Abstract

This dissertation examines the challenge emotivism presents to contemporary ethicists. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, emotivism denies agents any rational vindication for their actions. This position issues from Enlightenment efforts to dispense with tradition-constituted modes of practical enquiry and issues in insoluable practical disputes. MacIntyre's account, however, mischaracterizes the relation between given and created elements of ethical valuation. Thereby his account misrepresents both the function of tradition in practical enquiry and how and to what ends moral traditions are sustained. In contrast I argue that practical enquiry's main function is not recapitulative but creative, that it serves ends in addition to moral ends, that it embodies a teleology whose ideals are both discovered and constructed, and that its ideals become creative of the future as the traditions it comprises progress