The Semantics of the Goodness and the Ugly

  There are different views concerning the meanings of the most important ethical concepts such as the goodness and the ugly. The author of this article while classifying various views and explaining them, tries to make a critical study of those views as well. Accordingly, first he goes on to examine critically the theory of emotionalists as one of the most important non-cognitive theories. Then he embarks on dealing with G. E. Moorechr('39')s intuitionist view. He also classifies the descriptive theories on the goodness and the ugly into groups of naturalistic and metaphysic and criticizes them which includes those of Islamic and western thinkers. He further criticizes certain metaphysical views and put forward his own view.  At the end he studies critically the naturalistic fallacy as proponed by G. E. Moore who holds that any definition of the goodness and the ugly including naturalistic and metaphysical is natural fallacy. Key words: non-cognitive, the principle of verification, intuitionism, descriptive, naturalism, naturalistic fallacy.