Doubts about moral principles

Modern moral philosophy in the British analytic tradition has, with very few exceptions, failed to produce work of any moral significance. There are two main reasons for this. There is first a characteristic failure or refusal to do justice to the complexity and specificity of moral problems and second, a tendency to present the nature and goals of morality in highly general, abstract terms. The paper attempts to establish this by concentrating on the work of R. M. Hare and G. J. Warnock which may be taken as fairly representative of purely formal moral theories and substantive moral theories respectively. The paper argues for a return to the concrete and specific, and ends with a short fiction which, it is hoped, will give some support to the main points