IB Philosophy 10.1.3 the Nature of Ethical and Aesthetic Judgments Notes

Ayer's Emotivist Theory of Ethics

1. As established in 10.1.1, the verification principle divides meaningful statements into analytic and synthetic. Ethical statements fall into neither category: they are not true by definition, nor can any observation verify or falsify them.
2. Ayer's conclusion is that ethical statements are cognitively meaningless, expressing no proposition at all.
3. Ayer distinguishes his emotivism from subjectivism. The subjectivist holds that 'Stealing is wrong' means 'I disapprove of stealing,' a factual claim about the speaker's psychological state that could in principle be verified.
4. Ayer rejects subjectivism because moral disagreement would then be merely disagreement about each person's feelings, which is absurd: when two people disagree about whether torture is wrong, they are not merely reporting different internal states.
5. Ayer develops this position in Chapter 6 of Language, Truth and Logic, 'A Critique of Ethics and Theology.'
6. Instead, Ayer argues that moral utterances function as expressions of feeling, not descriptions of feeling. Saying "Stealing is wrong" is more like exclaiming "Stealing!" in a tone of disapproval than asserting "I have a feeling of disapproval about stealing." The moral sentence adds no factual content to the bare statement that stealing occurred.

Emotivism and Its Consequences

1. The implications for moral philosophy are radical. If emotivism is correct, then normative ethics (systematic theories about what is right and wrong) is not a rational enterprise at all.
2. If emotivism is correct, moral theories are not competing accounts of moral truth but different ways of expressing and recommending attitudes. Examples include:
   1. Utilitarianism.
   2. Kantian deontology.
   3. Virtue ethics.
3. This position is sometimes called the "Boo/Hurrah" theory.
   1. "Charity is good" is equivalent to "Charity: hurrah!" and "Murder is wrong" is equivalent to "Murder: boo!"
   2. Moral language expresses attitudes and attempts to evoke similar attitudes in others, but it does not state anything that could be true or false.
4. Ayer argues that this analysis explains the apparent intractability of moral disagreements. If moral claims were factual, we could settle disputes by gathering evidence.
5. The impossibility of resolving moral disagreements through observation is precisely what we should expect if moral utterances express emotions rather than state facts.
6. Ayer does not deny that we can reason about moral matters, but he restricts such reasoning to factual questions about means, not evaluative questions about ends. We can rationally debate whether a particular policy reduces poverty (an empirical question), but we cannot rationally establish that reducing poverty is good (an evaluative claim that merely expresses an attitude).
7. The relationship between emotivism and the verification principle is direct: since moral statements are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, they must be cognitively meaningless. Emotivism is not an independent ethical theory but a consequence of applying the verification principle (10.1.1) consistently to moral language.

Aesthetic Judgments and the Expression of Taste

1. Ayer extends his emotivist analysis to aesthetic judgments with equal rigour. Statements such as "This symphony is beautiful" or "That novel is a masterpiece" are, like moral judgments, neither analytic nor empirically verifiable and are therefore cognitively meaningless.
2. Aesthetic statements express the speaker's response to an artwork or natural object, not an objective property of the thing itself. When someone says "Picasso's Guernica is a great painting," they are expressing an attitude of admiration, not reporting a verifiable fact about the canvas.
3. This position challenges the long tradition of philosophical aesthetics. Plato held that beauty is an objective Form; Kant argued that aesthetic judgments claim universal validity even though they are based on subjective feeling.
4. Ayer dismisses both views: aesthetic claims express personal or cultural taste, nothing more.
5. Kant's aesthetics presents a particularly interesting contrast. In the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant argued that when we judge 'This sunset is beautiful,' we are not merely reporting a private pleasure.
6. We judge that our pleasure arises from a 'disinterested' engagement, pleasured not because the sunset benefits us, but because its form produces a free harmony between imagination and understanding. This disinterested character grounds Kant's claim that aesthetic judgments demand universal agreement: we say 'this is beautiful,' not just 'I like this.'
7. Ayer dismisses this as a psychological fact about how we express attitudes, not evidence of cognitive content.
8. Ayer acknowledges that aesthetic disputes exist but argues they reduce to disagreements about factual matters or expressions of incompatible attitudes. Two critics who disagree about a novel may actually disagree about what the author intended (a factual question) or about the novel's historical significance (also factual).
9. Once all factual questions are settled, any remaining disagreement is a clash of attitudes, not a dispute about truth.
10. The consequences for art criticism are significant. If Ayer is correct, then no aesthetic judgment is objectively better than any other.

Criticism and Refinement in Aesthetic Emotivism

1. The claim that Shakespeare is superior to a greeting card verse expresses a cultural preference, not a truth about literary quality. This conclusion strikes many philosophers as a reductio ad absurdum (a proof by showing that a position leads to an absurd conclusion) of the theory.
2. Later emotivists refined the position. Charles Stevenson in Ethics and Language (1944) developed a more sophisticated emotivism that distinguished between disagreements in belief and disagreements in attitude.
3. Stevenson argued that moral and aesthetic persuasion involves both factual reasoning (changing beliefs) and emotive influence (changing attitudes), giving a richer account than Ayer's stark expressivism.
4. Stevenson's key illustration: two people who agree on all the facts about capital punishment (its deterrence rates, costs, risk of executing the innocent) may still disagree about whether it is wrong. This is 'disagreement in attitude' rather than disagreement in belief.
5. Moral persuasion works both by changing what people believe and by directly influencing their emotional dispositions, a process closer to rhetoric than demonstration.
6. The parallel treatment of ethics and aesthetics is philosophically important. By showing that both moral and aesthetic language fall outside the scope of meaningful factual discourse, Ayer demonstrates the sweeping consequences of the verification principle: it eliminates not just metaphysics (10.1.2) but the entire evaluative dimension of human experience from the domain of knowledge.

Responses and Alternatives to Emotivism

1. Emotivism provoked vigorous philosophical responses. One of the most common objections is the "moral reasoning" argument: we regularly engage in moral reasoning, constructing arguments with premises and conclusions.
2. If moral statements are mere expressions of feeling, it is difficult to explain how moral arguments can be valid or invalid.
3. R.M. Hare developed prescriptivism as an alternative to emotivism. Hare agreed with Ayer that moral statements are not descriptive, but argued they are universal prescriptions rather than mere expressions of feeling.
4. 'Stealing is wrong' means something like 'Do not steal, and I am committed to this prescription applying universally to all relevantly similar cases.'
5. Hare's prescriptivism preserves the possibility of moral reasoning. Because moral judgments are universal prescriptions, they must be logically consistent: if I prescribe that stealing is wrong, I cannot consistently exempt my own stealing.
6. This logical constraint on moral language provides a rational structure that emotivism lacks.
7. The most powerful contemporary objection is the Frege-Geach embedding problem (the objection that moral terms must have stable meaning in conditionals and questions, not just in direct assertions).
   1. If 'stealing is wrong' merely means 'Stealing: boo!', then the conditional 'If stealing is wrong, then getting your little brother to steal is wrong' turns into 'If stealing: boo!, then getting your little brother to steal: boo!', which is incoherent.
   2. Moral terms must have stable meaning across different sentence contexts (assertions, conditionals, questions), which pure expressivism cannot explain.
8. For example, if I judge that Hitler's treatment of Jews was wrong, I am committed to the universal prescription 'Do not treat any group this way,' applying to myself in analogous situations. I cannot consistently say 'It was wrong for Hitler but acceptable for me.'
9. But critics (including Hare himself later) noted that a fanatic could embrace a universalisable prescription to exterminate a group, and universalisability alone does not explain why some prescriptions are morally better than others.

