In a notebook of 1876, George Eliot engages at one point in a bit of philosophical musing. The 24th page of the notebook reads thus:

We see Eliot here speculating on some of the hardest questions in moral philosophy. While musing about the role of emotion in moral judgement and the tension between utilitarian and Kantian ethics, Eliot goes further and asks about the real motivational force supporting moral norms – what she calls the ‘sanction of virtue’. Of course, the rubber hits the road on this question when one asks about moral sceptics: how is it possible to persuade those who deny the existence of moral reasons? Where might one find ‘the scourge of the unwilling’?

In asking this question, Eliot was participating in the analysis of a problem that deeply worried her contemporaries. As John Stuart Mill put it, ‘The question is often asked, and properly so, in regard to any supposed moral standard […] what is the source of its obligation? Whence does it derive its binding force?’ Mill is looking for what analytic philosophers call an explanation of ‘normativity’, for an account as to how it can be true that agents are obliged to do something. Christine Korsgaard calls this ‘the normative question’; as she writes: ‘the day will come, for most of us, when what morality commands, obliges, or recommends is hard […] And then the question – why? – will press, and rightly so. Why should I be moral?’

Mill's own answer to the question was famously inadequate. He writes in Utilitarianism: