FiVE essays have been put together as a collection representative of the work that is being done on ethics by younger philosophers in Cambridge. 1 The contributors are Bernard Williams (24 pages), Roger Scruton (75 pages), S. W. Blackburn (24 pages), J. E. J. Altham (29 pages) and John Casey (50 pages). Professor Williams' essay, which is on Morality and the Emotions, is the only one to have been published before, having appeared originally as his Inaugural Lecture at Bedford College in 1965. Its theme is the neglect of the emotions in recent moral philosophy. After offering a diagnosis of the reason for the neglect, Williams turns to the Emotive Theory of Ethics, with the idea that we might learn something from it without reinstating it. The classical version of the theory made it out to be a necessary condition of any judgement's being a moral judgement that it should express the emotions of the speaker and influence the emotions of the hearer-a position that may be seen to be erroneous by a consideration of (inter alia) judgements in the hypothetical mode. Williams is not concerned to tilt against this error on the part of emotivism but takes as his target an error committed by anti-emotivists under the influence, one would think, of the same basic conception of philosophical analysis-I mean the conception of it as a quest for fundamental ingredients or component factors, so that when the grammar of something is found hard to grasp this is conceived to be due to a logical complexity which must be dealt with by unearthing the basic, simple constituents. Thus it is reckoned that a person must consist of a body plus . .. or that an action must consist of a movement plus ... and that a moral judgement must consist of an empirical or descriptive part together with an expletive or goading element (choice-registering element, performatory element or whatnot). Nothing has contributed more to philosophy's industrial revolution in the English speaking world of our time than this conception of analysis in the methodological version which enables philosophical accounts to be rendered as by chartered actuaries in the form of a list: a list of the necessary and sufficient conditions of X. Since every one of the necessary conditions is thought equally essential and what is not essential forms no part of the account, the principle on which the method operates is that of essentialism. The idea is that the obtaining of all the necessary conditions would give sufficiency and thus logically 'bring into being' the X whose philosophical nature is under investigation, thereby completely accounting for it. Such is the kind of essentialistic error that the Emotivists were committing when they represented it to be a necessary condition of a judgement's being a moral judgement that it should be in part, i.e. in the very part that made it moral, the expression and projection of an emotion. And they took an essentialistic view of the emotion as well, in specifying it as approval. However, the repudiation of emotivism could readily be thought by critics of it who were also of an essentialistic turn of mind to amount to the thesis that any association between moral judgements and the emotions must therefore be purely adventitious. This is the error that Williams is out to combat and the brief observations I have made about analysis and essentialism may possibly serve to underline the point and importance of what he is doing, especially since the rest of the book, on which according to the editor Williams' essay has had consider-