metaethics

—metaethical, adj.

/met'euh eth"iks, met"euh eth'-/, n. (usually used with a sing. v.)

the philosophy of ethics dealing with the meaning of ethical terms, the nature of moral discourse, and the foundations of moral principles.

Also, meta-ethics.

[1945-50; META- + ETHICS]

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      the subdiscipline of ethics concerned with determining the nature of moral concepts and judgments largely through the analysis of the logical and semantic aspects of moral language.

      A brief treatment of metaethics follows. For further discussion, see ethics: Metaethics (ethics).

      Analytic (analytic philosophy) philosophers, also known as philosophers of language, distinguish between the first-order language, in which all humans communicate with one another, and the second-order language, in which philosophers attempt to understand, analyze, and clarify the nature and meaning of first-order discourse. Hence, metaethics, as a term in the second-order enterprise, identifies a fundamental task of the moral philosopher, the logical analysis (1) of the meanings of such moral terms as right and wrong, obligatory and forbidden, good and evil; (2) of the function of the statements in which such terms occur; and (3) of the nature of the justifications, or moral reasoning, used in the support of these statements. Metaethics (or analytic, or critical, ethics) is thus to be contrasted with practical, normative, or speculative ethics, which explores such first-order questions as: “What actions are right and what are wrong?”; “How should one live and what things should one value?”; and “Is life worth living?”

      Analytic philosophers agree that the fundamental questions in ethical theory are metaethical; and some even assert that they are the only questions appropriate for a moral philosopher and that normative questions can be dealt with by all people in their capacity as moralists. The position of the moral philosopher is thus analogous to that of the philosopher of science, who considers only the logic of scientific statements and remains neutral on the question of which are true and which false. The possibility that metaethics might succeed in such neutral analyses of moral language has been questioned, however, even by Analytic philosophers themselves, who argue that there are presuppositions about moral language that are themselves normative, which may well underlie the analytic enterprise and condition its theoretical results.

 Major metaethical theories include naturalism, nonnaturalism (or intuitionism), emotivism, and prescriptivism. Naturalists, such as Ralph Barton Perry, Stephen Coburn Pepper, W.T. Stace, Richard B. Brandt, and Geoffrey James Warnock, and nonnaturalists, such as G.E. Moore, H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross, and A.C. Ewing, agree that moral language is cognitive—i.e., that moral claims can be known to be true or false. They disagree, however, on how this knowing is to be done. Naturalists hold either that these claims can be adequately justified by reasoning from statements employing only nonmoral terms or that moral terms themselves can be defined in nonmoral (natural or factlike) terms. Intuitionists deny both of these positions and hold that moral terms are sui generis, that moral statements are autonomous in their logical status. Emotivists, notably Sir A.J. Ayer (Ayer, Sir A.J.) and Charles Stevenson, deny that moral utterances are cognitive, holding that they consist in emotional expressions of approval or disapproval and that the nature of moral reasoning and justification must be reinterpreted to take this essential characteristic of moral utterances into account. R.M. Hare and other exponents of prescriptivism take a somewhat similar approach, arguing that moral judgments are prescriptions or prohibitions of action, rather than statements of fact about the world.

 

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