If you say, "Killing people is wrong," that's morality. If you say, "You shouldn't kill people because God prohibited it," or "You shouldn't kill people because it goes against the trend of the universe", that's metaethics.

Just as there's far more agreement on Special Relativity than there is on the question "What is science?", people find it much easier to agree "Murder is bad" than to agree what makes it bad, or what it means for something to be bad.

People do get attached to their metaethics. Indeed they frequently insist that if their metaethic is wrong, all morality necessarily falls apart. It might be interesting to set up a panel of metaethicists—theists, Objectivists, Platonists, etc.—all of whom agree that killing is wrong; all of whom disagree on what it means for a thing to be "wrong"; and all of whom insist that if their metaethic is untrue, then morality falls apart.

Clearly a good number of people, if they are to make philosophical progress, will need to shift metathics at some point in their lives. You may have to do it.

At that point, it might be useful to have an open line of retreat—not a retreat from morality, but a retreat from Your-Current-Metaethic. (You know, the one that, if it is not true, leaves no possible basis for not killing people.)

And so I've been setting up these lines of retreat, in many and various posts, summarized below. For I have learned that to change metaethical beliefs is nigh-impossible in the presence of an unanswered attachment.

If, for example, someone believes the authority of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" derives from God, then there are several and well-known things to say that can help set up a line of retreat—as opposed to immediately attacking the plausibility of God. You can say, "Take personal responsibility! Even if you got orders from God, it would be your own decision to obey those orders. Even if God didn't order you to be moral, you could just be moral anyway."

The above argument actually generalizes to quite a number of metaethics—you just substitute Their-Favorite-Source-Of-Morality, or even the word "morality", for "God". Even if your particular source of moral authority failed, couldn't you just drag the child off the train tracks anyway? And indeed, who is it but you, that ever decided to follow this source of moral aut...

Richard5

Richard5

Richard5

Richard5