ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author discusses the position he have previously called 'prescriptive realism', and describes one way of relating the position to theism. This is an ambitious project for a single paper, and the author will sometimes have to rely on promissory notes rather than worked-out theory. In his book God's Call he tried to give a historical account of the dispute over the last century between realism and expressivism, taking central characters in sequence and labelling their theories, G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, R. M. Hare, Iris Murdoch, J. L. Mackie, John McDowell, David Brink, and Allan Gibbard. The author proposed 'prescriptive realism' as a name for a view that combines the merits of each side that emerge from this history. Prescriptive realism is expressivist because it holds that one central function of value judgement is to express some motivational or 'orectic' state. The expressivism-realism debate seemed to reduce moral judgement to the expression of emotion.