Questions of the right and the good: metaethics and anthropology

Questions of the right and the good have been variously recognised by anthropologists as key to understanding human action and behaviour since the early days of the discipline, with the influential recent ‘ethical turn’ perhaps the most obvious example (Mattingly and Throop, 2018). Here, the authors – who together founded the Social Science and Ethics Group at the University of Sussex – reflect on how their own fieldwork led them to engage with metaethics, and how doing so advanced their understanding of their ethnographic material, anthropological theory, and their own professional ethics. The three cases draw on fieldwork in Nicaragua, Bolivia, and China.