This article explores how periodical publishing shaped discussions of ethics in Victorian England during the 1860s and 1870s. Through a close analysis of the debate about the ethics of belief involving W. K. Clifford and his contemporaries in journals such as the Contemporary Review, the Nineteenth Century, and the Fortnightly Review, this article examines two related ethical concepts: how personal modes of articulating ethical views complicated an individual's understanding of the subjective nature of ethics and how editorial practices, especially the convention of anonymous publication, helped to form the ethos of contributors as public intellectuals.