The Nature of Morality: Introduction to Metaethics

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will introduce and explore fundamental questions about the natures of ethics and morality. To be clear: We will not be concerned to investigate which acts, behaviors, states of affairs, or general ways of living are right or wrong, good or bad, virtuous or vicious, and so on. The foregoing are questions one asks when doing ethics. But we will not (primarily) be doing ethics in this course. Rather, we will be taking a step back, or going a layer deeper, by asking questions about what it is we are doing when doing ethics. In other words, we will be asking questions of meta-ethics. More specifically, we will be asking: (i) Whether it is an aim of ethical thought and discourse to apprehend moral facts and properties (i.e., morality); and, if so, (ii) Whether there is such a thing as morality; and, if so, (iii) What morality is.