ABSTRACT
During the following decades the influence of Moore’s ideas spread well beyond Cambridge (and Bloomsbury), partly through the establishment of an ‘intuitionist’ school of ethical theory at Oxford which largely agreed with him on the central metaphysical issues of ethics.3 The result is that, for better or worse, twentieth-century British ethical theory is unintelligible without reference to PE; its history until 1960 or so being, in brief, that although Moore was taken to have refuted ‘ethical naturalism’, Moore’s own brand of ‘ethical non-naturalism’ was thought to make unacceptable metaphysical and epistemological demands; so the only recourse was to abandon belief in an objective moral reality and accept an emotivist, prescriptivist, or otherwise anti-realist, account of ethical values.
