 Much contemporary metaethics relies on assumptions about the nature of ordinary moral thought, discourse, and practice; metaethicists tend to see their project as essentially conservative. For example, Michael Smith writes that the first step in metaethical theorizing is to “identify features that are manifest in ordinary moral practice” and the second step is to “make sense of a practice having these features.” (1994) This assumption has had a major impact on the debate between realists and anti-realists, with realists claiming to best capture the nature of ordinary moral discourse: “We begin as (tacit) cognitivists and realists about ethics,” says Brink (1989), and then “we are led to some form of antirealism (if we are) only because we come to regard the moral realist’s commitments as untenable… Moral realism should be our metaethical starting point, and we should give it up only if it does involve unacceptable metaphysical and epistemological commitments.”