ABSTRACT
During the first 60 years or so of the twentieth century, two things characterized the dis cussion of ethical issues in the United States, and to some extent other English-speaking countries. On the one hand, the theoretical analyses of moral philosophers concentrated on questions of so-called metaethics. Most professional philosophers assumed that their proper business was not to take sides on substantive ethical questions but rather to con sider in a more formal way what kinds of issues and judgments are properly classified as moral in the first place. On the other hand, in less academic circles, ethical debates repeat edly ran into stalemate. A hard-line group of dogmatists, who appealed either to a code of universal rules or to the authority of a religious system or teacher, confronted a rival group of relativists and subjectivists, who found in the anthropological and psychological diver sity of human attitudes evidence to justify a corresponding diversity in moral convictions and feelings.1
