Abstract: This concluding chapter returns to our opening methodological question: how can we improve our ethical beliefs? It sets out a procedure: the identification of beliefs of high reliability (e.g. certain beliefs about basic human interests, certain basic moral beliefs, and certain factual beliefs). These beliefs of high reliability can come together to form a single, rather rough picture of forms of a good life for the likes of us living, as we do, in large societies in modern conditions. It was this picture, and not the foundationalist form of coherentist programmes, that began in the previous chapter to eliminate possible accounts of moral norms—for instance, familiar forms of utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics.

Keywords: coherentism, foundationalism, method in ethics,