  Plato held a view about moral thinking that depended on seeing the objects of moral thought as abstract, pre-existing entities. One can already see in Crummell's Natural Rights Argument (discussed above) a strong Platonic streak. It clearly continues here in his idea that moral agents intuit timeless principles. Plato pursued this idea far enough to conclude that such principles, as unchanging, were precisely the sorts of entities that could underwrite moral conversation and reflection. In fact, without them moral action and thinking would be unstable and constantly shifting—as he would put it, becoming what it might finally be, but not actually being that thing. Fortunately on the Platonic approach, timeless abstract moral principles always are, and so never need to be further stabilized or justified.