It is not true that moral judgement floats free of our ideas about a good human life. Reality is not brute and nameless. Meaning is not withdrawn. Rather, we will only be prepared to call something a moral principle, she said, if we can ‘fill in a certain background’. That background, she had learnt from reading Aquinas with Elizabeth, will be one that allows us to see ‘a connexion, in a man’s mind, with that (admittedly large) collection of virtues and vices’.
