¹ The classic exponent of the position is David Hume. See Hume, , A Treatise of Human Nature (London, 1738)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hume, , An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (London, 1752)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Appendix 1, sec. 1. Antecedents can be found in the compendia of skeptical views assembled by Sextus Empiricus.

² See Stevenson, Charles L., “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms,” in his Facts and Values (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963)Google Scholar, and also his earlier Ethics and Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944). Two works particularly useful on the “emotive theory” are Warnock, G. J., Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Urmson, J. O., The Emotive Theory of Ethics (London: Hutchinson, 1968)Google Scholar.

³ Stevenson, Facts and Values, 16.

⁴ Ayer, A. J., Language, Truth, and Logic, reprint ed. (New York: Dover, 1952), 108Google Scholar.

⁵ Compare Hare, R. M., The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952)Google Scholar.

⁶ A comprehensive bibliography of the subject is given in Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, “Moral Realism Bibliography,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 24, Supplement (1986), 143–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Critics of moral realism often suppose, quite wrongly, that ethical appraisals can reflect matters of fact only if ethical characteristics represent supernatural properties that are somehow discernible by a special faculty of moral intuition—a peculiar “moral sense,” as it were. Only recently has this far-fetched view attracted the criticism it deserves. See Boyd, Richard, “How to Be a Moral Realist,” in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, as well as some of the other essays of that anthology.

⁸ Does this way of viewing the matter put subrational animals outside the pale of moral concern? By no means. For it matters deeply to rational agents how other rational agents treat animals, or for that matter, how they treat any other sorts of beings that have interests capable of being injured. We have a substantial interest in how others comport themselves who also belong to the type to which we see ourselves as belonging.

⁹ The earliest Mesopotamian counting notation was a matter of context-variable numerical indicators, with one symbol indicating “10” when sheep were at issue, “6” when referring to containers of grain, and “18” when referring to fields or plots of arable land. Whatever these symbols were, they were not numbers, and such combinational manipulations as they admitted of do not constitute arithmetic. But this fact pivots on what we think—namely, on how we understand what is at issue with “arithmetic.”

¹⁰ See, e.g., Kluckhohn, Clyde, Culture and Behavior (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Kluckhohn, , “Ethical Relativity; Sic et Non,” The Journal of Philosophy 52 (1955): 663–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Redfield, R., “The Universally Human and the Culturally Variable,” The Journal of General Education 10 (1967): 150–60Google Scholar; Linton, Ralph, “Universal Ethical Principles: An Anthropological View,” in Anshen, R. N., ed., Moral Principles in Action (New York: Harper, 1952)Google Scholar; and Linton, , “The Problem of Universal Values,” in Spencer, R. F., ed., Method and Perspective in Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954)Google Scholar.

¹¹ The analogy of natural law is helpful: “Theft, murder, adultery and all injuries are forbidden by the laws of nature; but which is to be called theft, what murder, what adultery, what injury in a citizen, this is not to be determined by the natural but by the civil law …” (Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, chap. IV, sec. 16). St. Thomas Aquinas holds that appropriate human law must be subordinate to the natural law by way of “particular determination”—with different human laws, varying from place to place, nevertheless representing appropriate concretizations of the same underlying principle of natural law. See Summa Theologica, IaIIae, questions 95–96.