Imagine that human beings had been designed by a very talented but rather malicious half wit. Here we are, then, so made, rather nimble, quick fingered, quite bright, mortal and aware of it, with feelings we identify as of sorrow and compassion, whatever they are, built to kill and to manipulate, modify, smash up or down our environment to the end that we survive, not individually, but as a species. It is like living with a set of perversely contradictory instructions. Sometimes that is how it seems, a kind of glory, a jest and a riddle that but slenderly knows itself, etc.

With this unpromising, rather tragic material at our disposal we have erected or come to be aware of or are ineluctably landed with a way of regarding our conduct which we call moral. Does it arise as part of the natural process or is it something else? Whatever its source,