Moral Discourse Sui Generis

Abstract

The eighteenth-century intuitionists tried to show that moral discourse is sui generis and cannot be reduced to non-moral without loss, or change, of meaning. This was their second line of attack on Hobbes. They charged him and other apparent ‘naturalists’, such as Locke, with using ethical terms in such a way as to ‘import something different from what they will allow to be their only meaning’.²¹