Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, moral philosophers have done their best to push the question of moral change off the intellectual agenda. If you look back to Principia Ethica, which appeared in 1903, you will find G.E. Moore taking it for granted that ethics is concerned with a single unanalysable object called “the good”, which is the only thing we can ever really mean when we talk about “goodness”. There could be no progress in morality as such, apart from throwing out any historical flotsam and jetsam that might have made its way into the clear waters of ethical intuition. Genuine ethics did not have a history, in Moore’s opinion; only pseudo-ethics did.