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Jan 23, 2007 · Metaethics. First published Tue Jan 23, 2007; substantive revision Tue Jan 24, 2023. Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.
- Metaethics: Introduction. The prefix “meta” is derived from the Greek for “beyond”. Metaethics is therefore a form of study that is beyond the topics considered in normative or applied ethics.
- The Value of Metaethics. A former colleague once suggested that Metaethics was entirely and frustratingly pointless — academia for academia’s sake, she thought.
- Cognitivism versus Non-Cognitivism. Key to the successful study of Metaethics is understanding the various key terminological distinctions that make up the “metaethical map”.
- Realism versus Anti-Realism. The second key fork in the road that separates metaethical theories is the choice between Moral Realism and Moral Anti-Realism (as with Cognitivism, the “Moral” prefix is assumed from hereon).
People also ask
Is moral objectivism a form of metaethical relativism?
Is moral relativism a metaethical position?
Why do metaethical Relativists argue that moral judgments lack moral authority?
What is moral relativism?
Feb 19, 2004 · The first point is a form of metaethical relativism: It says one morality may be true for one society and a conflicting morality may be true for another society. Hence, there is no one objectively correct morality for all societies. The second point, however, is a concession to moral objectivism.
Much recent work in meta-ethics and ethical theory has drawn extensively on claims about moral psychology. The goal of this paper is to provide a broad overview of some of these claims and the implications that certain philosophers are taking them to have for the plausibility of moral relativism.
Our goal is to integrate philosophical and empirical work on constraints on normative relativism. First, we present a working definition of moral relativism. Second, we outline naturalist versions of normative relativism, and third, we highlight the empirical constraints in this reasoning.
Mar 1, 2008 · In this paper, we develop a method that distinguishes ethical objectivists (i.e., individuals who take their ethical beliefs to express true facts about the world) from ethical subjectivists (i.e., individuals who take their ethical beliefs to be mind-dependent, and to express nothing more than facts about human psychology).
Experiment 1 showed that individuals tend to regard ethical statements as clearly more objec- tive than social conventions and tastes, and almost as objective as scientific facts. Yet, there was considerable variation in objectivism, both across different ethical statements, and across individuals.
