III
The eighteenth-century dispute between the advo-
cates of reason and those of moral sense or sentiment
as the basis of moral judgment was a reflection of the
rift between rationalism and empiricism in the theory
of knowledge. In the nineteenth century the focus of
interest moved away from epistemological questions
in ethics as in general philosophy. The ethical theory
of the nineteenth century was more concerned with
the criterion and end of moral action than with the
nature of moral judgment.
Moral philosophy in the twentieth century, however,
has seen a return of the interests (and arguments) of
the eighteenth. Rationalist ethics of the kind found in
Richard Price and in Kant was revived by the Oxford
intuitionists or deontologists, H. A. Prichard, Sir David
Ross, and E. F. Carritt. The intuitionism of G. E.
Moore, which went along with a form of utilitarianism
and a scale of values that recalls Plato rather than Kant,
was of a different character, not clearly rationalist,
though certainly not empiricist either. It is a mistake
to think of Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) as uphold-
ing a moral sense theory on the ground that Moore
compares good with yellow in being, as he thinks, a
simple indefinable quality. Moore does not imply that
we perceive the quality of goodness through a sense
analogous to sight, and in any event this was not sug-
gested by the moral sense theory either.
A twentieth-century revival of the moral sense is to
be found rather in the emotive theory of ethics put
forward by A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic
(1936). As in Hutcheson and Hume, moral and aesthetic
judgments are coupled, and the theory arises from
empiricist epistemology. The emotive theory holds that
moral judgments express or evince, but do not describe,
the speaker's emotions of approval and disapproval;
their logical character is that of exclamations, not of
statements. The purpose of the theory is to accommo-
date moral and aesthetic judgments within a frame-
work of empiricism, while avoiding familiar criticisms
of the view that these judgments are autobiographical
descriptions of subjective feeling. The emotive theory
of ethics is an adjunct of logical positivism or logical
empiricism, which avowedly owes its inspiration to
Hume. No philosopher is more acute than Hume in
discerning and pursuing logical subtleties; but his con-
tribution to ethics is enhanced by the comparable
subtlety of his psychology. The emotive theory, which
confines itself to logical questions, is a crude thing
when set beside the moral sense theory of Hume.
