ABSTRACT
Form and content represent the horns of a dilemma that tends to beset any attempts to deal with what the author have called the central question of ethical theory: how to find a definition of ‘moral’. Critics have complained that formal theories (such as prescriptivism) leave the content of morality wholly unspecified; the critics, on the contrary, think the content of morality is quite specific. What determines this content, and makes it objective, is just one big fact about morality: the fact that it is, in some deep sense, useful, profitable, advantageous, beneficial. The critics differ over the question ‘beneficial to whom?’; some take a more egoistic line, that it must pay the individual to be good; others, that it must pay someone, most people, but not necessarily everyone.
