ETHICS addition to the logical properties of moral language give rise to something like a Golden Rule Let us suppose that A owes money to B, B owes money to C, and neither is in a position to repay the debt on the due date B may judge ‘A ought to go to prison’ But since this judgement is univerzalisable, and B is in the same position as A, the judgement entails for B ‘I ought to go to prison’—a judgement that is unlikely to command his assent Hare maintained that considerations of this sort would lead to the adoption of a roughly utilitarian system of moral judgements, since he believed, implausibly, that only a small minority of fanatics would be content to be done by as they had done to others In the late 1950s Hare’s prescriptivism was subjected to devastating criticism by a number of colleagues living in Oxford, notably Foot, Geach, and Anscombe Philippa Foot (b 1920) in ‘Moral Beliefs’ (1958) and ‘Goodness and Choice’ (1961) attacked the distinction between descriptive and evaluative predicates by concentrating attention on the names of particular virtues and vices She invites us to consider words like ‘rude’ and ‘courageous’ It is not difficult to describe in purely factual terms behaviour that would merit these epithets; yet calling someone rude or courageous is clearly a matter of evaluation A judgement cannot be treated as moral judgement, Foot argued, simply on the basis of formal characteristics such as universalizability and prescriptivity Merely by making the appropriate choices one cannot make clasping the hands three times in an hour into a good action, or determine that what makes a man a good man is having red hair Moral beliefs must concern traits and actions that are beneficial or harmful to human beings Since it is not a matter of human decision which traits and actions promote or diminish human flourishing, moral judgements likewise cannot depend simply on human choice In the ancient and medieval world the analysis of virtues and vices, and the investigation of their relationship to happiness, was a very substantial part of moral philosophy It is largely due to Philippa Foot that in recent decades virtue theory, after centuries of neglect, has come to occupy a prominent part in moral philosophy Peter Geach (b 1919) in ‘Good and Evil’ (1956) attacked the descriptive– evaluative distinction in the case also of the most general terms, such as ‘good’ The important distinction, he claimed, is that between attributive 245