ABSTRACT
In the years immediately following World War II, the field of ethics was dominated by discussion of the meta-ethical theory known as emotivism. This theory maintained that moral judgements are expressions of emotions and attitudes and not statements of fact about objective reality. As a set of claims about the meaning and the epistemological status of moral judgements, ernotivisrn represented a new, metaethical conception of ethics. Earlier in the century G. E. Moore had inquired about the meaning of the word 'good', and hence he and his fellow British intuitionists might be said to have initiated the meta - ethical approach. But it was the ernotivists who first restricted ethical inquiry to meta -ethical investigations. Rather than making normative judgements about what is right and wrong or good and evil, they saw the role of philosophy as one of elucidating the linguistic character of normative judgements. Questions of meaning and justification were central to the ernotivists' conception of meta-ethics as a second-order enterprise of linguistic analysis. According to this conception, no firstorder, normative conclusions follow from meta-ethical analyses. U nderstood in this sense, meta-ethics became the preferred way of doing ethics for the following two decades.
