 According to Stevenson and Ayer the function of moral judgments is to express approval and disapproval. But to approve of X is to think or feel that X is good or right: to disapprove is to think or feel that it is bad or wrong. Thus the emotivist analysis of the moral terms is viciously circular. (Russell himself had developed a similar line of argument against theories which identify rightness with a tendency to arouse approval in his “The Elements of Ethics” (1912).)