ABSTRACT
This chapter juxtaposes the fairly quick and automatic thinking and decision making that constitute everyday moral thought and action with the slower, more complicated, and more reflective thinking that steps beyond everyday moral thought. When everyday moral thought runs into difficulties, we are led to thinking about moral principles. Even when everyday moral thought does not run into difficulties, it can be challenged by repeated “why?” questions. Pushed far enough, such questions have to be answered either by admitting ignorance or by pointing to theses about whatever ultimately makes acts morally required, permissible, or prohibited. Such theses are moral theories. The chapter ends by pointing out a respect in which everyday moral thought is more like rule-consequentialism, contractualism, foundational pluralism, and virtue ethics than everyday moral thought is like traditional act-consequentialism.
