meta-ethics

Meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.

There are three kinds of meta-ethics problems, or three general questions:

1) What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments? (moral semantics)
2) What is the nature of moral judgments? (moral ontology)
3) How may moral judgments be supported or defended? (moral epistemology) A question of the first type might be, "What do the words 'good', 'bad', 'right' and 'wrong' mean?" The second category includes questions of whether moral judgments are universal or relative, of one kind or many kinds, etc. Questions of the third kind ask, for example, how we can know if something is right or wrong, if at all.

13👍 1👎