Metaethics

In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, ground, and meaning of moral judgment, ethical belief, or values. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics (questions of how one ought to be and act) and applied ethics (practical questions of right behavior in given, usually contentious, situations).

While normative ethics addresses such questions as "What should I do?", evaluating specific practices and principles of action, metaethics addresses questions about the nature of goodness, how one can discriminate good from evil, and what the proper account of moral knowledge is. Similar to accounts of knowledge generally, the threat of skepticism about the possibility of moral knowledge and cognitively meaningful moral propositions often motivates positive accounts in metaethics. Another distinction is often made between the nature of questions related to each: first-order (substantive) questions belong to the domain of normative ethics, whereas metaethics addresses second-order (formal) questions.

Some theorists argue that a metaphysical account of morality is necessary for the proper evaluation of actual moral theories and for making practical moral decisions; others reason from opposite premises and suggest that studying moral judgments about proper actions can guide us to a true account of the nature of morality.

According to Richard Garner and Bernard Rosen, there are three kinds of metaethical problems, or three general questions:

Garner and Rosen say that answers to the three basic questions "are not unrelated, and sometimes an answer to one will strongly suggest, or perhaps even entail, an answer to another." A metaethical theory, unlike a normative ethical theory, does not attempt to evaluate specific choices as being better, worse, good, bad, or evil; although it may have profound implications as to the validity and meaning of normative ethical claims. An answer to any of the three example questions above would not itself be a normative ethical statement.

Moral semantics attempts to answer the question, "What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments?" Answers may have implications for answers to the other two questions as well.

Cognitivist theories hold that evaluative moral sentences express propositions (i.e., they are 'truth-apt' or 'truth bearers', capable of being true or false), as opposed to non-cognitivism. Most forms of cognitivism hold that some such propositions are true (including moral realism and ethical subjectivism), as opposed to error theory, which asserts that all are erroneous.

Moral realism (in the robust sense; see moral universalism for the minimalist sense) holds that such propositions are about robust or mind-independent facts, that is, not facts about any person or group's subjective opinion, but about objective features of the world. Metaethical theories are commonly categorized as either a form of realism or as one of three forms of "anti-realism" regarding moral facts: ethical subjectivism, error theory, or non-cognitivism. Realism comes in two main varieties: