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What is metaethics in philosophy?
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Normative Ethics, Metaethics and Applied Ethics. What is the difference? Normative Ethics is focused on the creation of theories that provide general moral rules governing our behavior, such as Utilitarianism or Kantian Ethics.
- Mark Dimmock, Andrew Fisher
- Church Hill, TN
- 2017
Ethics is concerned with whether and how those ethical opinions can be reasonably justified. Normative ethics in particular is concerned with articulating and developing the general ethical theories in terms of which ethical opinions at the applied level might be justified.
Normative ethics and applied ethics are covered in separate chapters. Each field is distinguished by a different level of inquiry and analysis. Metaethics focuses on moral reasoning and foundational questions that explore the assumptions related to moral beliefs and practice.
- History of Metaethics
- The Normative Relevance of Metaethics
- Semantic Issues in Metaethics
- Ontological Issues in Metaethics
- Psychology and Metaethics
- Epistemological Issues in Metaethics
- Anthropological Considerations
- Political Implications of Metaethics
- References and Further Reading
a. Metaethics before Moore
Although the word “metaethics” (more commonly “meta-ethics” among British and Australian philosophers) was coined in the early part of the twentieth century, the basic philosophical concern regarding the status and foundations of moral language, properties, and judgments goes back to the very beginnings of philosophy. Several characters in Plato’s dialogues, for instance, arguably represent metaethical stances familiar to philosophers today: Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias (482c-486d) advances t...
b. Metaethics in the Twentieth-Century
Analytic metaethics in its modern form, however, is generally recognized as beginning with the moral writings of G.E. Moore. (Although, see Hurka 2003 for an argument that Moore’s innovations must be contextualized by reference to the preceding thought of Henry Sidgwick.) In his groundbreaking Principia Ethica (1903), Moore urged a distinction between merely theorizing about moral goods on the one hand, versus theorizing about the very concept of “good” itself. (Moore’s specific metaethical v...
Since philosophical ethics is often conceived of as a practicalbranch of philosophy—aiming at providing concrete moral guidance and justifications—metaethics sits awkwardly as a largely abstract enterprise that says little or nothing about real-life moral issues. Indeed, the pressing nature of such issues was part of the general migration back to a...
a. Cognitivism versus Non-Cognitivism
One of the central debates within analytic metaethics concerns the semantics of what is actually going on when people make moral statements such as “Abortion is morally wrong” or “Going to war is never morally justified.” The metaethical question is not necessarily whether such statements themselves are true or false, but whether they are even the sort of sentences that are capable of being true or false in the first place (that is, whether such sentences are “truth-apt”) and, if they are, wh...
b. Theories of Moral Truth
A related issue regarding the semantics of metaethics concerns what it would even mean to say that a moral statement is “true” if some form of cognitivism were correct. The traditional philosophical account of truth (called the correspondence theory of truth) regards a proposition as true just in case it accurately describes the way the world really is independent of the proposition. Thus, the sentence “The cat is on the mat” would be true if and only if there really is a cat who is really on...
a. Moral Realisms
If moral truth is understood in the traditional sense of corresponding to reality, what sort of features of reality could suffice to accommodate this correspondence? What sort of entity is “wrongness” or “goodness” in the first place? The branch of philosophy that deals with the way in which things exist is called “ontology”, and metaethical positions may also be divided according to how they envision the ontological status of moral values. Perhaps the biggest schism within metaethics is betw...
b. Moral Relativisms
Other metaethical positions reject altogether the idea that moral values— whether naturalistic, non-naturalistic, or dispositional—are real or objective in the sense of being independent from human belief or culture in the first place. Such positions instead insist on the fundamentally anthropocentric nature of morality. According to such views, moral values are not “out there” in the world (whether as scientific properties, dispositional properties, or Platonic Forms) at all, but are created...
One of the most pressing questions within analytic metaethics concerns how morality engages our embodied human psychologies. Specifically, how (if at all) do moral judgments move us to act in accordance with them? Is there any reason to be moral for its own sake, and can we give any psychologically persuasive reasons to others to act morally if the...
Analytic metaethics also explores questions of how we make moral judgments in the first place, and how (if at all) we are able to know moral truths. The field of moral epistemologycan be divided into questions about what moral knowledge is, how moral beliefs can be justified, and where moral knowledge comes from.
Although much of analytic metaethics concerns rarified debates that can often be highly abstracted from actual, applied moral concerns, several metaethical positions have also drawn heavily on cultural anthropological considerations to motivate or flesh-out their views. After all, as discussed above in section one, it has often been actual, histori...
In addition to accommodating or accounting for the existence of moral disagreements, metaethics has also been thought to provide some insight concerning how we should respond to such differences at the normative or political level. Most often, debates concerning the morally appropriate response to moral differences have been framed against analyses...
a. Textual Citations
1. Adams, Robert. (1987). The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology. Oxford University Press. 2. Altham, J.E.J. (1986) “The Legacy of Emotivism,” in Macdonald & Wright, eds. Fact, Science, and Morality. Oxford University Press, 1986. 3. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. (2008). Experiments in Ethics. Harvard University Press. 4. Audi, Robert. (1999). “Moral Knowledge and Ethical Pluralism,” in Greco and Sosa, eds. Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, 1999, ch. 6. 5. Ayer, A.J. (1936). L...
b. Anthologies and Introductions
1. Fisher, Andrew and Kirchin, Simon, eds. (2006). Arguing about Metaethics. Routledge Press. 2. Harman, Gilbert and Thomson, J.J. (1996). Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity. Blackwell Publishers. 3. Miller, Alexander. (2003). An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics. Polity Press. 4. Moser, Paul and Carson, Thomas, eds. (2001). Moral Relativism: A Reader. Oxford University Press. 5. Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, ed. (1988). Essays on Moral Realism. Cornell University Press. 6. Shafer-Landau,...
Author Information
Kevin M. DeLapp Email: kevin.delapp@converse.edu Converse College U. S. A.
Metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics are the three main areas of ethics, which are each distinguished by a different level of inquiry and analysis. Applied ethics focuses on the application of moral norms and principles to controversial issues to determine the rightness of specific actions.
This article defends a variety of positions in both normative moral theory and metaethics. It discusses metaethical and normative issues. It gives an introduction to moral theory and helps to raise the level of debate in moral philosophy and to foster a heightened level of responsiveness and reasonableness in moral discourse.
10: Applied Ethics. Page ID. 162188. Nathan Smith et al. OpenStax. Figure 10.1 Bioethics is an area of applied ethics that explores the many potential ethical dilemmas that can arise in medicine and related areas.
