Emotivism Must Die!

The failure of people to exercise their God-given faculty of intelligence (intelligence means the ability to distinguish categories) is correctly called stupidity. Against stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain; but it is not the gods alone who are condemned in intellectual battles with the stupid to beat at the air. It would be easier for us to leave the stupid to wallow in their pitiable mire and go about our lives; but those of us who love our fellow man are loth to neglect someone in such a state of extreme necessity.
Now the form of stupidity with which we are probably all best acquainted is that called "emotivism" or "emotionalism". It is not a method of thought ; it is the negation of Thought (which is why I have called it Stupid) and the substitution for it of Will. A man is an emotivist who laughs at something because it is unfamiliar to him - which is indeed a particularly pathetic and puerile strain of this disease. That man also is an emotivist who utters the diabolical sentence, "She had to have an abortion," as if murder were not only in some cases not an evil, but could actually be demanded by a moral obligation - which is what the words "have to" mean. He is an emotivist who would have a man put down like a dog "to end his suffering"; also, he who lauds self-murder as the means to escape the woes of this world; again, he who cannot bear a word of criticism against himself, but who at a mere nothing will fly into an insensate rage wherein there will be no limits to the emotional abuse he himself inflicts upon his unfortunate victims. This last, incidentally, will frequently support abortion and euthanasia. He will justify his moods with laudatory epithets, such as "common humanity" - the word "common" having the same function as "had to" in the phrase "had to have an abortion" - implying, of course, that anyone who does not agree with him is morally evil. He would never dare assert that he implied that; nevertheless, that is the implied meaning of his words, which is inescapable. You cannot affirm something without simultaneously affirming all that logically follows from it.
The Emotivist, because his substitution for Thought subsists in Will that answers Feeling, will tend to inflict his philosophy on all those about him, be they willing or no. This may be inferred from his use of such words as "had to" and "common", and also such expressions as "those who have no experience of", with reference, for example, to witnessing the slow and painful death of a beloved family member - which will be the Emotivist's attempt at justification for what is called euthanasia but should be called lugrothanasia, unhappy death; yet special pleading is not argument. The Emotivist will regard pleasure as the supreme good, and pain as the supreme evil. He may well regard the infliction of pain, even in just punishment, as the worst sin (if he believes in sin) that can be committed - so, for instance, no parent shall be permitted to smack his naughty child - yet he will not object to the imprisonment of the miscreant parent who dares to discipline his son, or to the trauma undergone by the family by its being destroyed in this way. If his emotions followed some sort of reason, perhaps these things would trouble him; but our emotions are inordinate and delude us. Yet the Emotivist trusts to these rather than to his intelligence. But since the Emotivist has abandoned intelligence, he has only the emotions to fall back upon.

I have said that the Emotivist replaces Will for Thought. If he thinks at all, it will be to justify what his will has already chosen. So, if he has chosen something evil, for instance, fornication or unnatural vice, he will, after having made a decision, rationalize it in order to fit in with his emotions and his will.
We all do this at times. There is no limit to the depravity of man, nor to his stupidity. But where Emotion is followed as superior to Reason, man ends up broken and a wreck, more depraved and more stultified than he could ever otherwise have been. For this reason, and because of the stumblingblock it puts in the way of intelligent argument, emotivism must die.