ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a variety of possible responses to the basic metaethical issues. An important strain in ethical philosophy since the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century has been the desire to achieve an understanding of ethics that is consistent with the worldview of the empirical sciences. Empirical naturalism is the general metaphysical doctrine that nothing exists beyond what is open to empirical investigation. Metaphysical naturalism does not entail ethical naturalism. For example, it might be that although ethical convictions and feelings are familiar aspects of the natural realm and that such natural states of mind appear to have ethical facts as their objects, these appearances are nonetheless invariably mistaken, since there are no ethical facts. Noncognitivists agree with ethical naturalists and nihilists in holding to metaphysical naturalism. Many ethical naturalist theories of value take their cue from the (natural) properties of valuation.
