If, as MacIntyre claims, every set of moral values presupposes a set of social assumptions, then what are the major social assumptions that he sees as dominant in the West? The key one for MacIntyre is what he calls emotivism, which he defines as follows: Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.20
