Paper

Martina Korpue

Introduction to Ethics

Professor Fumerton

November 30, 2012

“Ethical judgments are social instruments”

In his essay “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms”, Charles Leslie Stevenson (C.L. Stevenson), a professor of philosophy who taught at the University of Michigan, theorizes that the function of ethical statements is not to describe, but is rather to prescribe. He claims that language carries a type of meaning which he calls ‘emotive meaning’, rather than descriptive meaning and uses many examples of the term ‘good’ to establish his belief. He aims at showing that the notion of ‘good’ is equivalent to taking favor of something (“X is good”= “I like X”). Stevenson’s in-depth analysis of the concept of ‘good’ ultimately shows his readers the reality that the disagreement over whether something is good or not is just simply a disagreement in attitude.

The first method used in determining the emotive meaning of ethical statements is to first address ethical questions in answering the question ‘Is X good?’ by what Stevenson calls ‘substitution’. He explains that in order to help understand this concept, the question must be substituted by a question that is free from ambiguity and confusion (Stevenson 370). It would not make sense to substitute this question with one that is irrelevant or with one that is the same as the question being assessed. He uses an example of substitution with the statement ‘Is X pink with yellow trimmings?’ This statement clearly has no relation to the original question and would cause confusion. The substituted question should not be identical to the original question as well. It should be somewhat different and “identical only in the sense that a child is identical with the man he later becomes” (370). Stevenson also discusses how the substituted question must be related to the original. His answer to this matter is that it must be relevant. He claims that there are certain conditions under which relevance of the...