used to argue that critical thinking about values only becomes more demanding once we reject the objectivist view that thinking about values is something like comparing a proposition to the world. Art criticism is a good example. Here, at least, we recognize that the lack of "objective" standards does not make evaluation simple or arbitrary. Evaluation becomes instead much more difficult: it must take far more into account, it requires the development of special sensibilities, and it must allow for a certain relativism of perspective without abandoning the attempt at discourse and mediation. But this Stevensonian insight has not yet caught on in ethics. The popular ethical subjectivism of our day -all too familiar to anyone who teaches college students, and not uncommon elsewhere, even on the other side of the lectern -is still, more or less, the dimissive view associated with the early, polemical emotivists like Ayer. People continue to insist that values are "merely subjective", and it is only a short while since any criticism met the response "That's just a value judgment!", as if it could not possibly bear on others' values or choices. And perhaps for just this reason many objectivistically-inclined philosophers continue to believe that admitting the subjectivity of values would represent a kind of disaster, a final defeat for the forces of reason: so this fear too may indirectly presuppose something very like Ayer's picture of the alternative to objectivism.
Why this emotivist picture of values should be so tenacious is far from clear, and the answer presumably involves cultural and historical factors not amenable to philosophical argument. I shall suggest, however, that at least part of the answer is that we have, so far, lacked a paradigm of values -a familiar and easily "unpacked" example -which brings out the inadequacy of the popular subjectivism most clearly. We have not yet advanced a particular value whose structure resists simplification, whose openness to criticism is easy to show, and around which philosophical as well as popular thinking might crystallize. For the demands on such a paradigm are in fact rather high. To be effective it must be more immediately familiar than art criticism, and (also, perhaps, unlike art) it must represent a kind of value whose openness to critical thinking has not been partially eroded by the emotivist or other forms of subjectivism it once might have been used to oppose. To take up