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This chapter provides some further insights into normative thinking and reconciles a few meta-ethical disagreements. It builds on an earlier assumption that all non-naturalists make ontological claims of a kind which is ‘mysterious and incredible’. But these objections do not apply to the kind of non-realist cognitivism that has been discussed so far. Hence, the non-realist cognitivist view that there are some non-natural, non-ontological normative truths. The chapter details further dissenting views drawn from these arguments, in the process exploring other meta-ethical arguments concerning the use of the word ‘true’, non-realist cognitivism, normative concepts, normativity, oblique expressivism, and so on.

This chapter looks at how we can roughly distinguish several views that are meta-ethical in the sense that they are about the meaning and truth of moral claims, and of other normative claims. It looks at how non-naturalist views can differ ontologically by making different claims about what exists and what is real. Going further, the metaphysical non-naturalists believe that, when we make irreducibly normative claims, these claims imply that there exist some ontologically weighty non-natural entities or properties. non-metaphysical non-naturalists make no such claims, since they deny that irreducibly normative truths have any such ontologically weighty implications. One such view in this light is non-realist cognitivism, in which there are some true claims which are not made to be true by the way in which they correctly describe, or correspond to, how things are in some part of reality.

This chapter investigates a wider, non-realist cognitivist form. In this view, our normative concepts and claims cannot be defined or restated in naturalistic terms. As non-naturalists believe, these concepts and claims are irreducibly normative. According to metaphysical non-naturalists, these claims imply that there exist some ontologically weighty non-natural entities or properties. But if non-naturalists gave up their ontological beliefs in these mysterious non-natural properties, the best version of non-naturalism would coincide with the best version of the quasi-realist expressivism discussed in this chapter. Some non-naturalists, however, do not have such ontological beliefs, as there are some non-empirical truths which have no weighty ontological implications.