ABSTRACT
An ethical philosophy that is properly responsive to, and based in, real human ethical experience will give an important and central place to the notion of encounters with values; to epiphanies. Phenomenological descriptions succeed when they are sincere-when they are offered with a serious attempt at honesty. Xerxes's reaction to seeing something exceptionally beautiful-the plane tree-is to drop everything else he is doing and halt to contemplate it. Moral non-realism: recognitionalism says that we encounter values as realities outside us, objective, observation-independent, and not shaped by our wants, preferences, or projects. Moral non-realism denies that there could be any such values. Similarly with systematic moral theory, thinking about ethics in the experiential way that the author is recommending and exploring cannot, in itself, disprove the systematician's very different way of thinking about ethics.
