Metaethic

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The branch of philosophy that examines the meaning, foundations, and implications of moral statements and ethical concepts
2. A field of philosophical inquiry focused on understanding what moral terms mean and how ethical judgments can be justified or interpreted
3. An area of philosophy concerned with analyzing the nature and status of moral claims, including their truth and how they should be understood

Etymology: "Metaethic" is a plain compound: the prefix "meta-", from Greek "meta" meaning "after" or "beyond", attached to "ethic", the adjective-turned-noun from Greek "ethikos" relating to character or habit. The prefix signals a step removed from the subject itself. Ordinary ethics asks what is right or wrong, while metaethics asks what moral claims are, whether they can be true, and where their authority comes from. The "meta-" prefix is one of the most productive tools in modern English for this kind of second-order thinking. Many fields use it the same way, so "metalanguage" is language about language and "metamathematics" is mathematics about mathematics. The Greek preposition was not chosen for this sense in antiquity; the usage developed in modern scholarly coinages from classical building blocks.