and -intuitionism. In this largely negative way I arrived at a
teleological position, in which the notions of the beneficial and the
harmful and the good of man set the conceptual frame for a moral
'point of view'. Perhaps one could distinguish between two main
variants of this position in ethics. The one makes the notion of the
good of man relative to a notion of the nature of man. The other
makes it relative to the needs and wants of individual men. We
could call the two variants the 'objectivist' and the 'subjectivist'
variant respectively. I think it is right to say that Aristotle favoured
the first. Here my position differs from his and is, I think, more
akin to that of some writers of the utilitarian tradition.

From what has just been said someone may get the impression
that this is a treatise on ethics. It is not. (See Ch. I, sect. 1.) But I
think that it contains the germ of an ethics, that a moral philo-
sophy may become extracted from it. This philosophy will hardly
strike one as novel in its main features. What may be to some
extent new is the approach to ethics through a study of the varieties
of goodness. I think that this approach is worth being pursued with
much more thoroughness than I have been capable of. I hope
others would find it inviting to work out in greater detail things,
which are here presented in the form of a first sketch.

GEORG HENRIK VON WRIGHT

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