 Values have objective reality, but not in a transcendent realm divorced from this world of facts or states of affairs. Anderson agrees that “the way things are” includes moral facts: “it is impossible to discuss social processes except in terms of ways of living or forms of enterprise, and that is moral characterisation” (EMP, 330). But he cannot accept that moral characterisation entails moral prescription because this would commit us to a morality of commands, and to programmes for action and reform designed to achieve a merely external good. The importance of ethical inquiry is in giving an account of productive activities which entail the operation of a certain mentality or spirit. Within such activities there is no question of external ends or rewards to be achieved. Goodness exists in free, spontaneous participation in such movements and activities (although not of course in the metaphysical sense of undetermined free will – such practices, social movements and ways of life are not things we as individuals “opt into” at will; they in a sense adopt us). Acting because we feel obliged so to act is on this view an indication of the absence of goodness. Although the notion of “virtue” does not much appeal to him, Anderson’s emphasis upon the transformative role of practices and ways of life upon the ethical outlook of the individual does seem to accord with many of the major preoccupations of virtue ethicists. Alasdair Macintyre recognises the value to contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics of Anderson’s Heraclitean appreciation of conflict and the importance he attributes to critical traditions (Macintyre 1981).