The SEP does not agree with you.
Great, I assume this means you think the SEP article is representing the convention. Let me know if that's not the case, since if it isn't, we're wasting our time talking about my interpretation of it.
Anyway, suppose someone were to come along and say 'Moral truths come primarily in the form of absolute injunctions!' (or whatever would fix him as a deontologist). We ask him for an example of such an injunction, and he says 'Do not kill.' So far, we agree that this whole discussion has taken place within normative ethics.
Now we ask him 'Why shouldn't we kill?' This is a pretty ambiguous question, and we could be asking a clearly normative question to which the answer might be 'because there's an injunction to the effect that you shouldn't'. But this isn't the kind of question I'm talking about in my (perhaps poorly phrased) initial post. What the confused person I discuss wants is not an answer to the question 'what is right and wrong', from the deontologist, he wants answers to questions like 'what makes a particular injunction true?' 'How do you know this injunction is true?' and so on.
What this confused person often complains about (I know you've had some recent experience with this on "Philosophical Landmines") is that the only explanations they get, explanations which are obviously inadequate, are explanations like 'Because God said so in the Bible'. In complaining about this, the confused person implies that this is the kind of answer they want, but that it's a very poor one.
A deontologist who gives this kind of answer is, I think we will agree, endorsing some form of divine command theory. So what kind of a thing is 'divine command theory', and what kind of answer is 'because God said so'? Is it meta-ethical, or normative? Well, the SEP article says this:
Deontological theories are normative theories. They do not presuppose any particular position on moral ontology or on moral epistemology. Presumably, a deontologist can be a moral realist of either the natural (moral properties are identical to natural properties) or nonnatural (moral properties are not themselves natural properties even if they are nonreductively related to natural properties) variety. Or a deontologist can be an expressivist, a constructivist, a transcendentalist, a conventionalist, or a Divine command theorist regarding the nature of morality.
Notice that Divine command theory is on the list of things next to 'expressivist', 'constructivist', and other meta-ethical positions, implying that 'because God said so' (the kind of answer the confused person is asking for) is not a claim within normative ethics (which would rather involve claims about what, exactly, God said), but a meta-ethical claim. After all, even if we accept we should do what God says, we have not yet committed to either deontology or consequentialism, much less any specific deontological or consequentialist claims like 'do not kill' or 'minimize deaths'.
So I grant that 'why is it wrong to kill' was a poor phrase: this question is ambiguously normative or meta-ethical. If this is all you meant by 'right in spirit but wrong in letter', then I agree, and I'll now try to come up with a way to make my post clearer.
Nevertheless, according to the SEP article anyway, I've correctly identified the conventional line between normative ethics and meta ethics, and so I've correctly diagnosed a confusion. What do you think?
Okay. I think I see what is happening. The whole issue get's weirdly skewed by divine command theory, which is so simple it is hard to see the distinction and which implies a very particular formula for a normative theory. Let me outline the position:
Metaethics: Divine Command theory. In answer to the question "What is morality?" they answer "the will/decree of God".
Normative Ethics: In answer to the question "Why is murder immoral?" they provide a proof that God decrees murder to be immoral, say, a justification for the Bibl...
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