ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a way of thinking about metaethics and teaching it to students that avoids the traditional taxonomic ‘Author-Ism’ approach. It seeks to inculcate a firm, intuitive, yet sophisticated grasp of how moral thought and discourse work. The overall plan is Cartesian. I begin from a position of radical scepticism over the truth or acceptability of all evaluative judgements and try to work my way out of it by taking a series of small steps. The position I arrive at is that moral knowledge is possible, though not every moral claim is decidable in practice or even in principle, and that one should be confident in some moral judgements but undogmatic and open-minded as regards others.
