Introduction
Human beings, it seems plausible to say, are typically subject to moral obligations and this seems a difference between them and the objects studied by natural science.
It is widely thought, for example, that killing people needs justification so that where there is no justification we have an obligation not to kill. Similarly, it is often held that one should not lie unless there is a very special reason to do so and that the well-fed and the comfortable ought to show concern for the hungry and those suffering. We imagine there would seem to be no difficulty in agreeing that these could all be categorized as moral beliefs: it is a category familiar to us and ordinarily most of the time we surely have no difficulty in picking out those beliefs that belong to it and those that do not. Trying to put one’s finger on the distinctive character of such beliefs, however, is not easy.[1] In what follows
