ABSTRACT
In this way our discussion of meta-ethics brings us back to the central ethical question, “How should life be lived?”. In Chapters 8-10 I shall be asking whether there is a moral theory that gives a good answer to this question. To assess this I shall describe and examine four moral theories in turn: virtue ethics, utilitarianism, Kantianism and contractarianism. My conclusion, to be developed in full in Chapter 11, will be that all four theories have something to teach us; but none of them can teach us everything. For an adequate answer to the question how to live, we need to look elsewhere than to moral theory; we need to develop the (broadly intuitionist) idea of what I shall call an ethical outlook (see §11.3).
