Metaethics

Metaethics, the subdiscipline of ethics concerned with the nature of ethical theories and moral judgments. (Read Peter Singer’s Britannica entry on ethics.) A brief treatment of metaethics follows. For further discussion, see ethics: Metaethics. Major metaethical theories include naturalism, nonnaturalism (or intuitionism), emotivism, and prescriptivism. Naturalists and nonnaturalists agree that moral language is cognitive—i.e., that moral claims can be known to be true or false. They disagree, however, on how this knowing is to be...