ABSTRACT
Emotivism appeared on the scene of British moral philosophy as a reaction to ethical intuitionism. Intuitionism, as advocated by G.E.Moore, H.A. Pritchard and W.D.Ross,1 was, like the naturalism it rejected, itself a cognitivist theory of ethics, though of a special kind. Dominated by the referential theory of meaning according to which a piece of language means what it refers to, it held that moral terms refer to moral properties, except that these are not natural ones like redness but ‘non-natural’, perceived not by the physical senses but through a special faculty of moral intuition. Moral judgements were thus taken to be essentially informative, like all descriptive statements, designating facts, albeit of a special, non-natural kind. The emotivists broke sharply with this basic intuitionist assumption. They were the first analytical philosophers to argue that moral judgements are not fact-stating or descriptive, at least not primarily or exclusively so. Like the intuitionists, they rejected all naturalist definitions of ‘good’ and recognised the existence of a logical gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. But, unlike the intuitionists, they held that the logical gap does not divide two kinds of property (moral and non-moral) but separates one use to which language can be put (description) from another use (evaluation).
