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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 ...
Thus, Blackburn's theory of quasi-realism provides a coherent account of ethical pluralism. It also answers John Mackie's concerns, presented in his argument from queerness, about the apparently contradictory nature of ethics. Quasi-realism, a meta-ethical approach, enables ethics based on actions, virtues and consequences to be reconciled.
Meta-ethical moral relativists believe not only that people disagree about moral issues, but that terms such as "good", "bad", "right" and "wrong" do not stand subject to universal truth conditions at all; rather, they are relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of an individual or a group of people. [7]
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 ...
Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes. [1] [2] [3] Hence, it is colloquially known as the hurrah/boo theory. [4]
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."
His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century. Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism as a meta-ethical theory, which he argues is supported by analysis of formal features of moral discourse, and for his defence of preference utilitarianism based on his prescriptivism.