I am indebted to Yann Wilhelm for his generous and probing commentary. It brings welcome clarification and new challenges to the project I presented in “Naturalizing Metaethics.” I also welcome the spirit of Wilhelm’s discussion, which moves beyond ideological debates about metaphilosophy and offers promising strategies for answering core metaethical questions.
Wilhelm successfully establishes that my preferred form of naturalism is less compatible with traditional philosophy than I let on, but I also pointed out that work by traditionally minded philosophy remains an invaluable font of philosophical theories. Wilhelm then offers a helpful suggestion that naturalists might more easily defend internalism if they bypass conceptual versions of that view. In response, I suggested that the radical implications of naturalism may actually offer a way to defend the conceptual version of internalism, by advancing a naturalized account of conceptual truth. Finally, Wilhelm offered a new psychological cum functional account of moral discourse, which inoculates non-cognitivists against grammatical objections. While I hold out hope for cognitivism, Wilhelm has identified a genuine empirical challenge to the cognitivist. This challenge beautifully demonstrates the value of empirical testing in metaethics, and it also reminds us that there is much work to be done.