Moral language (words like 'good,' 'just,' 'ought,' 'right') requires explanation of how these terms get their meaning and what, if anything, they refer to. Whether moral terms refer to objective properties, express attitudes, or do something else entirely shapes what kind of thing morality is.
Compare how different terms work: 'red' picks out a color; 'pain' describes a sensation; 'good' picks out... what? Consider debates about whether 'good' means the same thing in 'good person' and 'good knife.'
You've studied normativity — the idea that claims like "you ought to keep your promises" or "cruelty is wrong" have a distinctive character: they tell us what *should* be, not just what *is*. But that study left open a deeper question: what are these claims actually *doing* when we make them? When I say "torture is wrong," am I describing a feature of torture (like its causing pain), expressing my attitude toward it, commanding you not to do it, or something else entirely? This is the question of moral language and meaning, and it sits at the foundation of metaethics.
To see why it matters, compare moral terms with ordinary descriptive terms. "The apple is red" attributes a perceivable property to an object — there's a fact of the matter, detectable (in principle) by observation. "The apple is good" is already harder: "good" in what sense? Good to eat? Aesthetically pleasing? Here "good" seems to be relative to a purpose. "Torturing children is wrong" is harder still: what property would "wrongness" be, and where would it be located? This question — whether moral terms *refer* to properties at all — divides cognitivists (who say moral sentences express beliefs and can be true or false) from non-cognitivists (who say moral sentences express something else — attitudes, emotions, prescriptions — and don't have truth values in the ordinary sense).
Among cognitivists, there is a further division about what moral terms refer to. Naturalists hold that moral properties are just natural properties — "good" might mean something like "conducive to flourishing" or "approved by the ideal observer." These properties are in principle observable and scientifically tractable. Non-naturalists (like G.E. Moore) hold that "good" refers to a sui generis moral property that is not reducible to any natural property — Moore's open question argument tries to show that no natural definition of "good" is correct, because for any natural property N, it always remains an open question whether something with N is truly good. Non-naturalism preserves the distinctiveness of moral claims at the cost of making their epistemology mysterious.
Non-cognitivists deny that moral sentences express beliefs at all. Emotivism holds that "torture is wrong" means something like "boo, torture!" — it expresses disapproval rather than asserting a truth. Prescriptivism holds that it means something like "don't torture!" — a universal command. More sophisticated descendants like expressivism try to account for the complexity of moral reasoning (logical inference, moral disagreement, motivation) while denying that moral sentences are truth-apt. The debate matters because it determines whether moral disagreements are genuine disagreements about facts (where one side could be right and the other wrong) or merely differences in attitude or preference (where there's no fact to be right or wrong about). Everything in normative ethics — duties, rights, consequences — presupposes some answer to these metaethical questions about what moral language is doing.
Topics in reflective domains aren't scored by quiz answers. Read, reflect, and mark when you've thought it through.