What is an empirical theory of ethics?

I recall a conversation about this with my supervisor over the phone in 1996. He said that there was a strong approach and a weak approach that could be taken towards it. The strong approach was that there was a scientific method that could be found for morals, and the weak approach was that moral intuitions were experience-dependent. I definitely believe in at least the weak approach. What is controversial about the strong approach is that it seems to require a Kuhnian moral paradigm, and exactly what that is would be far from obvious. If one aspires to a pure empiricism in ethics, then one cannot provide much content to it without virtually endless observation, hypothesis, experimentation and so on. But if one has already formulated the rules for same, then one would not have to do it all on one's own. One could easily enough recruit other so-called moral scientists to do the work for one. If this sounds preposterous, then maybe it is, but that is what a strong approach to an empirical theory of ethics would seem to be like.

On the other hand, the weak approach is not trivial, either. For one thing, it implies that one should be able to form reliable moral intuitions from keeping the study of ethics relevant to one's own life. In fact, one could go further and say that this holds true for philosophy in general. Furthermore, it is difficult to argue that philosophy is relevant to one's life, for example, if one does not practice what one preaches. So that would be a pretty reliable way to arrive at reliable intuitions that were empirically derived.

I think that's the clearest that I have expressed my argument for an empirical approach so far. It preserves both the empirical character of the approach and the marriage of theory to practice that I had originally intended.