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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).
Ideal observer theory is the meta-ethical view which claims that ethical sentences express truth-apt propositions about the attitudes of a hypothetical ideal observer. In other words, ideal observer theory states that ethical judgments should be interpreted as statements about the reactions that a neutral and fully informed observer would have ...
This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism (which accepts that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false) with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism [1] and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism (which denies that moral ...
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 ...
In meta-ethics, expressivism is a theory about the meaning of moral language.According to expressivism [citation needed], sentences that employ moral terms – for example, "It is wrong to torture an innocent human being" – are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as "wrong", "good", or "just" do not refer to real, in-the-world properties.
Ethical naturalism has been criticized most prominently [according to whom?] by ethical non-naturalist G. E. Moore, who formulated the open-question argument.Garner and Rosen say that a common definition of "natural property" is one "which can be discovered by sense observation or experience, experiment, or through any of the available means of science."
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He used the example of water not having an identical meaning to H 2 O to propose that "being commanded by God" does not have an identical meaning to "being obligatory". This was not an objection to the truth of divine command theory, but Wainwright believed it demonstrated that the theory should not be used to formulate assertions about the ...