This actually came up in the last rerun, but it’s relevant to this one too:
If you say, “Killing people is wrong,” that’s morality. If you say, “You shouldn’t kill people because God prohibited it,” or “You shouldn’t kill people because it goes against the trend of the universe”, that’s metaethics.
Metaethics is a philosophical term of art, and so in some sense we can use it as we like, but among those who use the term I think almost everyone would consider the above three claims to be straightforwardly ethical ones. A meta ethical question in line with these would be something like ‘is the wrongness of killing, if it is wrong, a property of an act, or of people who perform the act’? The whole point of meta ethical discourse is supposed to be to isolate a number of issues concerning ethics that float free of any and all positive ethical positions, and the above claims do not. I’m not sure if this has any important consequences for EY’s claims.
This actually came up in the last rerun, but it’s relevant to this one too:
Metaethics is a philosophical term of art, and so in some sense we can use it as we like, but among those who use the term I think almost everyone would consider the above three claims to be straightforwardly ethical ones. A meta ethical question in line with these would be something like ‘is the wrongness of killing, if it is wrong, a property of an act, or of people who perform the act’? The whole point of meta ethical discourse is supposed to be to isolate a number of issues concerning ethics that float free of any and all positive ethical positions, and the above claims do not. I’m not sure if this has any important consequences for EY’s claims.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/