Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice.
While normative ethics addresses such questions as "What should I do?", evaluating specific practices and principles of action, metaethics addresses questions about the nature of goodness, how one can discriminate good from evil, and what the proper account of moral knowledge is.
Metaethics is a branch of analytic philosophy that explores the status, foundations, and scope of moral values, properties, and words. Whereas the fields of applied ethics and normative theory focus on what is moral, metaethics focuses on what morality itself is.
Major metaethical theories include naturalism, nonnaturalism (or intuitionism), emotivism, and prescriptivism. Naturalists and nonnaturalists agree that moral language is cognitive—i.e., that moral claims can be known to be true or false. They disagree, however, on how this knowing is to be done.
Realist metaethical theories argue that mind-independent moral properties – such as ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, and ‘bad’ – exist. These moral properties give rise to mind-independent moral facts, such as “murder is wrong”.
Meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature, origins, and meaning of ethical concepts and statements. It examines questions about what morality itself is, rather than what actions are right or wrong.
Metaethics (or Meta-ethics) is that part of philosophy concerned with the ultimate status and grounding of ethics, whether in external metaphysical terms, or in internal, psychological terms.
Applied ethics seeks answers to moral questions about specific practices like abortion, euthanasia and business, while normative ethics seeks abstract moral principles that apply generally. We can loosely define metaethics as seeking answers to questions about normative ethics.
