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Moral relativism or ethical relativism (often reformulated as relativist ethics or relativist morality) is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures.
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In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, and meaning of moral judgment. 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 ...
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).
Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical belief that ethical sentences reduce to factual statements about the attitudes and/or conventions of individual people, or that any ethical sentence implies an attitude held by someone.
Metaethical theories can be categorized, at least for our purposes, in respect of where they fall in the debates between Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism, and Realism and Anti-Realism. Thus, it is a prerequisite for understanding and evaluating metaethical theories that you understand these two debates.
The term ‘moral relativism’ is associated with a variety of very different concepts, some of which function mainly to oppose the view. Schematically, we intend to use the term as follows: Moral relativism consists of three components. First, it holds that descriptive, prescriptive, or meta-ethical aspects of prescriptive
