Moral issues, as anyone can observe who watches how they present themselves in real life, come to us as a confused mixture of questions of fact and questions of value, together with a large element of questions concerning the meanings of words. In the more difficult cases we cannot begin to answer these questions till we have established to which of these classes they belong. Everyday moral discussions are full of confusions between questions of fact, requiring empirical investigation, questions of definition, requiring an agreement on how to use words, and questions of value, requiring evaluative decisions. It is often not impossible to answer these various sorts of questions, once we have sorted them out; and ethics is a training in doing this.
(R. M. Hare, "Broad's Approach to Moral Philosophy," chap. 1 in Essays on Philosophical Method [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972], 1-18, at 15 [essay first published in 1959])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 