 Alexander opens the monograph by stating that the proper business of ethics is the study of moral judgements, such as “It is wrong to lie”. Alexander sets out to discover the nature of morality, asking what these judgements actually express (Alexander 1889: 1–3). He does so by examining a selection of “working conceptions” in ethics—including right, wrong, and duty—and asking what they correspond to. In the same way that the working conceptions of physics—including energy, matter and motion—are ordered according to a “natural coherence”, Alexander aims to order ethical conceptions. Alexander concludes that these working conceptions correspond to ways of maintaining equilibrium in society. For example, ideas of good or right imply nothing more than “an adjustment of parts in an orderly whole”: the equilibrium of different persons in society.