ABSTRACT
Metaethics concerns questions about normative inquiry, rather than questions within normative inquiry. Metaethics may also be contrasted with normative ethics as philosophy of science is contrasted with science. This chapter focuses on the classification of easy paradigms. Views which make claims about the nature of moral language, thought, epistemology, or reality, including noncognitivism, moral error theory, contextualism, relativism, and reductive realism, are all paradigmatically metaethical. Normative ethical theory, paradigmatically includes both particular and highly general claims about what is good, best, right, wrong, or apt, as well as attempts to explain why. The chapter argues that many, but not all, paradigmatic metaethical views carry straightforward commitments for paradigmatic normative ethical questions, and that at least one kind of paradigmatically normative ethical view carries straightforward commitments for metaethics. One important and central question in metaethics concerns the nature of the meaning of moral words like 'good', 'ought', and 'wrong'.