Realist and Global Critiques of Emotivism

1. J.L. Mackie's error theory (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 1977) offers yet another approach. Mackie agreed with Ayer that there are no objective moral facts but argued that moral statements do purport to state facts; they are simply all false.
2. Ordinary moral discourse is systematically mistaken in its assumption of objectivity.
3. Mackie offers two arguments.
   1. The argument from queerness: if there were objective moral facts, they would be entities utterly unlike anything else in the natural world, not colours, shapes, or forces, and we would need a mysterious faculty of moral intuition to perceive them.
   2. The argument from disagreement: if moral claims were objectively true, we would expect more convergence across cultures and history; persistent deep disagreement suggests moral views reflect attitudes, not discoveries about moral reality.
4. The practical upshot is that Mackie, unlike Ayer, allows us to call moral statements true or false, all being systematically false in the way 'witches exist' is false. This is a systematic error built into ordinary moral thought, not a mere expression of feeling.
5. Moral realists (G.E. Moore, contemporary philosophers such as Derek Parfit) reject emotivism entirely. They argue that moral truths are objective and knowable, though not through empirical observation.
6. Moore's open question argument suggests that goodness cannot be reduced to any natural property, but this does not make moral claims meaningless; it makes them sui generis truths (truths of their own unique kind, not reducible to anything else).

Non-Western Perspectives on Emotivism

1. From a non-Western perspective, Ayer's emotivism appears culturally narrow. In Confucian ethics (explored in 10.2), moral cultivation is inseparable from knowledge and practice.
2. The claim that moral judgments are mere expressions of feeling would be incomprehensible within a tradition that treats ethical development as the primary goal of philosophical inquiry.
3. Buddhist ethics similarly challenges emotivism. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path are presented as truths about the nature of suffering and its cessation, not as expressions of the Buddha's personal preferences.
4. The concept of right action in Buddhism implies objective standards that emotivism cannot accommodate.
5. The debate between emotivism and its rivals remains central to meta-ethics, the branch of philosophy that asks what moral language means and whether moral knowledge is possible. Ayer's contribution was to pose the question with unmatched clarity: if moral statements are not empirically verifiable, what exactly are they?
6. The various answers to this question, examined more fully in Unit 4, constitute one of the richest areas of contemporary philosophy.

The Legacy of Ayer's Meta-Ethics

1. Despite its limitations, Ayer's emotivism permanently changed the landscape of moral philosophy. Before Language, Truth and Logic, meta-ethics barely existed as a distinct field.
2. Ayer forced philosophers to confront the question of what moral language does before attempting to answer substantive moral questions.
3. The distinction between first-order ethics (asking what is right and wrong) and meta-ethics (asking what the words 'right' and 'wrong' actually mean) became fundamental to analytic moral philosophy largely because of the challenge Ayer posed. Even philosophers who rejected emotivism had to articulate their meta-ethical position in response to it.
4. Emotivism also influenced the philosophy of law. Legal positivists such as H.L.A. Hart drew on the emotivist insight that legal norms cannot be derived from moral facts alone.
5. The separation of law and morality, central to legal positivism, has affinities with Ayer's separation of factual and evaluative language.
6. In aesthetics, Ayer's approach contributed to the rise of institutional theories of art. If aesthetic quality is not an objective property, then what makes something 'art' may be determined by social institutions (galleries, critics, art schools) rather than by intrinsic features.

Expressivist Refinements and Lasting Questions

1. George Dickie's institutional theory (1974) reflects this deflationary approach to aesthetic value.
2. Simon Blackburn's quasi-realism (a view that starts from emotivism but tries to earn back realistic-sounding moral talk) attempts to earn the right to talk as if moral facts exist while starting from an expressivist base. Blackburn argues that from within the practice of moral expression, we can reconstruct notions of moral truth, moral knowledge, and moral progress without requiring mind-independent moral facts.
3. If successful, quasi-realism would show that Ayer's expressivism need not impoverish moral discourse, allowing us to speak of moral 'truths' as projections from our attitudes rather than discoveries of external facts.
4. The ongoing vitality of meta-ethical debate testifies to the enduring power of Ayer's challenge. Whether moral judgments express feelings, state facts, issue prescriptions, or project attitudes onto the world remains one of the most contested questions in philosophy, as explored throughout Unit 4 and revisited in 10.1.7.
5. For IB students, understanding emotivism is essential not only for the prescribed text but for the ethics component of the course. Ayer's theory provides a clear, testable framework against which to evaluate other meta-ethical positions, making it an invaluable tool for structured exam responses.
6. The broader lesson of Ayer's treatment of ethics and aesthetics connects to the theme of 10.1.2: the verification principle eliminates not only metaphysics but also the evaluative dimension of human thought from the domain of knowledge. Whether this represents philosophical progress or an impoverishment of philosophy remains the central question for readers of Language, Truth and Logic.