Though primarily focussed on philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology, Scott Soames’s Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century contains several discussions of ethics. Volume 1 contains two chapters on Moore’s ethics, one on the emotivism of Ayer and Stevenson, and one on Ross; Volume 2 adds a chapter on Hare’s prescriptivism. The bulk of the Moore chapters as well as the ones on emotivism and Hare concern metaethics, but there is also discussion of Moore’s normative views and the chapter on Ross is entirely normative. Since there is no material on ethics after Hare, the book concentrates on figures from the first half of the century. But there is much of interest in what it says about them. Soames discusses these figures without much reference to the recent literature on them or their philosophical problems, but his book is none the worse for that. Since ethics is not his main area of expertise, there are, not surprisingly, some historical inaccuracies, but they mostly concern matters of detail. On the larger issues he nicely picks out these philosophers’ most important ideas, even when they are not highlighted in their texts, and his criticisms go to the heart of those ideas; in several cases they are also novel. In this paper I will concentrate on an objection he raises against Moore’s ethics that connects to one of his book’s central themes. In his “Introduction” Soames identifies two main achievements of 20th-century analytic philosophy. One is the successful understanding of the concepts of logical consequence, logical truth, necessary truth, and a priori truth. The other is the recognition that philosophical 1 speculation must be grounded in pre-philosophical thought, so no philosophical theory can be more securely supported than pre-philosophical beliefs arising from common sense or science. For this second theme Moore is a hero for his work on epistemology, where he famously held that our common-sense belief that we have knowledge of an external world cannot be overturned by any philosophical theory of knowledge...