Editing Metaethics (section)

==== Empiricism ====
[[Empiricism]] is the doctrine that knowledge is gained primarily through observation and experience. Metaethical theories that imply an empirical epistemology include:

* [[ethical naturalism]], which holds moral facts to be reducible to non-moral facts and thus knowable in the same ways; and 
* most common forms of [[ethical subjectivism]], which hold that moral facts reduce to facts about individual opinions or cultural conventions and thus are knowable by observation of those conventions.

There are exceptions within subjectivism however, such as [[ideal observer theory]], which implies that moral facts may be known through a rational process, and [[Subjectivism#Ethical subjectivism|individualist ethical subjectivism]], which holds that moral facts are merely personal opinions and so may be known only through introspection. Empirical arguments for ethics run into the ''[[is-ought]]'' problem, which asserts that the way the world ''is'' cannot alone instruct people how they ''ought'' to act.