The a priori, intuitionism, and moral language

pp. 244-261

in: Harold Durfee, Foundational reflections, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

Recent Anglo-Saxon, and especially British ethical theory has developed upon the assumption that something more satisfactory than ethical intuitionism was philosophically necessary. To discover that the good was unanalysable, to be intuited, and consequently either noted or not noted, as the case may be, by the attentive observer was not as philosophically or morally helpful as one might wish. In the attempt to overcome this deficiency contemporary moral philosophers, especially the "prescriptivists", turned to the language of morals to understand how this language functioned, and how its more descriptive and more evaluative functions (assuming these may be distinguished) were related.