ABSTRACT
It is hard to conceive of a society in which all its members actually treat each other well. Presumably there has never been one. There have been, and are, societies in which a (usually religious) ethical code prescribes how people ought to treat each other even though they fail lamentably to live up to it. The very idea of ‘morality’ – again understandably – is likely to arouse in people a range of unfavourable reactions. Morality has in this way come to be associated with sentimentality, hypocrisy, or ‘unscientificness’. However, unless morality is rescued from its obscurity – what is even almost a state of ignominy – and reinstated at the centre of our public life, it is hard to see how we can begin to construct a society worth living in. For example, morality as the revelation of a magical religious authority is surely something no longer likely to command widespread acceptance.
