Ayer's Emotivism

Monika Mahmutovic (301180032)
PHIL 221 Fall 2015
Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Warriner
Wed. October 14, 2015

Ayer’s Emotivism and its Limits

In the sixth chapter of his 1952 publication Language, Truth and Logic, A. J. Ayer outlines the the theory of emotivism, according to which he explicitly denies moral realism in his work. His commitment to emotivism and espousal of the thesis that moral definitions and judgements are altogether incoherent and impossible leads Ayer to quite boldly claim that our so-called moral claims express nothing more that our emotions towards certain actions, circumstances or states of affairs. Ayer, though, is convinced that emotivism can still allow for moral claims to motivate us to act a certain way. Yet, after
E. Moore to the subjectivist could easily apply to Ayer’s own emotivism. Moore points out that because we do seem to dispute ethical statements, or questions of value, it is therefore obvious that these statements are more than statements of feeling. Otherwise, it would be impossible to have these disputes. Ayer’s response to this objection is to point out that “the dispute is to really about a question of value, but about a question of fact.” The reason that this is important for emotivism is because this dispute is not about the actual emotions of moral sentiments that two individuals who are in a dispute are expressing. Instead, the dispute is about their interpretations of circumstances, events, or “facts about the case” (that are empirical facts), which influence their moral
The fact of the matter is that emotivism will never hold that an ethical statement counts as a proposition at all. It is the case that subjectivists are expressing a fact about their feelings, for they retain that one expresses a proposition when they say ‘x is wrong,’ it is just that the proposition is one that expresses a fact that they feel that x is repugnant. The emotivist on the other had does not at all express a proposition that is capable of being true or false, not even about their own moral sentiments. They merely express the moral sentiment itself, that x is repugnant to them, and not a proposition stating the fact that it is so. As Ayer states, the ethical statement “is purely emotive.” Thus, it would be impossible for two emotivists in a dispute to be arguing over their “ethical feelings”, for they are not even stating anything about them (only expressing them). If emotivists were to engage in any dispute, it indeed would have to be deferred to something other than their actual moral sentients (perhaps their empirical observations that inspire them, as Ayer suggests), for despite their opposing moral feelings, they cannot be contradicting each other about those feelings if they have never stated any facts about their own