Iris would describe ‘this piece of our philosophical history’ – from Ayer to Hare – as ‘the elimination of metaphysics from ethics’. While Idealists and Realists had aimed at discovering objective moral truth, whether by self-transcendence or intuition, in Ayer’s and Hare’s worlds, we confront ‘a stripped and empty scene’ in which morality is ‘not pictured…as being attached to any real natural or metaphysical structure. It is pictured without any transcendent background.’
