Since you understand how diseased the discipline of ethics is, I'm hoping the next post in the series will focus heavily on clearing up the semantic issues that have made it so diseased. I don't think any real sense can be made of metaethics until the very nature of what someone is doing when they utter an ethical statement is covered.

We use language to do a lot of things: express emotions, make other people do stuff, signal, intimidate, get our thoughts into other people's minds, parrot what someone else said - and often more than one of these at a time. Since we presumably are trying to get at the speaker's intention, we really can't know the "meaning" without asking the speaker, yet various metaethical theorists call themselves emotivists, error theorists, prescriptivists, and so on. It seems to me the choice of an meta-ethical theory boils down to a choice of what the theorists wants to presume people are trying to do when they use the word ought.

Surely no one can deny that sometimes some people do indeed intend "You ought not steal" as a command, or as a way of expressing disgust at the notion of theft, or simply as a means of intimidation. My meta-meta-ethical theory is that it all depends on what the person uttering the statement intends to accomplish by saying it. A debate between these meta-ethical theories sounds very likely to revolve around whose definition of ought is "correct".

In short, I think the main reason ethics is so diseased as a discipline is that the theorists are trying to argue whose definition is better, rather than acknowledging that it is pretty hard for anyone to know what each person intends by their moralistic language.