Behaviour 151 (2014) 209–228 brill.com/beh Empiricism and normative ethics: What do the biology and the psychology of morality have to do with ethics? Owen Flanagan * , Aaron Ancell, Stephen Martin and Gordon Steenbergen Department of Philosophy, Duke University, 201 West Duke Building, Box 90743, Durham, NC 27708, USA * Corresponding author’s e-mail address: ojf@duke.edu Accepted 15 September 2013; published online 27 November 2013 Abstract What do the biology and psychology of morality have to do with normative ethics? Our answer is, a great deal. We argue that normative ethics is an ongoing, ever-evolving research program in what is best conceived as human ecology. Keywords empiricism, ethics, eudaimonia, flourishing, moral psychology, moral inference, Hume, nat- uralism. “Moral science is not something with a separate province. It is physical, biological, and historical knowledge placed in a humane context where it will illuminate and guide the activities of men.” (Dewey, 1922: 204) 1. The question What do the biology and the psychology of morality have to do with nor- mative ethics? More generally, what does information from the Geisteswis- senschaften, including the sciences that pertain to our evolutionary history, have to do with how we ought to be and to live, and to the nature of hu- man flourishing? Our answer is a great deal. Ethics concerns the values, virtues, ends, norms, rules, and principles of human personal and social life, all of which are natural phenomena. It casts two lines of inquiry, one into what these features are, and another into what they ought to be. The first line of inquiry is descriptive-genealogical (Flanagan, 1991b, 1996a, 2006;  2014 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden DOI:10.1163/1568539X-00003142