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Quote by: Merge  I agree with you here, but flaws in specific ethical theories don't necessarily project onto the meta-ethical category that those theories fall under. Meta-ethics don't actually make any claims or statements about what should be, so how can the flaws of meta-ethics be anything but logical? Even if all ethical theories under Moral Realativism are flawed in that they have "only partially complete views of the facts," Moral Realativism itself cannot be said to have only a partially complete view of the facts because as a meta-ethic it does not even deal in empirical facts. Moral Realativism is concerned only with how specific ethics function, not how moral agents should act. |
I have never seen a morally relativistic theory which took a complete view of the facts (or rather, all the information to be considered) -- the term 'Moral Relativism' here represents any theory which incorporates elements that are logically consistant with the model of Moral Relativism, because I have no reason to mention specific theories that appear reminscient of the meta-ethical abstraction we designate 'moral relativism' -- the term 'Moral Relativism' is representational enough without using words like various kinds of 'Sophism', Nietzschean', most kinds of existentialism and Postmodernism, and possibly Logical Positivism (although this is debatable, as Logical Positivism dismisses ethics outright and only passingly appears to be favoring something like moral subjectivity or moral relativism).
Meta-Ethical theories cannot be criticized except on logical grounds, but here the terms are being used as a reference or signpost for a broader set of things, which can be criticized for how they work out in practice. To cut the length of the content of my post down, I use designations put on multiple ethical theories to refer to those theories -- sorry if there was any confusion as to what I meant.