ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a partial assessment of its success in ethics and the wider theory of practical reason. It suggests that analytic philosophers view non–cognitivism in ethics as in part motivated by philosophical naturalism. Naturalism has become almost orthodoxy, at least in Anglo–American philosophy. It has long been a force in ethics, reaching its pinnacle in the British tradition extending from David Hume to John Stuart Mill; but in the twentieth century it has been developed in virtually every field of philosophy. The possibility of cognitivism without realism, however, has been defended by Kantian constructivists. On the historically dominant side is cognitivism, roughly the view that moral judgments are truth–valued and hence appropriate objects of cognitive attitudes as belief and knowledge. In meeting criteria of epistemic objectivity, utilitarian empiricism in ethics may seem to have an advantage over rationalist moral theories.
