Ayer comes under the umbrella of Logical Positivism. Logical Positivists reject the idea of God or metaphysics, due to their belief that anything hypothesised to exist without evidence is meaningless. Something could only be literally significant or truthful if it was empirically verifiable or analytic. Therefore Ayer’s ultimate aim was to create a positivist theory in which all significant artificial acts have scientific verification. Any artificial acts which can’t be empirically proved would not be genuinely significant. Such a theory demands that all ethical judgements should be proven empirically, which cannot be done because any scientific experiments could not evaluate whether ‘stealing money is wrong’ empirically nor analytically. Ayer concluded, therefore, that all ethical statements are meaningless: “It will be said that... the existence of ethics and aesthetics as branches of speculative knowledge presents an insuperable objection to our radical empiricist thesis.”
This can, perhaps, be understood better in terms of aesthetics. As Ayer adds, “Aesthetic terms are used in exactly the same way as ethical terms. Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed, as ethical words are employed, not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response. It follows, as in ethics, that there is no sense in attributing objective validity to aesthetic judgements, and no possibility of arguing about questions of fact.”
The Utilitarian view of ethics, as laid out by John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism (1863), might be more favourable towards ethics in light of Ayer’s logical positivist ideals. Utilitarians conclude that the rightness of an action should be determined by its ability to promote happiness. Therefore a statement such as ‘stealing money is wrong’ becomes ‘stealing money tends to lead to unhappiness’. Such a statement would not only be scientifically viable but also psychologically interpretable as true or false, which would allow ethics to be accepted by Logical Positivists. However Ayer is at odds with the utilitarianism concept of morality. He discredits the concept of ‘x is good’ because “it is not self contradictory to say that some pleasant things are not good, or that some bad things are desired, it cannot be the case that the sentence ‘x is good’ is equivalent to ‘x is pleasant’, or to ‘x is desired’. And to every other variant to utilitarianism with which I am acquainted the same objection can be made.” One may also point out that although ‘stealing money tends to lead to unhappiness’, this may only apply to the person whose money has been stolen. It could lead to the happiness of the person who stole it, unless he or she is caught.
Ayer also looks into ‘absolutism’ or ‘intuition’ as means of justifying moral judgements. This would mean that ethical judgements cannot be branded true or false as they come from intellectual intuition - an individual realm of the human mind. Therefore, Ayer dismisses both naturalism and non naturalism since they fail to pass as literally significant. However in some instances outside ethics, non-naturalism or intuition is portrayed as significant. For example M. Smith has pointed out theories of the ‘Big Bang’, by which our universe is said to have begun, are not analytic nor empirically verifiable and yet considered to be significant facts.
Ayer maintains that anyone who makes the ethical judgement ‘stealing money is wrong’ is merely expressing their personal attitude to stealing money. Ayer puts an emotional slant on this by claiming that “ejaculations or commands which are designed to provoke the reader to action of a certain sort” are “calculated also to arouse feeling, and so to stimulate action”. Ayer’s emotive, or ‘Hoorah-Boo!’, theory means that he becomes unconcerned with the actual meaning of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but the response they invoke. ‘Stealing money is wrong’ is a sentence void of factual meaning, although the semantics of the sentence gives it an assurance which would lead the listener to believe it is a sentence of factual truth and should be taken notice of. If someone were to state something is good, they should approve of it themselves.
“When someone disagrees with us about the moral value of a certain type of action we do admittedly resort to argument in order to win him over to our way of thinking. But we do not attempt to show by our arguments that he has the ‘wrong’ ethical feeling towards a situation whose nature he has correctly apprehended. What we attempt to show is that he is mistaken about the facts of the case..... if our opponent has undergone a different process of moral conditioning from ourselves... then we abandon the attempt to convince him by argument.” Therefore it would seem that ethical disagreements are due to a clash of feelings developed from one’s conditioning - not merely a philosophical game.
Now that Ayer has ascertained, in his view, that ethical judgements are made up of no factual content, he addresses the issue of moral arguments. If one was to argue over whether ‘stealing money is wrong’ then the argument would not be, in Ayer’s view, ethical, but emotional, and one’s different emotional response to stealing money. In which case the disagreements which incur would not contradict each other as neither party would be denouncing that the other party’s statement was true (nor false). Since Ayer has already concluded that the issue of truth and falsity is redundant in questions of ethics such contradictions can never occur within the field of moral judgements. Ethical terms, it would seem, are simply emotions: they make no declarations of the truth, but express a subjective attitude towards someone or something. Emotivism overcomes the problem of non-naturalism which is failure to account where our moral knowledge originally came from.
Ayer disagrees with what he determines to be ethical subjectivist and utilitarianism theories. Subjectivists believe the issues of something being right or wrong are determined by approval of a person or group towards the action. Utilitarians define ethics in terms of pleasure, happiness or satisfaction. Ayer’s opinion is that ethical notions are essentially unable to be analysed since they are pseudo-concepts. Moreover an ethical judgement does not add to the factual content of a statement but only adds one’s personal feelings towards the statement.
Let us now progress from the moral statement ‘stealing money is wrong’ to an apparently more important suggestion - ‘Murder is wrong’. Such a statement under Ayer’s philosophy, would be the equivalent of saying ‘murder!’ with facial expressions indicating one’s disapproval. However does the statement ‘murder is wrong’ come from analytic or synthetic knowledge? If one is to state that the premeditated act of murder is wrong, then how would one approach the issue of euthanasia? A doctor’s opinion on euthanasia will depend on his moral conditioning and subjective beliefs. Therefore the issues of euthanasia supports Ayer’s claim that ethics is not a case of facts but emotions. It’s a similar case with soldiers in times of war - are they to be classed as murderers? To protect a soldier the statement should be murder is against the law due to social conventions. However does the act of murder have natural wrongness or is it a subjective response in our conscience that makes it ‘wrong’? This is yet another unanswerable question as it would depend if one were to take Ayer’s Logical Positivism into account or not. It cannot be denied that murder obviously does have a certain wrongness - for someone’s life is being ended: yet, there is no empirical verification to state that this is naturally wrong.
Since we have abolished metaphysics, we can be concerned only by what is in the sensory realm. Therefore, ‘murder is wrong’ cannot be proven through the sensory realm as one does not know how the murdered victim would feel. In the same sense, talk of ‘God exists’ becomes a statement about the speaker who is merely stating ‘I believe God exists’. In the same way, ‘murder is wrong’ is not based upon an ultimate truth, and so the meaning is simply, ‘I don’t like murder’. Ayer abolishes ethical statements as analytical or synthetic there can be no way of judging whether murder is right or wrong and therefore to say ‘murder is wrong’ has no superiority over ‘murder is right’.
Exponentially, one can relate Ayer’s views to contemporary issues. For example, the West condemns the acts of Al Quaeda. However there is no rational ground for complaint as this is an ethical judgement. One may disagree with their acts but the ‘morality issues’ are due to the West’s conditioning, and the way Al Quaeda act is due to their conditioning. Diligent supporters of Al Quaeda are led to believe that bombing certain western targets for the ‘Jihad’ is morally right. The West ‘contradicts’ such acts as morally wrong since our conditioning condemns them to be what we perceive as ‘murderers’. However are these conflicting opinions “simply expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false”? Is it any different from a soldier killing an opposing soldier in war; or a French resistance fighter killing an armed German in the Second World War? Ayer says, “What seems intuitively certain to one person may seen doubtful, or even false, to another”. However neither side would be willing to accept the other’s ethics even though Ayer would claim that neither principles are based upon fact and therefore what is in conflict are emotional values.
