What Ethics Is Not, Part 3

5. Ethics is not “Meta-Ethics”
“Ethics is thinking about good and evil. Meta-ethics is thinking about ethics. Much of contemporary philosophical ethics is meta-ethics. It asks questions like how moral statements are linguistically meaningful or how moral reasoning is different than reasoning about facts, whether any judgment can be infallible, and how we make these moral judgements. Those are important questions, but they are secondary. They come secondary in time, in fact in the third place, after we have first made moral choices, and then, in the second place, we have reflected on this moral experience, only then do we, in the third place, do we reflect on our ethical reflections.”

6. Ethics is not Applied Ethics
Ethics is not specifically about the issues of abortion, genetic research, war or poverty. Rather, ethics is the development of the truths which we can apply to these issues. But if one is teaching ethics, we do not just delve into the application of the principles until the principles are established.