What's Your Meta-Ethic?

From time to time it's important to do something that's hard for most people because it's done so seldom: think. Yours truly is not immune from this.

Thinking is hard work. It's easier to do a whole day of manual labor than to think and reason and learn all day.

But it's worth doing at times because it makes the rest of the time that much easier. Especially when it's about the basics -- no, deeper than basics; something foundational.

Meta-ethics.

Meta-ethics isn't some kind of Japanese monster movie, Godzilla vs. Meta-Ethics. Meta-ethics deals with the overarching principles of which things are "good" and "important"; the things to be valued; the worldview.

[Wikipedia] Meta-ethics addresses questions such as "What is goodness?" and "How can we tell what is good from what is bad?", seeking to understand the nature of ethical properties and evaluations.

According to Richard Garner and Bernard Rosen,^[1] there are three kinds of meta-ethical problems, or three general questions:

1. What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments?
2. What is the nature of moral judgments?
3. How may moral judgments be supported or defended?

A question of the first type might be, "What do the words 'good', 'bad', 'right' and 'wrong' mean?" (see value theory). The second category includes questions of whether moral judgments are universal or relative, of one kind or many kinds, etc. Questions of the third kind ask, for example, how we can know if something is right or wrong, if at all.

Why should we bother with such philosophical stuff? Isn't it rather esoteric and removed from everyday life and ultimately unknowable?

It's important because the meta-ethic determines what the ethics are. Morals are derived directly from ethics. These tell you what to do.

If you have a bad meta-ethic, you get bad ethics; bad ethics lead to bad morals; bad morals lead to bad actions. So, it's important to start from the right place. [Part 2]