  Wrestling with these questions returns one immediately and directly to wondering about the nature of morality and the role it is supposed to play in human life. What is it about morality's nature, or its role, that would make sense of the idea that general principles are essential to it?  Why not suppose that one case of cruelty might be wrong, and another not wrong, without there being any ground that would justify treating them as different?  Why is it so natural to suppose that there must be some other difference — say a difference in their consequences, or a difference in what has led up to the act of cruelty — that underwrites and justifies the thought that one is wrong, but not the other?  Why not grant that one of the two just happened to be wrong and the other happened not to be? Could not moral properties just happen to have been distributed randomly so that, in the end, there is no justification for one action having a certain moral standing while another, otherwise the same, has a different standing?  These suggested possibilities are, I believe, not real possibilities at all. They would each entail that moral demands are fundamentally arbitrary in a way that is incompatible with morality's claim to authority. But what is it about morality that precludes it being fundamentally arbitrary?  A good answer, I suspect, will lead one away from the idea that moral properties are merely there in the world to be found, wholly independent of our concerns and practices. But a good answer is needed.  And a good answer is not provided simply by supplying, if one could, a consistent and coherent set of principles that successfully systematized particular moral judgments about acts, institutions, and characters.  The challenge here is not simply to show that moral judgments can be seen to fit a pattern; the challenge is to show that the pattern they fit — the principle(s) to which they conform — work to explain and justify their importance.    