I have always found it difficult to describe what philosophers do in a way that non-philosophers can understand. So, at the risk of being thoroughly unilluminating, I offer the following comments. What I do as a meta-ethicist is to try to explain why the human moral landscape has the features it does. I try to describe both the actual landscape and the normatively required landscape, and to explain the differences between the two. I think that it is particularly important to explain why so many of us believe that it is a good thing to help strangers, people who are neither kin, nor members of the same group that we belong to, nor partners in reciprocal relationships.
