It comes down to the ‘Hurrah/Boo’ theory. If I was to say, “Abortion is wrong”, all I am really saying is that in my opinion, I believe abortion isn’t right-“Boo to abortion”. Even if I give reasons why to back the moral statement up, those reasons are just my emotions to support a feeling.
Some emotivists are logical positivists and they believe that all language is analytic, synthetic or meaningless. That is, the different parts of the sentence can arrive at the truth or falsehood OR it can be proved through i.e. experiments and senses OR it is just meaningless.
Meaningless is what some scholars believe ethical statements to be. When they say they are no more than expressions of opinion, they mean that there can be no way in which we could verify the right or wrong of the statement.” Murder is wrong” is merely saying that I disapprove of murder and therefore I think it is wrong.
Logical Positivists are a threat to language and ethics because they undermine language. It makes all ethical language merely subjective and individual.
A.J. Ayer was a logical positivist and he was interested in how you verify factual statements and how you cannot verify moral statements. He believes that moral statements have no objective validity whatsoever. Although we would say that stealing is wrong according to deontological ethics, Ayer would totally disagree and say there is no way of verifying the truth or falsehood of this statement.
Stevenson was interested in observing how people use moral terms in everyday conversation. He analyses that general agreements or disagreements occur within them. He also steers to the fact that moral terms either make you attracted to them or repel them and also the fact that you cannot apply analytic or synthetic methods of verification to ethical language. He says that ethical statements cannot be fact because people have disagreeing “opinions” over them. For example, one person may agree that abortion is right while the other may totally disagree. He believes that not all moral statements fall under the “Hurrah/Boo” theory as some are mixed as before. He also believes that all moral statements have cognitive meaning and emotive meaning. So, for example, “Sexual intercourse without the person’s consent” is the cognitive meaning whereas “Rape” id the emotive meaning as it has more of an impact on the way you feel about an ethical topic. Stephenson believes there are these two different meanings because we want to steer people to our way of thinking.
People have different ideas of the definitions of moral words therefore moral statements cannot be fact-only opinion. No ethical statement can be proved or disproved. One person may say “Laura is good”-maybe because of something she has done, however not everyone may believe that-it is a feeling or opinion and not fact.
