Ethics: if value judgements express desire rather than state fact, what entitles the moral vehemence of the political writing?

Bertrand Russell, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Questions of value lie outside the domain of knowledge. When we assert that this or that has value, we are giving expression to our own emotions, not to a fact which would still be true if our feelings were different.¹²

Sources

1. For example: should capital punishment be inflicted for theft, or only for murder, or not at all? Jeremy Bentham, who considered pleasure to be the Good, devoted himself to working out what criminal code 228 ould most promote pleasure, and concluded it ought to be much less severe than prevailing in his day. All this, except proposition that pleasure is the Good, es within the sphere of science.

   Religion and Science, pp. 228–230

2. I think that in this they are right, but I draw the further conclusion, which they do not draw, that questions as to "values" lie wholly outside the domain of knowledge. That is to say, when we assert that this or that has "' value," we are giving expression to our own emotions, not a fact which would still be true if our al feelings were different, To make clear, we must try to analyse the contion of the Good.

   Religion and Science, pp. 230–232

Where the argument is made

• The Elements of Ethics (1910), the early objectivist statement
• Religion and Science (1935), ch. 9, "Science and Ethics", the clearest emotivist passage
• Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954)
• "Reply to My Critics" in Schilpp, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (1944)

How the argument was received

Held with visible discomfort by a man whose public life was one long moral denunciation.