This book is about moralism understood as a kind of vice. I use the term moralism very broadly to cover a class of defects of thought and understanding that apply not only to the practice of making moral judgements but to moral thought and moral theorizing more generally. Inevitably, then, the targets of the philosophical arguments and criticisms I develop in this book are many and varied, and admittedly not everything I have to say about moralism applies equally to all of those targets. So, to give just one example, a moral theory may be moralistic in the negative sense I intend without a particular proponent of that theory being an overt moralizer. All the same, the term moralism does, I think, serve to pick out particular related tendencies of thought as they occur in both specific moral judgements and moral theorizing more generally, and which serve to hinder our understanding of the kind of phenomena that moral judging and theorizing are both responses to. Or so I shall argue.

I cannot provide a detailed account of moralism as I understand it in this short preface; that is the aim of the book as a whole. My more limited aim is twofold: first, to say something about the particular issues and problems related to moralism that I shall examine in distinct chapters; and second, and in the context of introducing these issues and problems, to say something about the conception of moral thought that underlies my characterization of the vice of moralism.