Less than twenty years ago Peter Winch complained of the

The examples of which he complained were trivial in either or both of two ways. Some were examples of the minor perplexities of life, such as returning library books or annoying the neighbors with one's music; some were examples described only in outline rather than in depth; and some examples were both minor and schematic.

Since Winch wrote these words the climate of Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy has changed. The wintry ethics of logical positivism and the cold spring of metaethical inquiry have supposedly been supplanted by a new flourishing of substantive ethical writing. This new concern has developed in two quite distinct genres of writing on ethics. In Britian the change is apparent in the writings of Winch and of others working in a Wittgensteinian vein. Throughout the -English-speaking philosophical world, and especially in the United States, it shows in “philosophical discussions of substantive legal, social and political problems” that apparently confront us. In writing both of the Wittgensteinian and of the “problem-centered” variety we find no attempt to spare the reader from considering either the most tragic or the most lurid examples, both public and intimate. Indeed, some writers now apologize not for the trivial but for the sensational nature of their examples.