ML: Ethical arguments - how to justify a value judgement? WF-FI-212-WMAN-CE22

Despite deep correlations between the main tenets of British ethical theorizing at the age of Enlightenment and the development of 20-th century non-cognitivism, the comparative analyses of both philosophical traditions are most often limited to emphasising the general patronage of David Hume over the metaethical revolution triggered off by G. E. Moore. The lecture aims at providing a complementary description of the wider context of the 17th and 20th century philosophical debate, centring around the issue of justification of value judgements. Hume's proto-emotivism appears in this perspective as a response to the intuitionist theory of moral sense formulated by Francis Hutcheson; at the same time, it turns out to be the main source of inspiration for Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy. The three stages of development of the 17th century ethical sentimentalism are thus confronted with the emotivist paradigm structured, similarly, in a threefold manner. Initiated by Moore in his moral intuitionism, it is pushed towards psychological reductionism by Ch. L. Stevenson, and then finally redefined in R. M. Hare’s prescriptivism with its emphasis on inter-subjective validity of moral norms. By juxtaposing those six, apparently self-contained, episodes in the history of ethics, one may notice a specific kind of paradigm, determining the principal categories of thinking, characteristic of emotivist argumentation. The systemic shortcomings which, in a symmetrical pattern, become evident in the mutually corresponding theories constitute a conclusive proof of the insurmountable limitations of emotivism.