The sphere of moral action is plagued by paradoxes. Bruno Celano considers some traditional moral paradoxes related to recursive moral norms and tragic choices. This article extends Cel-ano's analysis to other paradoxes discussed in recent decades in the context of the debates on population ethics and the Trolley Problem. The prospect that there is no moral theory capable of respecting our moral intuitions can be seen as a threat to moral realism. This idea was recently developed by Christopher Cowie in his original defence of the moral error theory. A distinctive feature of Cowie's view is the connection between normative ethics and metaethics. This article proposes a second way of using the problem of moral paradoxes to connect normative enquiry and metaethics, the structure of which is opposite to Cowie's: not “from ethics to metaethics”, but “from metaethics to ethics”.
