The best way to tell is to read the metaethics textbook and see what happens. If it turns out you need a crash course on (say) utilitarian thinking, you can always do that and then return to metaethics.
What is your reason for wanting to read a metaethics textbook? I ask because the most obvious reason (I think) is "because I want to live a good life, so I want to figure out what constitutes living a good life, and for that I need a coherent system of ethics" but I'd have thought that most people thinking in those terms and inclined to read philosophy textbooks would already have looked into (at least) whatever variety of ethics they find most congenial.
Good point. I ordered it yesterday, and it's supposed to be an easy introduction, so we'll see what happens.
Well it seems to me that there are so many different schools of normative ethics, that unless we're all normative moral relativists (I don't think we are), most people must be wrong about normative ethics. I've seen claims here that mainstream metaethics has it all wrong, I just found out that lukeprog's got his own metaethics sequence, and some of the things that he claims to resolve seem like they would have profound implications for normative ethi...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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