Ethics And Moral Philosophy

The Art Of Metaethics

What is Moral Philosophy?

Moral Philosophy is the rational study of the meaning and justification of moral claims. A moral claim evaluates the rightness or wrongness of an action or a person's character. For example, "Lying is wrong" claims the act of lying is wrong, while "One shouldn't be lazy" claims a character trait (i.e., laziness) is wrong. Moral philosophy is usually divided into three distinct subject areas: metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics.

Metaethics

Metaethics is a branch of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words. Whereas the fields of applied ethics and normative theory focus on what is moral, metaethics focuses on what morality itself is.

(to put it bluntly, Metaethics explains the justification of certain actions, are the ethical, unethical, justified, not justified, etc.)

Metaethics examines the nature of moral claims and arguments.

This partly involves attempting to determine if moral claims have clear essential meanings (i.e., they avoid vagueness and ambiguity). But it attempts to answer questions such as, Are moral claims expressions of emotions? Are Moral claims social inventions? Are moral claims divine commands? Can one justify moral claims, if so how does one justify them?

Should I focus on metaethics when focusing on Nagel's moral philosophy chapter "What Does It All Mean". Nagel attempts to answer the ancient metaethical question, "Why Be Moral?". Metaethical positions might be divided according to how they respond to questions such as the following;

What exactly are people doing when they use moral words such as "good" and "right"? What precisely is a moral value in the first place, and are such values similar to other familiar sorts of entities, such as objects and properties? Where do moral values come from—what is their source and foundation? Are some things morally right or wrong for all people at all times, or does morality instead vary from person to person, context to context, or culture to culture?

Scientific and metaethical reasoning. Following the statement of "The average lifespan in 2016 was 78 years of age" you would be required to examine your data, meaning turn to scientific reasoning. With the statement of "We ought not arbitrarily kill someone" you would start with cultural relativism, for the cultural relativist a moral claim could be true or false depending on whether the culture deem it right or wrong, that being moral subjectivism. The moral subjectivist, like the cultural relativist cultural relativist believes that morality is not objective. On the other hand, moral realism claims that morality is objective, and some moral claims are true, regardless of whether an individual or culture indorses that. Next, Constructivism, may be considered an intermediate of realism and relativism, metaethical constructivism holds that what makes moral claims true is that a group of people deliberating in an idealized hypothetical forum would agree upon them. Finally, to examine Moral Nihilism, which claims that moral truth does not exist, for the nihilist there are no moral facts that will make moral claims true, morality is an illusion, nihilism also observes the idea that there is no point to being moral, when you are just going to die in the end.