If I am asked 'What is good,'" declared G. E. Moore, "my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter." 1 Far from ending the matter, this terse statement could well be called the beginning of Twentieth-Century, Anglo-Saxon ethics.
Although Moore's Principia Ethica defended the objectivity of good, many philosophers interpreted his arguments for the non-natural, indefinable character of good as proof for its non-existence -an interpretation supported by remarks Moore himself makes in the latter part of his book.2 Convinced that goodness is not a real property of beings, they turned their attention elsewhere, seeking an acceptable positivistic explanation for the almost universal conviction that "some things are good, others are bad." Henry Veatch's book, For an Ontology of Morals, 3 documents the increasingly more elaborate efforts by others to "explain" goodness by explaining it away.
One of these new schools of philosophy, emotivism, "found" a linguistic solution to the problem. According to W. D. Hudson, The emergence of emofivism was one of the most important developments in ethical theory of modern times. It provided a point of new departure. Its exponents led moral philosophy out of the blind alley of nonnaturalism and directed it along new lines of inquiry into the dynamic character of moral discourse .... A. J. Ayer first saw the importance of this dynamic aspect of value-language: the unique emotional impact of value-words and value-judgements. In his Language, Truth and Logic, he argued that, in every case in which one would commonly be said to be making an ethical judgement, the function of the relevant ethical word is purely "emotive." It is used to express feeling about certain subjects, but not to make any assertion about them. s Being pure expressions of emotion, value-words have no conceptual meaning. As a result, says Ayer, value-judgements cannot be either true or false. Indeed, they are completely unverifiable, because they are not judgements at all! As he puts it, value-judgements,