ABSTRACT
This book examines the foundations of ethics. It investigates fundamental issues in what is primarily metaethics. Metaethics, or second-order ethics, deals with ontological, epistemological, semantic or psychological issues about morality and moral claims. ‘Meta-ethics does not propound any moral principles or goals for action, except possibly by implication; it consists entirely of philosophical analysis.’1 By contrast, normative ethics, or first-order ethics, deals with ‘principles of obligation and general judgments of value in the light of which to determine what is morally right, wrong, or obligatory, and what or who is morally good, bad, or responsible’.2 Metaethical issues are those about, rather than within, morality; on the other hand, normative issues are those within, rather than about, morality.3
