The Theory of Value and the Rise of Ethical Emotivism

Abstract

Historical accounts of recent moral philosophy present the subject as going through several discrete stages of development during the present century.1 G.J. Warnock, for instance, writes in the introductory chapter of his Contemporary Moral Philosophy as follows: ...the tale that thus falls to be told is not in outline excessively complex, and can be seen as a quite intelligible sequence of distinguishable episodes. The major stages on the road are three in number. There is, first, Intuitionism, to be considered here as represented by G.E. Moore (Principia Ethica, 1903), H.A. Prichard (Moral Obligation, published posthumously in 1949), and W.D.Ross (The Right and the Good, 1930, and Foundations of Ethics, 1939). Second, in somewhat violent reaction to the undoubted shortcomings of that style of ethics, we have Emotivism; and here the chief spokesman is C.L. Stevenson (Ethics and Language, 1944). And, third, as an amendment of and an advance from Emotivism,... Prescriptivism, whose most lucid, persuasive, and original exponent is R.M. Hare....2 This picture of stages is not unique to Warnock, but is part of the standard account of the relationships a mong various schools of thought in recent moral philosophy. Kerner follows the three-stage account as given by Warnok, adding the ‘good reasons’ approach of Toulmin (Reason in Ethics, Cambridge, 1950) as a fourth stage.