Meta-ethics

Meta-ethics is the branch of moral philosophy that investigates the nature, origin, and meaning of moral judgments. Rather than asking what is right or wrong, it asks what moral claims are: factual statements about the world, expressions of emotion, or social conventions. The major positions include moral realism, moral relativism, expressivism, and error theory.

Meta-ethics is not a luxury for philosophers with time to spare; it is the operating system on which all moral reasoning runs. An engineer who claims to have bypassed philosophy by encoding "human values" into an AI has not avoided meta-ethics — they have simply adopted an unexamined version of moral realism and called it optimization.