Tff9HE distinction between metaethics and normative ethics, with moral philosophy identified with the former, has been widely accepted in some quarters. Yet there are those who seem to think contemporary moral philosophers, in pursuing metaethical studies, have forsaken the traditional task of moral philosophy, the task of searching for moral wisdom, for normative principles of conduct having to do with matters of right and wrong and what worthwhile. Indeed, some recent writers have returned to the position moral philosophy at least in part a normative discipline. Brandt, in Ethical Theory,1 regards moral philosophy as embracing both metaand normative ethics. He regards metaethics as concerned with the analysis of ethical concepts and the method by which ethical principles may be supported. Normative ethics . . ., as a philosophical discipline, he says, is an inquiry aiming to state and defend as valid or true a complete and economic set of general ethical principles, and also some less general principles are important for what we may call 'providing the ethical foundations' of the more important human institutions. Hospers, in Human Conduct,2 seems to be in thorough agreement with Brandt on these matters. The body of the text given to classical moral theories as proposed normative principles of conduct. He regards only the last chapter, which concerned with how moral principles can be verified, as metaethical. Singer, in Generalization in Ethics,regards his task to be to show the generalization argument, which he contends a moral principle, valid and that it serves as a test or criterion of the morality of conduct, and provides the basis for moral rules.4 I have the suspicion there a great deal of misunderstanding and confusion on this subject, for it seems to me metaethics not the study of some new set of problems but the problems with which moral philosophy has always been concerned. The difference lies in method and style rather than subject matter. It might be helpful to think of this matter in light of the contrast between classical and contemporary metaphysics. In the grand tradition, metaphysics was correlated with a rationalistic epistemology based on mathematics as a paradigm of knowledge. It not surprising metaphysics was conceived after the model of mathematics. It was thought to be concerned with fundamental truths about the essential and necessary structure of reality, selfevident principles from which the truths of the special disciplines could be deduced. With the shift from rationalism to empiricism in epistemology, metaphysics, as traditionally conceived, was left stranded. It appeared unintelligible and ridiculous to empiricists. They heaped scorn upon it. What they did not realize immediately was epistemology and metaphysics