ETHICS according to which, e.g it is not possible to hold that it cannot be right to kill the innocent as a means to any end whatsoever and that someone who thinks otherwise is in error’ This means that all their philosophies are incompatible with the Hebrew–Christian ethic, which held that there are certain things forbidden whatever consequences threaten According to Anscombe, the differences between individual philosophers since Sidgwick are, in comparison with this incompatibility, unimportant and provincial The notions of duty, and of moral right and wrong, Anscombe proposed, should be discarded in favour of the notions of justice and injustice, which had a genuine content Even of these notions it remained difficult to give a clear account, until we had a satisfactory philosophical psychology For one cannot analyse the concepts of justice and virtue unless one has a satisfactory account of such terms as ‘action’, ‘intention’, ‘pleasure’, and ‘wanting’ Anscombe herself made a monumental contribution to this area of philosophy in her book Intention (1957), which was taken as a model by many later investigators In the latter part of the twentieth century a variety of approaches to ethics was explored by English-speaking philosophers, and in Britain no single philosopher stood out as a prime exponent of ethical theory, as for a time Hare had done In reaction to Hare’s revival of Kantian morality a number of philosophers placed a renewed focus on themes of Aristotelian ethics Thus Philippa Foot laid emphasis on the central role of virtue in morality, inspiring a school of ‘virtue ethics’, and Bernard Williams reminded philosophers of the great part played by luck in determining one’s moral situation Foot’s starting point is that the virtues are characteristics that any human being needs to have both for his own sake and for that of others They differ from other qualities necessary for flourishing—such as health and strength, intelligence and skill—in that they are not mere capacities, but they engage the will They concern matters that are difficult for humans, and where there are temptations to be resisted; but pace Kant moral worth is not to be measured by the difficulty of moral action The really virtuous person is one who does good actions almost effortlessly: a really charitable person, for instance, is one who finds it easy, rather than hard, to make the sacrifices that charity calls for Without the virtues the life of a human being is stunted, in the way that the life of an animal lacking a sense-faculty is stunted 248