* Universal prescriptivism, a meta-ethical theory of the meaning of moral statements

Divine command theory is a meta-ethical theory which proposes that an action's status as morally good is equivalent to whether it is commanded by God.

The third and highest level is held to be a meta-ethical theory of the moral structure of care.

He furthermore advanced emotivism as a meta-ethical theory that sharply delineated between cognitive, scientific uses of language ( used to state facts and to give reasons, and subject to the laws of science ) and non-cognitive uses ( used to state feelings and exercise influence ).

Ethical intuitionism ( also called moral intuitionism ) is usually understood as a meta-ethical theory that embraces the following theses:

Descriptive moral relativism holds only that some people do in fact disagree about what is moral ; meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong ; and normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when we disagree about the morality of it.

Not all descriptive relativists adopt meta-ethical relativism, and moreover, not all meta-ethical relativists adopt normative relativism.

Normative moral relativists believe not only the meta-ethical thesis, but that it has normative implications on what we ought to do.

Many critics, including Ibn Warraq and Eddie Tabash, have suggested that meta-ethical relativists essentially take themselves out of any discussion of normative morality, since they seem to be rejecting an assumption of such discussions: the premise that there are right and wrong answers that can be discovered through reason.

Various systems of moral universalism may differ in various ways on the meta-ethical question of the nature of the morality, as well as in their substantial normative content, but all agree on its universality.

Contemporary meta-ethical research continues to debate more recent instantiations of ethical naturalism like the Science of morality.

* Moral nihilism, also known as ethical nihilism, is the meta-ethical view that nothing is morally preferable to anything else.

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false ( they are not truth-apt ).

As with other anti-realist meta-ethical theories, non-cognitivism is largely supported by the argument from queerness: ethical properties, if they existed, would be different from any other thing in the universe, since they have no observable effect on the world.

Moral nihilism, also known as ethical nihilism, is the meta-ethical view that morality does not exist as something inherent to objective reality ; therefore no action is necessarily preferable to any other.

Pluralism is metaphysical and meta-ethical, and espouses a cultural relativism with strong social constructivism, while pragmatism is physical, ethical in their opinion and of weak social constructivism.

Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes .< ref > Ogden and Richards, Meaning, 125: "' Good ' is alleged to stand for a unique, unanalyzable concept … is the subject matter of ethics.

Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false ( they are truth-apt ), which noncognitivists deny.

The broad term moral cognitivist is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false ( they are truth-apt ).

Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical belief that ethical sentences reduce to factual statements about the attitudes and / or conventions of individual people, or that any ethical sentence implies an attitude held by someone.

Universal prescriptivism ( often simply called prescriptivism ) is the meta-ethical view which claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable — whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts obtain.

Moral nihilism ( also known as ethical nihilism or amoralism ) is the meta-ethical view that nothing is intrinsically moral or immoral.

* Robust moral realism, the meta-ethical position that ethical sentences express factual propositions about robust or mind-independent features of the world, and that some such propositions are true.

Carol Gilligan famously championed the role of relationships as central to moral reasoning, and superior as a basis for understanding human choices than any prior linguistic or meta-ethical concept ( see ethic of care ).

Likewise, they do not necessarily make any commitments to the semantics, ontology, or epistemology of moral judgements ; that is, not all descriptive relativists are meta-ethical relativists.

The appeal to an objective though contingent human nature ( perhaps expressed, for mathematical purposes, in the form of a utility function or other decision-theoretic formalism ), as providing the ultimate criterion of " Friendliness ", is an answer to the meta-ethical problem of defining an objective morality ; extrapolated volition is intended to be what humanity objectively would want, all things considered, but it can only be defined relative to the psychological and cognitive qualities of present-day, unextrapolated humanity.

Practically speaking, such critics will argue that meta-ethical relativism may amount to Moral nihilism, or else incoherence.

Examining the meta-ethical theories of naturalism, upon which many consequentialist theories rely, may provide further clarification.

Ethical naturalism ( also called moral naturalism or naturalistic cognitivistic definism ) is the meta-ethical view which claims that:

Ethical non-naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:

Moral realism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:

Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:

When it comes to the moral questions that we might ask, it can be difficult to argue that there is not necessarily some level of meta-ethical relativism – and failure to address this matter is criticized as ethnocentrism.

Some forms of moral realism are compatible with some degree of meta-ethical relativism.

Moore's open question argument against what he considered the naturalistic fallacy was largely responsible for the birth of meta-ethical research in contemporary analytic philosophy.

Yet another way of categorizing meta-ethical theories is to distinguish between centralist and non-centralist theories.

** Moral universalism ( or universal morality ) is the meta-ethical position that some system of ethics, or a universal ethic, applies universally, that is to all people regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexuality, or other distinguishing feature.

* Moral skepticism is the class of meta-ethical theories all members of which entail that no one has any moral knowledge.

According to Bernard Williams, Moore's use of the phrase ' naturalistic fallacy ' to describe this particular kind of meta-ethical thinking was a ' spectacular misnomer '; Williams contending that it is not properly either naturalistic or a fallacy.

However, on certain versions of the meta-ethical view called moral realism, moral facts are both descriptive and prescriptive at the same time.

The argument further states that meta-ethical relativists, by contrast, cannot condemn theft, rape or genocide ( nor commend generosity, marriage, or the preservation of life ) without relying on the assumption of an objective source for morality.

They argue that meta-ethical relativism implies that we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when it runs counter to our personal or cultural moral standards.

Moral universalism ( also called moral objectivism or universal morality ) is the meta-ethical position that some system of ethics, or a universal ethic, applies universally, that is, for " all similarly situated individuals ", regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexuality, or any other distinguishing feature.

In parallel with the development of this work on mind and language, McDowell also made significant contributions to moral philosophy, specifically meta-ethical debates over the nature of moral reasons and moral objectivity.