  The history of moral theory is a history of attempts to identify, articulate, and defend general moral principles that serve to explain when and why various types of action, institutions, or characters count as right or wrong, just or unjust, virtuous or vicious. The assumption has consistently been that there is a general and principled account of morality to be given. And this assumption has survived the fact that few people think any particular set of principles that we have actually succeeded in articulating, is fully adequate.  What explains the assumption?  Why not hold, as particularists do, that there may well be no set of general principles that adequately mark moral distinctions?  Or, why not think, as skeptics do, that our repeated failures actually to identify fully adequate principles shows that morality is a chimera? 