'(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' - Explain and discuss the reasons Ayer puts forward for this view of ethical judgements.

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Nancy Duncan         -  -        PHY 285

5/ ‘(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’

(A.J. AYER LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOGIC CH 6. )

EXPLAIN AND DISCUSS THE REASONS AYER PUTS FORWARD FOR THIS VIEW OF ETHICAL JUDGEMENTS.

A.J. Ayer’s ideas on modern ethics were laid out in his groundbreaking book Language, Truth and Logic, which has been praised as the foundation to Logical Positivism.  First published in 1930, it was a controversial best seller at the time, due to its basic outlook that ethical judgements have no or very little meaning. Ayer came to this conclusion from the notion that an ethical judgement has no means of being empirically proved and therefore cannot be determined to be a statement of fact.  An ethical statement must be based upon one’s subjective emotions and feelings, so in the whole scheme of things its significance is slight. Ayer most famously laid out this concept with his stealing money example:

“If I say to someone ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’, I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole that money’. In adding that this action is wrong, I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval about it. It is as if I had said, ‘you stole that money’, in a peculiar tone of horror, or written with the addition of some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker. If I now generalise my previous statement and say ‘Stealing money is wrong’, I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning - that is, expresses no proposition that can be either true or false.”

Thus when someone makes a moral judgement they are merely stating one’s opinion of moral feelings which have no factual basis since it is purely an emotion. Or in Ayer’s words, “I am not making any factual statement, not even a statement about my own state of mind. I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments”.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, a philosophical revolution took place, which paved the way for modern British philosophy.  The new school of thought was more analytical and questioned past theories. Language, Truth and Logic epitomises this revolution.  Philosophers started to question issues of semantics, as in Moore’s Principa Ethica, questioning what ‘good’ actually meant. They concluded that ‘good’ was an indefinable property and therefore penalised all past theories, which had attempted to defined ‘good’, as incorrect. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was a great inspiration to Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that ethics was ‘important nonsense’.

Ayer disagrees with the cognitive claim that moral judgements declare beliefs and are therefore true.  Ayer is of the non-cognitive school where moral judgements declare emotions of approval or disapproval. Non-cognitive or Logical Positive theories aim to provide statements which represent how the world actually is.  To demonstrate this make a comparison between the beliefs that a) ‘there is a group of older children and a little boy in the street’ and b) ‘it is wrong that the group of children in the street are bullying the little boy’.  Sentence a) represents what is going on in the street and how the world is, but sentence b) adds no factual content to sentence a) as it cannot be assessed whether it is wrong to bully the little boy. The only difference between sentences a) and b) is that b) expresses the speaker’s emotions towards the situation on the street. Ayer demonstrates this with his stealing money statement, as cited above.

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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 ...

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