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Meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the four branches of ethics generally recognized by philosophers, the others being descriptive ethics, normative ethics and applied ethics. While normative ethics addresses such questions as "What should I do?", thus endorsing some ethical evaluations and rejecting others, 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. Some theorists argue that a metaphysical account of morality is necessary for the proper evaluation of actual moral theories and for making practical moral decisions; others reason from opposite premises and suggest that we must impart ideas of moral intuition onto proper action before we can give a proper account of morality's metaphysics. ==Meta-ethical questions== According to Richard Garner and Bernard Rosen, there are three kinds of meta-ethical problems, or three general questions: #What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments? (Moral semantics) #What is the nature of moral judgments? (Moral ontology) #How may moral judgments be supported or defended? (Moral epistemology) 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. Garner and Rosen say that answers to the three basic questions "are not unrelated, and sometimes an answer to one will strongly suggest, or perhaps even entail, an answer to another."〔 A meta-ethical theory, unlike a normative ethical theory, does not attempt to evaluate specific choices as being better, worse, good, bad, or evil; although it may have profound implications as to the validity and meaning of normative ethical claims. An answer to any of the three example questions above would not itself be a normative ethical statement. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Meta-ethics」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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