 One might be forgiven for thinking that Prichard is a sort of agent-relative consequentialist. He says that ‘unless the effect of an act were in some way good, there would be no obligation to produce it, i.e. the goodness of the thing produced is a presupposition of the obligation to produce it’ (2). And he says that a moral principle specifies two things, (a) a good thing which the action will produce and (b) a definite relation…’ (4). And in his most famous published article he writes ‘At best it can only be maintained that there is this element of truth in the Utilitarian view, that unless we recognized that something which an act will originate is good, we should not recognize that we ought to do the action’ (10). I take it, however, that it is one thing to specify as part of the ground something that is good, and another to say that its goodness is itself part of the ground, and that Prichard’s choice of the word ‘presupposition’ was well advised. (Not all necessary conditions for the rightness of an act are parts of the ground for that rightness; consider the role of the fact that there is nothing else that one should be doing instead.) And I would offer in support of this reading the following sentence from the same paper: ‘we do not come to appreciate an obligation by an argument, i.e. by a process of non-moral thinking, and in particular we do not do so by an argument of which a premiss is the ethical but not moral activity of appreciating the goodness either of the act or of a consequence of the act, i.e. our sense of the rightness of an act is not a conclusion from our appreciation of the goodness either of it or of anything else’ (13–14). Note the words ‘a premiss’ in this sentence.