ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines the historical setting of the issues as whether valuations are cognitive or at base matters of feeling or emotion and their reach into the controversies. It discusses Abraham Edel’s substantive contributions, emphasizing the naturalistic resources for ethical theory and derives from looking first at moralities in the concrete and for locating fruitful relations between theory and practice. Ethical theory needs also to examine and make explicit presuppositions about the world and man that permeate all parts of the morality, for they may operate surreptitiously to perpetuate outworn scientific theses or impossible utopian aspirations. Ethical theories give much of the vocabulary that identifies the problem, but they are not or cannot serve as frozen premises from which determinations follow directly.
