Metaethics is a branch of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words. Whereas the fields of applied ethics and normative theory focus on what is moral, metaethics focuses on what morality itself is.
Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice. As such, it counts within its domain a broad range of questions and puzzles, including: Is morality more a matter of taste than truth?
Meta-ethical relativism holds that moral judgments are not true or false in any absolute sense, but only relative to particular standpoints. This idea is essential to just about any version of moral relativism.
Major metaethical theories include naturalism, nonnaturalism (or intuitionism), emotivism, and prescriptivism. Naturalists and nonnaturalists agree that moral language is cognitive—i.e., that moral claims can be known to be true or false.
Metaethics addresses second-order questions about the meaning and status of moral judgments, for example, "What does it mean to say that something is good or bad, or right or wrong?", "Are moral judgments statements that purport to be true or false?", and "In what sense, if any, can moral judgments be true or false (or ...
While normative ethics addresses such questions as "What should I do?", evaluating specific practices and principles of action, meta-ethics addresses questions such as "What is goodness?" and "How can we tell what is good from what is bad?", seeking to understand the assumptions underlying normative theories.
The Golden Rule is a classic example of a normative principle: We should do to others what we would want others to do to us. Since I do not want my neighbor to steal my car, then it is wrong for me to steal her car. Since I would want people to feed me if I was starving, then I should help feed starving people.
Book Description. Metaethical subjectivism, the idea that the truth or falsity of moral statements is contingent upon the attitudes or conventions of observers, is often regarded as a lurid philosophical doctrine which generates much psychological resistance to its acceptance.
Relativists often do claim that an action/judgment etc. is morally required of a person. For example, if a person believes that abortion is morally wrong, then it IS wrong -- for her. In other words, it would be morally wrong for Susan to have an abortion if Susan believed that abortion is always morally wrong.
Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false (they are truth-apt), which noncognitivists deny.
An area of metaethics involves the psychological basis of our moral judgments and conduct, particularly understanding what motivates us to be moral.
In ethics and the social sciences, value theory involves various approaches that examine how, why, and to what degree humans value things and whether the object or subject of valuing is a person, idea, object, or anything else. Within philosophy, it is also known as ethics or axiology.
Metaphysical concepts and tools such as causation, properties, relations, and possible worlds are at the heart of many ethical problems. For example: moral culpability depends in part on causation. An agent's responsibility for an outcome is partially determined by causal facts.
Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him.
Metaethics and normative ethics are two major branches of ethics. While metaethics focuses on determining the meaning and objectivity of moral concepts of good and bad, or right and wrong, normative ethics attempts to determine which character traits are good and bad, which actions are right and wrong.
nonnormative ethics ethics whose objective is to establish what factually or conceptually is the case, not what ethically ought to be the case.
The authors note that because Utilitarianism broadens its concern to all people or an entire community, it is an improvement on Egoism.
MacIntyre argues that ethics should be about constructing a unified approach to morality that applies to all people everywhere.
Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy rested on the assumption that there is a “universal rationality” shared by all people everywhere.
Aristotle believed that we can find virtue between the vices of excess and deficiency. This virtuous point in between the vices he called:
The Enlightenment philosopher was one of the leading voices for deontological ethics.
Which branch of ethics attempts to answer moral questions and settle issues about what to do and who to be is:
Which of these is not one of Holmes’ aspects of moral reasoning for Christians?