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conchis comments on The Trouble With "Good" - Less Wrong
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Emotivism has its problems. Notably, you can't use 'yay' and 'boo' exclamations in arguments, and they can't be reasons.
"Should I eat this apple?" Becomes simply "how do I feel about eating this apple" (or otherwise it's simply meaningless). But really there are considerations that go into the answer other than mere feelings (for example, is the apple poisonous?).
Because utilitarianism has a theory of right action and a theory of value, I don't think it's compatible with emotivism. But I haven't read much in the literature detailing this particular question, as I don't read much currently about utilitarianism.
I may be misintepreting, but I wonder whether Yvain's use of the word "emotivism" here is leading people astray. He doesn't seem to be committing himself to emotivism as a metaethical theory of what it means to say something is good, as much as an empirical claim about most people's moral psychology (that is, what's going on in their brains when they say things like "X is good"). The empirical claim and the normative commitment to utilitarianism don't seem incompatible. (And the empirical claim is one that seems to be backed up by recent work in moral psychology.)