This began, in the late seventies, as an impatient polemic against recent ethical treatises, and then gradually got tamed until it became another one. It seemed to me then, and still does, that philosophers had an interest in proving the rationality of ethics that was manic and unhealthy, as though their ultimate nightmare was putting their best, airtight, moral argument on the board and having a class of sophomores drawl, ``Well, I guess you and I have different values systems.`` No physicist has to risk that kind of humiliation and the philosophers strove to fashion deadly refuta¬tions that would give them similar security. At the same time the effects of the mindless relativism of the sixties and seventies were becoming apparent, especially as preached to school children and practiced by criminal justice professionals. Both the relativist and moral intellectualist alterna¬tives seemed wrong and distasteful.

During the mid 1970`s there began a rekindling of interest by a number of thinkers in human nature, evolutionary history, and the idea of Man as part of nature, as these bear on the nature of ethics. I suspect this direction of late twentieth century thought is still gathering momentum. The ``new naturalism`` is not definist but descriptive, seeking to understand its corner of the universe, which implies, of course, that causes are not merely to be distinguished from moral reasons and set aside but integrated with reasons and explored as part of the process of naturalizing ethics. In any case this is what I try to do. The theory that will emerge is relativistic at a deep level: deep enough, I believe, to provide no solace to either criminals or education professors.

It was natural, then, that I