Metaethics
noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 The study of the nature and meaning of moral judgments, and the foundations and the possibility of ethical reasoning as such. uncountable
"However, he holds that ethics is not capable of proving cruelty—or happiness, for that matter—to be either good or bad. This view of the limitations of the reasoning of normative ethics belongs to metaethics."
Example
More examples"However, he holds that ethics is not capable of proving cruelty—or happiness, for that matter—to be either good or bad. This view of the limitations of the reasoning of normative ethics belongs to metaethics."
Etymology
From meta- + ethics. First attested in the 1930s.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.