ABSTRACT
Emotivism emerges, historically, from the ruins of naturalism and non-naturalism in the following way. Emotivism is the most extreme of the so-called non-cognitive ethical theories, those which make this last point, that moral talk contains nothing that can be true or false, nothing that can be known, or believed, but only felt. Yet emotivism could still be wrong in making emotion the primary fact and action-guiding a secondary one. This is because the effect of emotivism is to reduce all moral issues to matters of inclination or taste; and matters of inclination or taste are, notoriously, not matters for argument; so there can be no moral issues, and no such thing as a moral dispute. Emotivism certainly accounts for the action-guiding feature of morality: it goes some way to explaining how morality makes a difference to conduct.
