Ethicists must deliver intuitive platitudes about lying, murder, theft, injury, and the whole familiar bunch. If we can hope to surprise or advance, it is only in neglected or undeveloped corners of normative consensus. True conclusions in ethics must be mostly boring.

And yet ethicists must deliver a vindication of common moral claims. We must give arguments that should convince all the reasonable that our normative claims are correct. To put it grandly, we must deliver a transcendental vindication of those claims, from the point of view of the universe. To put it less grandly, we must provide a direct argument for the truth of the claims, independent of appeal to common moral intuitions. We need to provide considerations that ought to convince those who are outside normative consensus that we are right and they are wrong. If we merely monger common intuitions, unsupported by argument, evidence, or fact beyond their mere familiarity or warm fuzziness, we will have little to add to the standard wisdom of the street and the sea lanes. And worse, to the immoral, disagreeable, skeptically minded, or just diverse, it may not unreasonably seem that there is nothing to philosophical ethics but so much talk, so much high-minded or sanctimonious but otherwise empty blather.

And so we face two dragons. There may be no sufficiently transcendental vindication of any ethical claims, so that ethics is just a bunch of chatter.