A sketch of my own thoughts on metaethics. This essay tries to do a host of things, perhaps none of them particularly well, but I do say a little bit of what I want to say. Hopefully informative at least in marking out some conceptual space.
I. There are broadly three ways you might carve up positions on the metaphysical foundations of an ethical theory. You could be a moral realist, a moral constructivist, or a moral antirealist. While these distinctions might not be exhaustive, or discriminate existing theories in a fine-grained enough way to capture and appreciate their subtle differences, broadly speaking, they cover most of the really substantive metaphysical differences. Here I attempt to sketch out their general characteristics, some of their greatest difficulties, and gesture towards potential solutions to them.