In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the  history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 17, which looks at the subjective turn in analytic philosophy, and the unravelling of morality in the twentieth century, from the intuitionism of GE Moore’s Principia Ethica to JL Mackie’s ‘error theory’ and moral nihilism. This extract begins with Moore and looks at how intuitionism gave way to emotivism. GE Moore’s Principia Ethica, published in 1903, came to be both one of the most […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: aj ayer, emotivism, ge moore, herbert spencer, history of moral thought, hume, intuitionism, js mill, kenan malik's books, morality, naturalistic fallacy