I. Introduction

In this paper I want to outline a metaethical view that I think represents an addition to the standard alternatives in metaethics. I shall indicate how it connects to historical approaches and to some leading views in the contemporary literature. There are several recent authors working along similar lines, but the view emerged in my own work from an extended treatment of emotion, which supplies a somewhat different moral- psychological basis.2

The view is meant to contrast with noncognitivist accounts of ethics in terms of emotion (emotivism and more recent versions of expressivism), but I shall not review in detail the arguments that the basis it assigns to ethics allows for moral realism.3 Instead I want mainly to present the view here and to recommend it for further attention, first in more or less the form in which it emerged, as a way of explaining the special motivational force of moral judgments (Section II), and then recast in somewhat artificial terms, for comparison with another (at least arguably) realist approach to metaethics known as "response-dependency" (Section III).4 My own view can be seen as a social or two-level version of response-dependency, but with a less rigid account of motivational force introduced by the move to the social level. I shall go on to acknowledge some difficulties but also to cite further advantages of my suggested approach on issues of justification (Section IV) and on the question of the relevance of emotion to moral judgment (Section V).

In a nutshell: A response-dependent account explains a concept in terms of a disposition to respond in some way under standard conditions. The paradigm case outside ethics is the definition of color concepts--of red, say, as applying to things that would look red to normal observers under normal conditions of color perception. As currently understood, a