I maintain that this claim to objective validity, or whatever name we like to call it by, is an essential feature of moral judgments, or of moral experience generally. You may call it, if you like, part of the definition, as long as it is clear that it is not an arbitrarily assigned definition but a feature that is discovered in the kinds of experience that we are agreed in calling moral. It follows that anyone who tries to explain moral experience purely in terms of personal feelings or emotions is, by implication, saying that all moral judgments are false, because they all claim to be asserting the presence of something which is not really there at all. This is, no doubt, a tenable view, and if held, it is desirable that it should be stated plainly and unequivocally. What is not tenable is any claim to base such a view on the examination or analysis of the actual moral experience we have or the moral judgments we make. For that reveals unmistakably that we do make the claim to objective validity. If that claim is rejected it can only be on grounds outside our moral experience.
(G. C. Field, "The Nature of Ethical Thinking," The Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 24 [1950]: 1-26, at 6)
Note from KBJ: The claim that moral judgments are either true or false is called cognitivism. The claim that moral judgments are neither true nor false is called noncognitivism. Some cognitivists—those known as error theorists—claim that all moral judgments are false. J. L. Mackie (1917-1981) is perhaps the best-known error theorist. See his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1977).
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 