Hmm, I don’t think so. Though I am not fully sure. Might depend on the precise definition.
It feels metaethical because I am responding to a perceived confusion of “what defines moral value?”, and not “what things are moral?”.
I think “adding up people’s experience over the course of their life determines whether an act has good consequences or not” is a confused approach to ethics, which feels more like a metaethical instead of an ethical disagreement.
However, happy to use either term if anyone feels strongly, or happy to learn that this kind of disagreement falls clearly into either “ethics” or “metaethics”.
I’m by no means schooled in academic philosophy, so I could also be wrong about this.
I tend to think about e.g. consequentialism, hedonistic utilitarianism, preference utilitarianism, lesswrongian ‘we should keep all the complexities of human value around’-ism, deontology, and virtue ethics as ethical theories. (This is backed up somewhat by the fact that these theories’ wikipedia pages name them ethical theories.) When I think about meta-ethics, I mainly think about moral realism vs moral anti-realism and their varieties, though the field contains quite a few other things, like cole_haus mentions.
My impression is that HLI endorses (roughly) hedonistic utilitarianism, and you said that you don’t, which would be an ethical disagreement. The borderlines aren’t very sharp though. If HLI would have asserted that hedonistic utilitarianism was objectively correct, then you could certainly have made a metaethical argument that no ethical theory is objectively correct. Alternatively, you might be able to bring metaethics into it if you think that there is an ethical truth that isn’t hedonistic utilitarianism.
(I saw you quoting Nate’s post in another thread. I think you could say that it makes a meta-ethical argument that it’s possible to care about things outside yourself, but that it doesn’t make the ethical argument that you ought to do so. Of course, HLI does care about things outside themselves, since they care about other people’s experiences.)
(a) Meaning: what is the semantic function of moral discourse? Is the function of moral discourse to state facts, or does it have some other non-fact-stating role?
(b) Metaphysics: do moral facts (or properties) exist? If so, what are they like? Are they identical or reducible to natural facts (or properties) or are they irreducible and sui generis?
(c) Epistemology and justification: is there such a thing as moral knowledge? How can we know whether our moral judgements are true or false? How can we ever justify our claims to moral knowledge?
(d) Phenomenology: how are moral qualities represented in the experience of an agent making a moral judgement? Do they appear to be ‘out there’ in the world?
(e) Moral psychology: what can we say about the motivational state of someone making a moral judgement? What sort of connection is there between making a moral judgement and being motivated to act as that judgement prescribes?
(f) Objectivity: can moral judgements really be correct or incorrect? Can we work towards finding out the moral truth?
It doesn’t quite seem to me like the original claim fits neatly into any of these categories.
Hmm, I don’t think so. Though I am not fully sure. Might depend on the precise definition.
It feels metaethical because I am responding to a perceived confusion of “what defines moral value?”, and not “what things are moral?”.
I think “adding up people’s experience over the course of their life determines whether an act has good consequences or not” is a confused approach to ethics, which feels more like a metaethical instead of an ethical disagreement.
However, happy to use either term if anyone feels strongly, or happy to learn that this kind of disagreement falls clearly into either “ethics” or “metaethics”.
I’m by no means schooled in academic philosophy, so I could also be wrong about this.
I tend to think about e.g. consequentialism, hedonistic utilitarianism, preference utilitarianism, lesswrongian ‘we should keep all the complexities of human value around’-ism, deontology, and virtue ethics as ethical theories. (This is backed up somewhat by the fact that these theories’ wikipedia pages name them ethical theories.) When I think about meta-ethics, I mainly think about moral realism vs moral anti-realism and their varieties, though the field contains quite a few other things, like cole_haus mentions.
My impression is that HLI endorses (roughly) hedonistic utilitarianism, and you said that you don’t, which would be an ethical disagreement. The borderlines aren’t very sharp though. If HLI would have asserted that hedonistic utilitarianism was objectively correct, then you could certainly have made a metaethical argument that no ethical theory is objectively correct. Alternatively, you might be able to bring metaethics into it if you think that there is an ethical truth that isn’t hedonistic utilitarianism.
(I saw you quoting Nate’s post in another thread. I think you could say that it makes a meta-ethical argument that it’s possible to care about things outside yourself, but that it doesn’t make the ethical argument that you ought to do so. Of course, HLI does care about things outside themselves, since they care about other people’s experiences.)
This seems reasonable. I changed it to say “ethical”.
Contemporary Metaethics delineates the field as being about:
It doesn’t quite seem to me like the original claim fits neatly into any of these categories.