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.