ABSTRACT
The creation of moral values is a pressing topic because, whether we use words like creation or not, we all need to find new moral ideas to help us deal with a confused and changing world. The notion that these ideas must be totally new, that they should not rest at all on traditional supports, exists and concerns us all. In European philosophy, since Nietzsche, this notion has often been put in terms of creation through the will. In Anglo-Saxon philosophy it has been much more modestly expressed by emotivism and prescriptivism, and prepared for before that by intuitionism. But it seems better to discuss Sartre’s and Nietzsche’s outspoken, tuppence-coloured version, because it is clearer and more forceful, and is closer to life. As Plato well knew, the tuppence-coloured kind of philosophy is the kind with an influence on life. It inevitably forms the storehouse from which the more discreet abstractions must be drawn.
