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Metaethics

The Cognitive Gap

Justin Bartlett explores a basic distinction between understandings of ethics.

We are all concerned, to a greater or lesser degree, with ethical issues. Whether it be concerns over crime and punishment, humanitarian aid, ecological destruction, or simply the fact that your friend has broken a promise, ethical considerations seem to creep into almost all areas of life. But what is it that makes humans prone to thinking in terms of right and wrong or good and bad? Why are we psychologically predisposed to make judgements of the moral variety, and what does it actually mean to make a moral judgement? These are what philosophers might call ‘second-order’ moral questions. They are among the chief concerns of the philosophical sub-field known as ‘metaethics’.

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