In recent work, several philosophers have begun to explicitly explore the conceptual ethics of normativity. Put roughly, this is a kind of normative and evaluative inquiry that aims to assess the normative words and concepts that we currently use, as well as salient possible alternative normative words and concepts that we might choose to adopt. One important question about this project is how it relates to more familiar metaethical or metanormative inquiries. This paper helps to illustrate the deep ways in which metanormative and conceptual ethics inquiries can interact, and why it is valuable for practitioners of these projects to attend to the relationships between them. The paper begins by introducing a powerful (although not exhaustive) model for thinking about this interaction, which generalizes on the recent “after error theory” literature. We argue that this model allows us to identify important and neglected views about the normative, and to better understand the argumentative burdens that philosophers take on in defending such views. We conclude by briefly discussing another way that thinking about error theory can be important for understanding the relationship between the conceptual ethics of normativity and metanormative inquiry: by complicating how we can understand the project of conceptual ethics itself.