Meta-Ethical Theory

Context:
- It can address the Ethical Questions, such as:
  - “What is goodness?”
  - “How can we tell what is good from what is bad?”
  - “Is morality more a matter of taste than truth?”
  - “Are moral standards culturally relative? Are there moral facts?”
  - “If there are moral facts, what is their origin? How is it that they set an appropriate standard for our behavior?”
  - “How might moral facts be related to other facts (about psychology, happiness, human conventions…)?”
- It can include Moral Metaphysics (a metaphysics).
- It can include Moral Epistemology (an epistemolody).
- It can include Moral Semantics (a semantics).
- It can include Moral Psychology.
- …
Counter-Example(s):
- a Normative Ethics, for some specific Moral System.
- an Applied Ethics.
- a Descriptive Ethics.
See: Property (Philosophy), Philosophical Question.

References

(Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/meta-ethics Retrieved:2014-6-22.
- Meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the four branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being descriptive ethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.
  While normative ethics addresses such questions as "What should one do?", thus endorsing some ethical evaluations and rejecting others, meta-ethics addresses questions such as "What is goodness?" and "How can we tell what is good from what is bad?", seeking to understand the nature of ethical properties and evaluations.
  Some theorists argue that a metaphysical account of morality is necessary for the proper evaluation of actual moral theories and for making practical moral decisions; others reason from opposite premises and suggest that we must impart ideas of moral intuition onto proper action before we can give a proper account of morality's metaphysics.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/
- Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice. As such, it counts within its domain a broad range of questions and puzzles, including: Is morality more a matter of taste than truth? Are moral standards culturally relative? Are there moral facts? If there are moral facts, what is their origin? How is it that they set an appropriate standard for our behavior? How might moral facts be related to other facts (about psychology, happiness, human conventions…)? And how do we learn about the moral facts, if there are any? These questions lead naturally to puzzles about the meaning of moral claims as well as about moral truth and the justification of our moral commitments. Metaethics explores as well the connection between values, reasons for action, and human motivation, asking how it is that moral standards might provide us with reasons to do or refrain from doing as it demands, and it addresses many of the issues commonly bound up with the nature of freedom and its significance (or not) for moral responsibility.