ETHICS principal task of moral philosophy to determine what things possessed this non-natural property After lengthy investigation Moore came to the conclusion that the only things that have intrinsic goodness are friendship and aesthetic experience The arguments in Principia Ethica are extraordinarily flimsy, and Moore himself was later to admit that ‘I did not give any tenable explanation of what I meant by saying that ‘‘good’’ was not a natural property.’6 Yet the book was remarkably influential, especially through two significant groups of admirers The Bloomsbury group, in particular J M Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and E M Forster, held up the book as a charter for a lifestyle that threw overboard conventional notions of respectability and rectitude In addition, professional philosophers who could not swallow the notion of goodness as a non-natural property nonetheless used the expression ‘naturalistic fallacy’ as a mantra to dispose of moral theories of which they disapproved Under the influence of logical positivism, however, some philosophers began to deny that goodness was any sort of property, natural or nonnatural, and to claim that ethical utterances were not statements of fact at all Thus A J Ayer maintained that if I say ‘Stealing money is wrong’, I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning—that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false It is as if I had written ‘Stealing money!!’—where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed It is clear that there is nothing said here which can be true or false Another man may disagree with me about the wrongness of stealing, in the sense that he may not have the same feelings about stealing as I have, and he may quarrel with me on account of my moral sentiments But he cannot, strictly speaking, contradict me (LTL 107) This view of ethical utterances was called ‘emotivism’ While Ayer laid stress on the expression of one’s own emotion, other emotivists saw as the function of moral language the encouragement of feelings and attitudes in other people But no emotivist was able to give a convincing account of the particular character of the sentiments in question, or to show in what way logic enters into moral reasoning when we use words like ‘because’ and ‘therefore’ P A Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of G E Moore (Chicago: Open Court, 1942) 243