I am deeply indebted to Tom Hurka and David Copp for the careful attention they have given to some of the central motifs in The Moral Foundation of Rights. By doing their job so well they have simplified mine considerably. Their exposition of my views is a model of fairness and accuracy; I need therefore waste no time disclaiming attributions or complaining about misrepresentation. Furthermore, they have shown admirable resolve in choosing to ignore the book's relatively peripheral concerns, even when these would have made easy targets. By adopting this policy of restraint they have helped to illuminate issues which, it seems to me, run to the very heart of moral/political theory.

Yes, this is the book that those who know Ronald de Sousa have been waiting for. Since long before his 1979 Dialogue article, there has been much interest in what de Sousa thinks about the rationality of emotions. Many promises are here fulfilled.

In our traditional patriarchal philosophy, the standard view is that reason ought to be the controlling element in human nature. Commonly in this tradition, emotion is considered an opposing force—a female power allied with the irrational, and devoted to dragging men from attending to the clarity and truth which are the proper objects of their devotion. In contemporary anglophone philosophy, the distinction between reason and emotion reached a certain pitch in emotivist accounts of ethics. Recently, beginning with the critique of emotivism, there have been gestures of revision to these views of how emotions are related to reason. Bernard Williams hinted at rethinking the traditional relationship when he remarked that, “the capacity for creative emotional response has the advantage of being, if not equally, at least broadly, distributed”.

Robert Martin, in his review of my Laws and Other Worlds, has grasped the thrust of much of the argument. I would like to respond to three specific points that he makes, and to add a couple of more general comments that will bring out some other aspects of the structure of the argument that he misses, to try to show why I think the sort of enterprise the book attempts is worthwhile, more important than Martin's own pragmatic tendencies will perhaps allow.

La recherche héraclitéenne vient de s'enrichir d'une nouvelle édition, accompagnée d'une traduction et d'un commentaire des Fragments d'Héraclite. M. Conche annonce lui-même son entreprise en ces mots: «La présente édition des Fragments de son oeuvre perdue vise, en conjuguant l'étude philologique et l'analyse philosophique, à restituer, autant que cela est possible, la pensée même d'Héraclite, dans son unité et sa cohérence».