Meta-Ethics is the branch of ethics that is concerned with the meaning of moral terms such as “good” and “bad” and moral statements such as “giving to the poor is good” and “giving to the poor is bad.” Issues in meta-ethics include whether such statements and the moral terms they contain refer to objective facts or properties of the universe (i.e., whether “goodness” and “badness” are inherent properties of the universe or mere linguistic conventions), whether moral terms are reducible to natural features of the universe (i.e., whether “goodness” and “badness” are reducible to, for example, pleasure and pain, respectively), and whether moral statements express propositions or in other words whether moral statements are capable of determinations of truth or falsehood (i.e., whether “giving to the poor is good” can be determined to be true or false, or whether such a statement merely expresses an emotional preference of the person making the statement, a prescriptive statement by that person, or another statement incapable of falsification).