Metaethics

Metaethics examines what moral judgments mean, whether they can be true, and what could make them true. It also investigates the nature and sources of moral knowledge and value.

Moral realism: The view that moral claims can be true and that some are true independently of anyone’s attitudes. It supplies the clearest account of moral judgments as claims about objective facts.
Moral subjectivism: The view that moral truths depend on the attitudes or responses of individuals. It grounds moral judgments in personal attitudes rather than stance-independent facts.
Open-question argument: G. E. Moore’s argument that defining goodness as a natural property leaves the question of its goodness open. It challenges attempts to identify moral properties with natural ones.
G. E. Moore: British philosopher whose Principia Ethica challenged naturalistic definitions of goodness. His open-question argument helped define twentieth-century debates about moral meaning.
Moral disagreement: Persistent conflict among people or cultures over moral judgments and principles. Its extent and persistence raise questions about objectivity, knowledge, and moral progress.
Moral anti-realism: A family of views denying that morality consists of stance-independent facts or properties. It gathers positions that reject the realist picture of moral truth.
Moral relativism: The view that moral standards or truths vary with cultural or social frameworks. It makes moral truth framework-dependent, unlike universalist accounts.
Moral supervenience: The principle that moral differences require some difference in the nonmoral features of a situation. It captures a constraint on how moral properties relate to natural facts.
A. J. Ayer: British philosopher who defended logical positivism and an emotivist account of ethical language. His emotivism made noncognitivism a prominent modern position.
Moral motivation: The connection between judging an action morally required and being motivated to perform it. It tests whether moral judgment necessarily involves practical motivation.

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