After Virtue

This is great silliness of course; but it is the great silliness of highly intelligent and perceptive people. It is therefore worth asking if we can discern any clues as to why they accepted Moore’s naive and complacent apocalypticism

Thirdly, it turns out to be the case, in the sixth and final chapter of Principia Ethica, that ‘personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the greatest goods we can imagine . . . ’ This is ‘the ultimate and fundamental truth of Moral Philosophy’. The achievement of friendship and the contemplation of what is beautiful in nature or in art become certainly almost the sole and perhaps the sole justifiable ends of all human action

Moore speaks of good as a non-natural property. Propositions declaring this or that to be good are what Moore called ‘intuitions’; they are incapable of proof or disproof and indeed no evidence or reasoning whatever can be adduced in their favor or disfavor.

Moore takes it that to call an action right is simply to say that of the available alternative actions it is the one which does or did as a matter of fact produce the most good

Moore is thus a utilitarian; every action is to be evaluated solely by its consequences, as compared with the consequences of alternative possible courses of action. And as with at least some other versions of utilitarianism it follows that no action is ever right or wrong as such. Anything whatsoever may under certain circumstances be permitted

Let us in the light of such considerations disregard emotivism’s claim to universality of scope; and let us instead consider emotivism as a theory which has been advanced in historically specific conditions. In the eighteenth century Hume embodied emotivist elements in the large and complex fabric of his total moral theory; but it is only in this century that emotivism has flourished as a theory on its own. And it did so as a response to a set of theories which flourished, especially in England, between 1903 and 1939

The theory in question borrowed from the early nineteenth century the name of ‘intuitionism’ and its immediate progenitor was G.E.

Feelings or attitudes of approval,’ is the reply. ‘What kind of approval?’ we ask, perhaps remarking that approval is of many kinds. It is in answer to this question that every version of emotivism either remains silent or, by identifying the relevant kind of approval as moral approval—that is, the type of approval expressed by a specifically moral judgment—becomes vacuously circular

Moral judgments express feelings or attitudes,’ it is said. ‘What kind of feelings or attitudes?’ we ask

Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character. Particular judgments may of course unite moral and factual elements. ‘Arson, being destructive of property, is wrong’ unites the factual judgment that arson destroys property with the moral judgment that arson is wrong. But the moral element in such a judgment is always to be sharply distinguised from the factual. Factual judgments are true or false; and in the realm of fact there are rational criteria by means of which we may secure agreement as to what is true and what is false. But moral judgments, being expressions of attitude or feeling, are neither true nor false; and agreement in moral judgment is not to be secured by any rational method, for there are none. It is to be secured, if at all, by producing certain non-rational effects on the emotions or attitudes of those who disagree with one. We use moral judgments not only to express our own feelings and attitudes, but also precisely to produce such effects in others