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 and applied ethics.
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 questions belong to the domain of normative ethics, whereas metaethics addresses second-order 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.

Metaethical questions

According to Richard Garner and Bernard Rosen, there are three kinds of metaethical problems, or three general questions:
  1. What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments?
  2. *Asks about the meanings of such words as 'good', 'bad', 'right', and 'wrong'
  3. What is the nature of moral judgments?
  4. *Asks questions of whether moral judgments are absolute or relative, of one kind or many kinds, etc.
  5. How may moral judgments be supported or defended?
  6. *Asks such questions as how we can know if something is right or wrong, if at all.
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

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

Cognitivist theories hold that evaluative moral sentences express propositions, as opposed to non-cognitivism. Most forms of cognitivism hold that some such propositions are true, as opposed to error theory, which asserts that all are erroneous.

Moral realism

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:
  1. Ethical naturalism holds that there are objective moral properties and that these properties are reducible or stand in some metaphysical relation to entirely non-ethical properties. Most ethical naturalists hold that we have empirical knowledge of moral truths. Ethical naturalism was implicitly assumed by many modern ethical theorists, particularly utilitarians.
  2. Ethical non-naturalism, as put forward by G. E. Moore, holds that there are objective and irreducible moral properties, and that we sometimes have intuitive or otherwise a priori awareness of moral properties or of moral truths. Moore's open question argument against what he considered the naturalistic fallacy was largely responsible for the birth of metaethical research in contemporary analytic philosophy.

    Ethical subjectivism

is one form of moral anti-realism. It holds that moral statements are made true or false by the attitudes and/or conventions of people, either those of each society, those of each individual, or those of some particular individual. Most forms of ethical subjectivism are relativist, but there are notable forms that are universalist:
, another form of moral anti-realism, holds that although ethical claims do express propositions, all such propositions are false, as the properties discussed don't exist. Thus, both the statement "Murder is morally wrong" and the statement "Murder is morally permissible" are false, according to error theory. J. L. Mackie is the best-known proponent of this view. Since error theory denies that there are moral truths, error theory entails moral nihilism and, thus, moral skepticism; however, neither moral nihilism nor moral skepticism conversely entail error theory.

Non-cognitivist theories

theories hold that ethical sentences are neither true nor false because they do not express genuine propositions. Non-cognitivism is another form of moral anti-realism. Most forms of non-cognitivism are also forms of expressivism, however some such as Mark Timmons and Terrence Horgan distinguish the two and allow the possibility of cognitivist forms of expressivism. Non-cognitivism includes:
  • Emotivism, defended by A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson, holds that ethical sentences serve merely to express emotions. Ayer argues that ethical sentences are expressions of approval or disapproval, not assertions. So "Killing is wrong" means something like "Boo on killing!".
  • Quasi-realism, defended by Simon Blackburn, holds that ethical statements behave linguistically like factual claims and can be appropriately called "true" or "false", even though there are no ethical facts for them to correspond to. Projectivism and moral fictionalism are related theories.
  • Universal prescriptivism, defended by R. M. Hare, holds that moral statements function like universalized imperative sentences. So "Killing is wrong" means something like "Don't kill!" Hare's version of prescriptivism requires that moral prescriptions be universalizable, and hence actually have objective values, in spite of failing to be indicative statements with truth-values per se.

    Centralism and non-centralism

Yet another way of categorizing metaethical theories is to distinguish between centralist and non-centralist moral theories. The debate between centralism and non-centralism revolves around the relationship between the so-called "thin" and "thick" concepts of morality: thin moral concepts are those such as good, bad, right, and wrong; thick moral concepts are those such as courageous, inequitable, just, or dishonest. While both sides agree that the thin concepts are more general and the thick more specific, centralists hold that the thin concepts are antecedent to the thick ones and that the latter are therefore dependent on the former. That is, centralists argue that one must understand words like "right" and "ought" before understanding words like "just" and "unkind." Non-centralism rejects this view, holding that thin and thick concepts are on par with one another and even that the thick concepts are a sufficient starting point for understanding the thin ones.
Non-centralism has been of particular importance to ethical naturalists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as part of their argument that normativity is a non-excisable aspect of language and that there is no way of analyzing thick moral concepts into a purely descriptive element attached to a thin moral evaluation, thus undermining any fundamental division between facts and norms. Allan Gibbard, R. M. Hare, and Simon Blackburn have argued in favor of the fact/norm distinction, meanwhile, with Gibbard going so far as to argue that, even if conventional English has only mixed normative terms, we could develop a nominally English metalanguage that still allowed us to maintain the division between factual descriptions and normative evaluations.

Moral ontology

Moral ontology attempts to answer the question, "What is the nature of moral judgments?"
Amongst those who believe there to be some standard of morality, there are two divisions:
  1. universalists, who hold that the same moral facts or principles apply to everyone everywhere; and
  2. relativists, who hold that different moral facts or principles apply to different people or societies.

    Moral universalism

is the metaethical position that some system of ethics, or a universal ethic, applies universally, that is to all intelligent beings regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexuality, or other distinguishing feature. The source or justification of this system may be thought to be, for instance, human nature, shared vulnerability to suffering, the demands of universal reason, what is common among existing moral codes, or the common mandates of religion. Moral universalism is the opposing position to various forms of moral relativism.
Universalist theories are generally forms of moral realism, though exceptions exist, such as the subjectivist ideal observer and divine command theories, and the non-cognitivist universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare. Forms of moral universalism include:
  • Value monism is the common form of universalism, which holds that all goods are commensurable on a single value scale.
  • Value pluralism contends that there are two or more genuine scales of value, knowable as such, yet incommensurable, so that any prioritization of these values is either non-cognitive or subjective. A value pluralist might, for example, contend that both a life as a nun and a life as a mother realize genuine values, yet they are incompatible, and there is no purely rational way to measure which is preferable. A notable proponent of this view is Isaiah Berlin.