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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 (questions of how one ought to be and act) and applied ethics (practical questions of right behavior in given, usually contentious, situations).
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions (i.e., statements) and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world."
The term "ethical subjectivism" covers two distinct theories in ethics. According to cognitive versions of ethical subjectivism, the truth of moral statements depends upon people's values, attitudes, feelings, or beliefs. Some forms of cognitivist ethical subjectivism can be counted as forms of realism, others are forms of anti-realism. [19]
Moral universalism (also called moral objectivism) is the meta-ethical position that some system of ethics, or a universal ethic, applies universally, that is, for "all similarly situated individuals", [1] regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other distinguishing feature. [2]
Meta-ethical relativism seems to eliminate the normative relativist's ability to make prescriptive claims. In other words, normative relativism may find it difficult to make a statement like "we think it is moral to tolerate behaviour" without always adding "other people think intolerance of certain behaviours is moral". [ 10 ]
Ethical non-naturalism (or moral non-naturalism) is the meta-ethical view which claims that: Ethical sentences express propositions. Some such propositions are true. Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of human opinion. These moral features of the world are not reducible to any set of non-moral features.
Hilary Putnam's book Ethics without Ontology (Harvard, 2004) argues for a similar view, that ethical (and for that matter mathematical) sentences can be true and objective without there being any objects to make them so. Cognitivism points to the semantic difference between imperative sentences and declarative sentences in normative subjects ...
Ethical naturalism (also called moral naturalism or naturalistic cognitivistic definism) [1] is the meta-ethical view which claims that: Ethical sentences express propositions. Some such propositions are true. Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world. These moral features of the world are reducible to some set of non ...