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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."
Universal prescriptivism (often simply called prescriptivism) is the meta-ethical view that claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable—whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts pertain.
Ethical naturalism encompasses any reduction of ethical properties, such as 'goodness', to non-ethical properties; there are many different examples of such reductions, and thus many different varieties of ethical naturalism. Hedonism, for example, is the view that goodness is ultimately just pleasure. [4]
An important development in 20th-century ethics in analytic philosophy was the emergence of metaethics. [234] Significant early contributions to this field were made by G. E. Moore (1873–1958), [235] who argued that moral values are essentially different from other properties found in the natural world. [236] R. M.
Some philosophers consider metaphilosophy to be a subject apart from philosophy, above or beyond it, [4] while others object to that idea. [5] Timothy Williamson argues that the philosophy of philosophy is "automatically part of philosophy", as is the philosophy of anything else. [6]
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Mackie is best known for his contributions to metaethics, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics. In his work The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation, Mackie makes an analysis of causality by prior philosophers and sets forth his theory of causality based on counterfactual conditionals.