ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses certain peculiarities of ethical reasoning and, in particular, of the procedures by means of which a normative ethics may be established, an ethics that can, with some show of justification, claim to set up standards holding for everyone. The typical arguments of ethics are not those which deduce trivial applications from principles of firm validity and of clear sense and scope; they are arguments in which a notion is stretched and developed to cover new types of case, in which application is retracted from cases to which a notion formerly applied, in which a notion constantly passes over into sister notions or doubles itself by gemmation or fission. The most basic moves of ethical, or rather pre-ethical, reasoning, are in no sense remarkable; they are moves dominated by analogy, which, here as elsewhere, plays a part so central in reasoning as to be practically identifiable with reasonableness itself.
