ABSTRACT
The field known as ‘meta-ethics’ is not without its short-comings. However, its general project has been to force the discovery of truths implicit within established normative discourses. This is the profound invention of meta-ethics and the key for understanding its significance as a paradigm of thought. It is probably for this reason that meta-ethicists have proclaimed for themselves a “second-order” designation, while retroactively establishing normative ethics as restrictive and merely of the “first order” (see Mackie, 1977). Within the field of ethical philosophy, this also implies that meta-ethicists have unearthed a domain of inquiry that counts. Indeed, it is by counting to the second-order, or, in other words, by counting to ‘two,’ that one moves also toward the revelation of truths dormant but nonetheless determinative within normative declarations.
