Virtue, practices, and traditions › What emotivism explains, and what it does not

MacIntyre examines emotivism, a theory according to which evaluative judgments express attitudes or preferences rather than report objective moral facts. If moral utterances ultimately express preferences, their practical force can include attempts to move other people toward the speaker's preferences. Appealing to an apparently impersonal standard could then conceal an effort to secure another person's agreement.

That distinction prevents a basic misreading. MacIntyre does not recommend abandoning reasons in favor of feelings. Nor does he infer that every moral argument is disguised manipulation. He distinguishes a philosophical theory about the meaning of moral judgments from a diagnosis of how people can use those judgments. A sentence can claim more authority than its speaker's actual reasoning supports.

His portraits of the manager and therapist belong to this cultural diagnosis (chapter 3). These are social characters who claim expertise in achieving purposes whose value is treated as already settled. The philosophical issue is what happens when claimed competence in selecting means appears to supply authority over ends. It would be a mistake to turn these portraits into a clinical account of therapy or a finding that every person in management acts manipulatively.