Similar to Marius’ answer, the way I see for metaethics to not have exactly the same problems as ethics is to have some statement similar to the ultimate criterion for science, “things that produce measurably accurate results are to be used rather than things that don’t.” But in the same way that this raises the question “why is working selected over not-working?”, any analogous claim in metaethics raises the question “why are moral systems that have property X preferable?”, and aside from consistency, which is not a strong enough property, I don’t know of any property X that is as universal to humans as “working is better than not working.” But I’m not certain, so I’m not ready to doom metaethics to failure yet.
Similar to Marius’ answer, the way I see for metaethics to not have exactly the same problems as ethics is to have some statement similar to the ultimate criterion for science, “things that produce measurably accurate results are to be used rather than things that don’t.” But in the same way that this raises the question “why is working selected over not-working?”, any analogous claim in metaethics raises the question “why are moral systems that have property X preferable?”, and aside from consistency, which is not a strong enough property, I don’t know of any property X that is as universal to humans as “working is better than not working.” But I’m not certain, so I’m not ready to doom metaethics to failure yet.