Moral philosophy during the period under review was marked by the dominance in England of a form of ethical intuitionism that arose in response to G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903). By the mid-1930s this began to be challenged, both in England and in the United States, by various forms of emotivism. In some isolation from this debate, Dewey continued to write extensively on ethics.

INTUITIONISM

The intuitionist school consisted of H. A. Prichard, W.D. Ross, H.W. B. Joseph, and E. F. Carritt in Oxford and C. D. Broad and A. C. Ewing in Cambridge. Prichard should probably be considered the leader of the school, though he published the least; Broad called Prichard ‘a man of immense ability whom I have always regarded as the Oxford Moore’ (1971: 14).

The intuitionists believed that rightness and goodness were distinct qualities, qualities that such things as people, actions, emotions, motives, intentions, and consequences could have. They were interested in the nature of and relation between these two qualities and in the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic forms of them, and in which things in fact have these properties. Ross, for instance, argued that there was no such thing as instrumental goodness, that is, value as a means (1930: 133, 1939: 257); but he insisted that there was such a thing as intrinsic value, and that it was distinct from intrinsic rightness. Further, nothing was capable of being both intrinsically good and intrinsically right (Prichard 1912: 5–6).