A Research Of C.L. Stevenson’s Emotivist Meta-ethics

Meta-ethics originated in the early20th century, G.E.Morre published his bookPrincipia Ethica, which marks the beginning of meta-ethics. Meta-ethics havingparticular status in the history of the development of ethics. There are three stages ofbasic problems of meta-ethics, they are intuitionism, emotivism and prescriptivism.The first stage representative personage is G.E.Moore and Harold A.Prichard and soon. They analyzed the basic moral concepts, and attracted a great deal of influence.They were called the Copernican Revolution in the history of ethics. The second stageof the meta-ethics is emotivism which the representative personage is BertrandA.W.Russell, A.J.Ayer and C.L.Stevenson. They distinguish between fact and value,described meaning and emotional meaning of language. They think the emotionalmeaning of language is more important than the described meaning. They denied thepossibility of ethics as a science. The representative personage of the third stage ofmeta-ethics is Toulmin and R.M.Hare, and they belong to the prescriptivism. Theycritiqued and developed the emotivism and made the meta-ethics regress to therationalism.Emotivism is a kind of non-cognitivism of ethic theory put forward by A.J.Ayer.He argue that ’good’ cannot be confirmed by experience, and also cannot be cognized.Moral language does not have the cognitive meaning, also without true or false, butonly express an emotion of the speaker. Stevenson partially accepted the emotivismtheory of Ayer, he argue that moral languages not only have the function ofdescription, but also have the function of express the emotion. He insist that thefunction of express the emotion of the moral languages is more important than thefunction of description, and express emotion is the main function of moral languages.He think the meaning of language does not lie in the objects it reference or the waysof confirmation, it lies in the psychological disposition that is to be used.Stevenson’s emotivism theory is more systematize and completeness, and accepted by more people. But due to its theoretical defects, it still met a lot of criticism.Hare realized the defects and shortcomings of the emotivism theory of Stevenson,and attend to close up ideas on the fact and value in order to make the meta-ethicsrevert to the normative ethics. Hare holds that moral judgments cannot be a randomexpression of personal feelings, moral principles must be universal and prescriptive.Hare mitigate the divide of fact and value and develop the meta-ethics step forward.Emotivism ethics use logical analysis method to study the basic concept of ethicsand ethical judgement. They think there is a difference between value judgement andfact judgement, value judgement is the expression of the emotion. Althoughemotivism theory has some defects, we cannot ignore its influence and meaning to ourworld as a systematized non-cognitivism theory.