By no means are Ayer’s ethical views considered to be the be all and end all of ethics. He has received much criticism for what can be seen as ‘sweeping statements’ abolishing years of human traditions and culture. We wouldn’t bother making ethical judgements or even spend the majority of our lives following our culture’s ethical blue print if they were purely fictional. It would be fairly remarkable if the whole world had lived for millions of years on what would essentially be a ‘lie’. How is it possible to disagree with ethical statements if they are untrue?
Ayer has been criticised for his vague definition of what can be ‘in principle empirically verifiable’ as he failed to come up with a blue print for what he actually means. Ayer responded to such criticisms in his second edition introduction “in putting forward the principle of certification as a criterion of meaning, I do not overlook the fact that the word ‘meaning’ is commonly used in a variety of senses, and I do not wish to deny that in some of these senses a statement may properly be said to be meaningful even though it is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable.”
There are obvious problems with the notion of emotivism since ethical judgements are not purely there for the emotional response they evoke but the ideas they state. G.J. Warnock in Contemporary Moral Philosophy believes that a statement such as ‘murder is wrong’ is factual because it can be discussed. If such statements were purely based on emotions then moral concepts would change with emotions and thus ethics would be a case of relative subjectivism. Although emotivism has failed to achieve what it set out to do in the world of ethics - to remove the notion that ethical judgements have any elements of truth or falsity - it has allowed more advanced theories of ethics. However, emotivism doesn’t explain ethical conduct and therefore as a theory it fails.
Even if one does agree with Ayer, it cannot be denied that although not always empirically viable, ethical judgements do hold some form of sense even if it is only action guiding. As Urmson stated, “To say something is bad or wrong is to commit oneself to an attitude and to give what, if not disputed, is an utterly sufficient reason for avoiding that thing”. Although not necessarily stating a bare fact, moral judgements are essentially a guidance or blue print for the society we live in.
Ethical statements can also achieve the effect of a command. For example: ‘it is your duty to tell the truth’ is received as an ethical notion of truth but can be interpreted as a command of ‘Tell the truth!’ In such instances the question of ethics comes into the world of semantics, because truth is subjective. It depends upon an individual’s perception of a particular ‘fact’.
“If I say, ‘stealing money is wrong’ I produce a statement which has no factual meaning - that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false.” As a factual statement Ayer is correct: whether stealing money is wrong or not is a debatable statement which can only be argued on grounds of personal experience and emotions. However, this view is black and white and fails to take into account the attitude of most people which would consider, ‘stealing money is wrong’, to be factually correct. Ayer’s theory, although persuasive, is detached. The core of his argument is that emotivism invalidates ethical judgements, yet it is emotivism which most of us live by. Since Ayer excludes such an important concept, he produces a cold, detached view of human society which may work in philosophical terms but has no bearing on the way we actually live today.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Language Truth and Logic (2nd Edition)
by A.J.Ayer
Pelican Books (1946)
Ethics and Language
by C.L. Stevenson
Yale University Press (1944)
The Emotive Theory of Ethics
by J.O. Urmson
Prometheus Books (1968)
Contemporary Moral Philosophy
by G.J. Warnock
St. Martin’s Press (1967)
Utilitatianism
by John Stuart Mill
Everyman (1968)
INTERNET RESOURCES
LECTURE NOTES
Language Truth and Logic by A.J.Ayer (2nd Edition 1946) Page 142
Language Truth and Logic by A.J.Ayer (2nd Edition 1946) Page 142
Language Truth and Logic by A.J.Ayer (2nd Edition 1946) Page 151
Language Truth and Logic by A.J.Ayer (2nd Edition 1946) Page 150
Language Truth and Logic by A.J.Ayer (2nd Edition 1946) Page 139
Language Truth and Logic by A.J.Ayer (2nd Edition 1946) Page 146-147
Language Truth and Logic by A.J.Ayer (2nd Edition 1946) Page 136
Language Truth and Logic by A.J.Ayer (2nd Edition 1946) Page 140-141
Language Truth and Logic by A.J.Ayer (2nd Edition 1946) Page 20
The Emotive Theory of Ethics by J.O. Urmson (1968) Page 20