Writing philosophically – like writing novels or history, like drawing or journalism, like taking photographs – presents countless choices about inclusions and exclusions which will enable the work to be read in one or another way, by one or another audience. How much should be said about the premisses of arguments, or about the context or history of a given discussion or position? How much should be allowed to fade into the background? How far should the detailed implications and ramifications of a position or an argument be developed?

Some difficult choices arise because philosophical writing aspires to sound argument. Is soundness of argument partly achieved, or at least buttressed, by careful commentary on kindred and on rival work? Does it help to discuss or defeat the strategies and arguments of work that has different starting points or different conclusions? Will ‘engaging with the literature’ be useful for maintaining convincing standards and strategies of argument? Or will it produce a cautiously and boringly ‘professional’ tone, put a lot of readers off, and camouflage the main lines of argument? Too much concentration on the failings of positions and lines of thought not taken might seem distracting and defensive; too cavalier a view of other work might seem arbitrary, dogmatic, and quite unprofessional.

In writing on justice and virtue I have repeatedly found these choices difficult. Nobody can write on justice or virtue without being aware of their importance in all our lives and of the centuries, indeed millennia, of thinking on both that lie behind us. Equally, nobody can look at contemporary writing on justice and on virtue without finding a certain disarray.