This book constitutes my response to a challenge, laid by Peter Singer in the friendliest possible way over drinks one day in 1988, for me to write up my (by implication, eccentric) version of utilitarianism someday. I was slow in rising to the challenge, in part because I was relatively uninterested in purely metaethical discussions and supposed that I had little to contribute to them. My interest has always lain more in practical questions of what we should do, collectively more than individually and publicly more than privately. In the end, however, I have come to realize that that is in itself the kernel of a metaethical defense of utilitarianism – one that is both novel, at least in contemporary terms, and powerful, at least within its chosen scope.

If the idea of this as a book has been slow in coming, the individual chapters had been writing themselves for some time. All these chapters except the introduction were originally either freestanding articles or chapters, published in a disparate array of journals and collections over the best part of a decade. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of all those journals and books for permission to reproduce those materials here. I am especially grateful to Cambridge University Press for this opportunity to draw together these papers in a way that will highlight their important collective message. Those original essays have been lightly edited for this collection, to draw out their common themes while preserving something of their original flavor.