final thesis will be that according to a non-descriptivist
meta-ethics'Postmodern Argumentation and Post-Postmodern Liberalism', in On the Relevance of
Meta-ethics: New Essays on
Meta-ethics, Jocelyne Couture and Kai Nielsen (eds), Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press.
Those moral philosophers concerned with what came to be called
meta-ethics were interested in examining what our moral languages are doing, and, for the most part, rejected the prescriptivism of the deontologists and consequentialists.
Mark LeBar (Ohio University) reviews
Meta-Ethics, Egoism, and Virtue, the first volume in the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies (ARSPS), a planned multi-volume series on Rand's thought sponsored by the Ayn Rand Society.
But you won't find adherence to a divine command theory of
meta-ethics among them." Christopher Hallquist rejoins:
Some bring technical instruments to bear on the issues, which is in the nature of an interdisciplinary subject such as
meta-ethics. On the whole, the vast majority of the articles in both volumes deserve careful studying by researchers working in
meta-ethics and more generally interested in the nature of normativity.
of Cardiff, Wales) presents a textbook for undergraduate students in their second or third year that introduces ethics from the perspectives of the history of ethics, value theory and the good life, normative ethics, applied ethics,
meta-ethics, and free will and responsibility.
This is a topic of fierce disagreement and significant controversy in
meta-ethics and the philosophy of law.
For instance, he treats the entire field of
meta-ethics as a mistake.
Dworkin is similarly impatient with
meta-ethics. Usually philosophers think that accounts of what moral claims are--expressions of attitudes, proposals of norms that others should adopt, statements about nonnatural properties, and so on--are "second-order" and independent of what one thinks about any actual moral question.
This next higher level for ethics is often called
meta-ethics in philosophy (Marturano, 2002; Sayre-McCord, 2007).
This discussion is motivated by both my sympathy with Aristotle's
meta-ethics and my problems with certain elements of his ethics.
