To be absolutely clear, my post is about the way academic philosophy happens to organize a certain debate, and I cite that SEP article as my major source. It will be very helpful to me if you point out where you disagree with the SEP article (and on what basis), or where you think I've misread it. (Look specifically at this section: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/#DeoTheMet
Again, there is no fact of the matter about what is a normative and what is a meta-ethical question, just a convention.
While I guess this could be logically possible, anyone who is not a moral realist needs to provide some kind of explanation for what exactly a normative theory is supposed to be doing and what it mean's to assert one if there are no moral facts.
Being a moral anti-realist is compatible with having, and following, a moral theory: you just think you have reasons to be moral which are not based on mind-independent facts. For example, you might think convention gives you reason to be moral, where conventionalism is traditionally described as a form of non-realism. (see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/#ChaMorAntRea
Being a deontologist (I think, and my post assumes) is even compatible with being a moral nihilist: "Moral principles must come in the form of injunctions, and there are no such injunctions."
Again, there is no fact of the matter about what is a normative and what is a meta-ethical question, just a convention.
Well there is a fact of the matter, it's just a fact about a convention.
...To be absolutely clear, my post is about the way academic philosophy happens to organize a certain debate, and I cite that SEP article as my major source. It will be very helpful to me if you point out where you disagree with the SEP article (and on what basis), or where you think I've misread it. (Look specifically at this section: http://plato.stanford.edu/entri
I think there’s a confusion in our discussions of deontology and consequentialism. I’m writing this post to try to clear up that confusion. First let me say that this post is not about any territorial facts. The issue here is how we use the philosophical terms of art ‘consequentialism’ and ‘deontology’.
The confusion is often stated thusly: “deontological theories are full of injunctions like ‘do not kill’, but they generally provide no (or no interesting) explanations for these injunctions.” There is of course an equivalently confused, though much less common, complaint about consequentialism.
This is confused because the term ‘deontology’ in philosophical jargon picks out a normative ethical theory, while the question ‘how do we know that it is wrong to kill?’ is not a normative but a meta-ethical question. Similarly, consequentialism contains in itself no explanation for why pleasure or utility are morally good, or why consequences should matter to morality at all. Nor does consequentialism/deontology make any claims about how we know moral facts (if there are any). That is also a meta-ethical question.
Some consequentialists and deontologists are also moral realists. Some are not. Some believe in divine commands, some are hedonists. Consequentialists and deontologists in practice always also subscribe to some meta-ethical theory which purports to explain the value of consequences or the source of injunctions. But consequentialism and deontology as such do not. In order to avoid strawmaning either the consequentialist or the deontologist, it’s important to either discuss the comprehensive views of particular ethicists, or to carefully leave aside meta-ethical issues.
This Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article provides a helpful overview of the issues in the consequentialist-deontologist debate, and is careful to distinguish between ethical and meta-ethical concerns.
SEP article on Deontology