Metaethics: Crash Course Philosophy #32
We begin our unit on ethics with a look at metaethics. Hank explains three forms of moral realism – moral absolutism, and cultural relativism, including the difference between descriptive...
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Is it wrong to steal to feed your family? Is there such a thing as a good lie? Questions like these are the domain of ethics – the branch of philosophy that studies morality, or right and wrong behavior. But before we can parse questions like these, we need to go deeper – into metaethics, which studies the very foundations of morality itself. Metaethics asks questions as basic as: what is morality? What’s its nature? Like, is it an objective thing, out there in the world, waiting to be known? Or is it more like a preference, an opinion, or just a bunch of cultural conventions? There are lots of different metaethical views out there. And one way to understand them is to put them to a test to see how they’d help you solve some thorny ethical problems. ...
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Is it wrong to steal to feed your family? Is there such a thing as a good lie? Questions like these are the domain of ethics – the branch of philosophy that studies morality, or right and wrong behavior. But before we can parse questions like these, we need to go deeper – into metaethics, which studies the very foundations of morality itself. Metaethics asks questions as basic as: what is morality? What’s its nature? Like, is it an objective thing, out there in the world, waiting to be known? Or is it more like a preference, an opinion, or just a bunch of cultural conventions? There are lots of different metaethical views out there. And one way to understand them is to put them to a test to see how they’d help you solve some thorny ethical problems. ...
