The branch of ethics that examines the nature, meaning, and justification of moral concepts and language rather than specific moral judgments. It asks questions like 'What does it mean to say something is good?' and 'Can moral statements be true or false?'
From Greek 'meta' (beyond/about) and 'ethikos' (relating to character). The term was coined in the 20th century to distinguish second-order questions about the nature of ethics from first-order normative questions about what we ought to do.
While normative ethics asks 'Is stealing wrong?', metaethics asks the more puzzling question 'What are we even doing when we call something wrong?' — it's like studying the grammar of moral language rather than using it to make moral claims!
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