Metaethics is the part of ethics that asks what moral claims are and how, if at all, they can be known. Normative ethics asks “What should we do?” Metaethics asks questions that sit underneath that question: What does “should” mean? Are moral claims true or false, or something else? If they are true, what makes […]

Metaethics is sometimes treated as a modern academic invention. In reality, the underlying questions are ancient: what is the good, what grounds obligation, and what gives moral judgment authority? What changes over time is the vocabulary and the dominant anxieties. A short history of metaethics can therefore be told as four shifts. Each shift marks […]

Metaethics is often introduced with intimidating vocabulary: “realism,” “expressivism,” “supervenience,” “non-naturalism,” “error theory.” The vocabulary can hide the real issues. Most metaethical disputes are driven by a handful of recurring confusions—confusions about what moral language is doing, what moral truth would be, and what moral knowledge could amount \to. This essay identifies common confusions in […]