Charles Stevenson 1908 – 1979
Charles Leslie Stevenson was an American moral philosopher and the principal architect of the emotivist account of ethical language. After studies at Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard, he held long professorships at Yale and at Michigan. His Ethics and Language, published in 1944, set out the celebrated thesis that moral judgments express attitudes and seek to influence the attitudes of others rather than to state plain matters of fact, and introduced the influential notion of persuasive definition. His Facts and Values extended the analysis to a wider range of evaluative terms and shaped a generation of metaethical debate.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Charles Stevenson:
“Moral disagreement is often disagreement in attitude.”
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Attributed to Charles Stevenson:
“Words such as 'good' have a magnetism: they attract emotions as well as describe.”
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Attributed to Charles Stevenson:
“Persuasive definitions hide normative claims as descriptions.”
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Attributed to Charles Stevenson:
“Ethical language is dynamic; it does what it says.”
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Attributed to Charles Stevenson:
“The work of ethics is the clarification of moral conflict.”