ABSTRACT
The general moral decline widely perceived to have been in progress for many years in both the UK and the USA has no doubt, like almost all interesting social phenomena, been an effect of many contributory causes. This chapter attends to only one: the de-moralization more or less unintentionally encouraged by the working of the machinery of the welfare state and then further encouraged by a deliberate and systematic drive to de-moralize both that machinery and what its operators have been increasingly inclined to describe as their clients. A main support for this systematic and apparently principled demoralization is the assumption called "anti-social determinism"; the assumption, that is to say, that the explanations produced by the social and psychological sciences necessarily constitute, at one and the same time, completely sufficient excuses for all the behavior so explained.
