Normative Ethics and Metaethics

Abstract

By its very name, the field of metaethics is contrasted with another field of inquiry, that of normative ethics. Metaethics concerns questions about normative inquiry, rather than questions within normative inquiry. Whereas normative ethics concerns questions like what is good or bad, what we must or ought to do, and why, metaethics is said to be concerned with questions like what it means to say that something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, whether such claims correspond to facts about the world, and how we know or manage to talk or think about such facts, if there are any. Metaethics may also be contrasted with normative ethics as philosophy of science is contrasted with science. Metaethicists, it is sometimes said, no more make claims within normative ethics than philosophers of science make claims within science, or pundits are engaged in playing football. On this conception of the distinction between normative ethics and metaethics, the divide between normative ethics and metaethics runs two ways. By its very nature, metaethics is concerned with questions that cross-cut the concerns of normative ethics, and so no answer to any metaethical question commits you in any way to any answer to a normative ethical question. Similarly, no answer to any normative ethical question commits you to any answer to a metaethical question. As we’ll see in what follows, this conception of the relationship between normative ethics and metaethics is mistaken. Some answers to some metaethical questions do carry commitments within normative ethics, and likewise, some answers to some normative ethical questions do carry commitments within metaethics. Indeed, as we’ll see, there is a very interesting set of views on which metaethics and normative ethics greatly overlap. Yet it is also a mistake to think that there is no real distinction between normative ethics and metaethics. As we will see, there are, in fact, some answers to some very important and central metaethical questions that indeed do not carry any commitments for the