Meta-Ethics

[maelstrm]

Was doing some random reading online and came to the Wikipedia page on Meta-Ethics

(which I will now blatantly steal and post below, with some minor formatting and fluff removal

While normative ethics addresses such questions as "Which things are good and bad?" and "What should we do?", thus endorsing some ethical evaluations and rejecting others, meta-ethics addresses the question "What is goodness?", seeking to understand the nature of ethical properties and evaluations.

Examples of meta-ethical questions include:

• What does it mean to say something is good?
• How, if at all, do we know what is right and wrong?
• How do moral attitudes motivate action?
• Are there objective or absolute values?
• What is the source of our values?

The major meta-ethical views are commonly divided into realist and anti-realist views:

• Moral realism holds that there are objective values. Realists believe that evaluative statements are factual claims, which are either true or false, and that their truth or falsity does not depend on our beliefs, feelings, or other attitudes towards the things that are evaluated. Moral realism comes in two variants:

• Ethical intuitionism and ethical non-naturalism, which hold that there are objective, irreducible moral properties (such as the property of 'goodness'), and that we sometimes have intuitive awareness of moral properties or of moral truths.

• Ethical naturalism, which holds that there are objective moral properties but that these properties are reducible to entirely non-ethical properties. Most ethical naturalists hold that we have empirical knowledge of moral truths. Several have argued that moral knowledge can be gained by the same means as scientific knowledge.

• Moral anti-realism holds that there are no objective values. This view comes in three variants:

• Ethical Subjectivism, which holds that moral statements are made true or false by the attitudes and/or conventions of observers. There are several different versions of subjectivism, including:

• Moral relativism (aka "cultural relativism"): This is the view that for a thing to be morally right is for it to be approved of by society; this leads to the conclusion that different things are right for people in different societies and different periods in history.
  

• The Divine Command Theory: Another subjectivist theory holds that for a thing to be right is for a unique being, God, to approve of it, and that what is right for non-God beings is obedience to the divine will.
  

• Individualist Subjectivism: Another view is that there are as many distinct scales of good and evil as there are subjects in the world.
  

• The Ideal Observer Theory: Finally, some hold that what is right is determined by the attitudes that a hypothetical ideal observer would have. An ideal observer is usually characterized as a being who is perfectly rational, imaginative, and informed, among other things.
  

• Non-cognitivism, which holds that ethical sentences are neither true nor false because they do not assert genuine propositions. Non-cognitivism encompasses:

• Emotivism, which holds that ethical sentences serve merely to express emotions. So "Killing is wrong" means something like, "Boo on killing!"

• Prescriptivism, which holds that moral statements function like imperatives. So "Killing is wrong" means something like, "Don't kill!"

• Quasi-realism, which 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.

• Error theory (aka "moral skepticism" aka "nihilism"), which holds that ethical sentences are generally false. Error theorists hold that there are no objective values, but that the claim that there are objective values is part of the meaning of ordinary ethical sentences; that is why, in their view, ethical sentences are false.
  

All of which got me thinking a number of things:

1. I should really do some more reading and possibly study in Philosophy, because I find it quite fascinating.
2. By those definitions I'm not sure whether I subscribe to "Ethical Intuitionism" or "Divine Command Theory" or perhaps both, if that's even possible.
3. And Inevitably "This is Wikipedia, those definitions are somewhat likely to be wrong/poorly-represented ;P"