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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).
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.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to ethics.. Ethics (also known as moral philosophy) is the branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct. [1]
[2] [3] Thus, while philosophy characteristically inquires into the nature of being, the reality of objects, the possibility of knowledge, the nature of truth, and so on, metaphilosophy is the self-reflective inquiry into the nature, aims, and methods of the activity that makes these kinds of inquiries, by asking what is philosophy itself, what ...
Cognitivism points to the semantic difference between imperative sentences and declarative sentences in normative subjects. Or to the different meanings and purposes of some superficially declarative sentences. For instance, if a teacher allows one of her students to go out by saying "You may go out", this sentence is neither true nor false.
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."
An example of the above is that of the concepts "finite parts" and "wholes"; they cannot be defined without reference to each other and thus with some amount of circularity, but we can make the self-evident statement that "the whole is greater than any of its parts", and thus establish a meaning particular to the two concepts.
Under his first pattern of analysis an ethical statement has two parts: a declaration of the speaker's attitude and an imperative to mirror it, so "'This is good' means I approve of this; do so as well." [30] The first half of the sentence is a proposition, but the imperative half is not, so Stevenson's translation of an ethical sentence ...