{"agent_id":"ayer","agent_name":"A.J. Ayer","slug":"emotivism","label":"Emotivism: are ethical statements expressions of attitude rather than descriptions of moral facts?","topic":"Emotivism","question":"Are ethical statements expressions of attitude rather than descriptions of moral facts?","position":"Ethical concepts are pseudo-concepts. The statement \"stealing money is wrong\" has the same factual content as the statement \"stealing money\" uttered with a tone of horror or accompanied by an exclamation mark; the value-component is the expression of an attitude of disapproval, not the description of an additional moral fact. Aesthetic statements work the same way. The position is emotivism, sometimes caricatured as the boo/hoorah theory (\"boo to murder! hooray for kindness!\"), but the considered position is more sophisticated than the caricature: ethical and aesthetic statements have rule-governed and prescriptive features the cruder emotivism missed, and the refined position acknowledged in Philosophical Essays' 'On the Analysis of Moral Judgments' (1949) and the engagement with Hare's prescriptivism preserves the central insight while addressing the structural complaints. Moral disagreement is real disagreement of attitude rather than pseudo-disagreement; moral judgement has real practical importance; ethics is not reducible to mere preference. What the position rules out is moral cognitivism — the view that moral statements describe mind-independent moral facts — and the metaphysical commitments that cognitivism requires.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Ethical concepts are pseudo-concepts.","n":[]},{"t":"The statement \"stealing money is wrong\" has the same factual content as the statement \"stealing money\" uttered with a tone of horror or accompanied by an exclamation mark; the value-component is the expression of an attitude of disapproval, not the description of an additional moral fact.","n":[1]},{"t":"Aesthetic statements work the same way.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The position is emotivism, sometimes caricatured as the boo/hoorah theory (\"boo to murder! hooray for kindness!\"), but the considered position is more sophisticated than the caricature: ethical and aesthetic statements have rule-governed and prescriptive features the cruder emotivism missed, and the refined position acknowledged in Philosophical Essays' 'On the Analysis of Moral Judgments' (1949) and the engagement with Hare's prescriptivism preserves the central insight while addressing the structural complaints.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"Moral disagreement is real disagreement of attitude rather than pseudo-disagreement; moral judgement has real practical importance; ethics is not reducible to mere preference.","n":[]},{"t":"What the position rules out is moral cognitivism — the view that moral statements describe mind-independent moral facts — and the metaphysical commitments that cognitivism requires.","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"Language, Truth and Logic (1936) Chapter 6 'Critique of Ethics and Theology' for the original emotivist statement; 'On the Analysis of Moral Judgments' (1949, in Philosophical Essays); the introduction to Logical Positivism (1959); 'Are There Objective Values?' (Freedom and Morality 1984); the reply to David Wiggins in the Hahn volume on 'Ayer on Morality and Feeling: From Subjectivism to Emotivism and Back?'; the reply to Peter Kivy on aesthetic emotivism. Reception: C.L. Stevenson Ethics and Language (1944) for the parallel American emotivist tradition; R.M. Hare The Language of Morals (1952) and Freedom and Reason (1963) for prescriptivism as descendant; Philippa Foot 'Moral Beliefs' (1958) and Natural Goodness (2001) for the cognitivist response; G.E.M. Anscombe 'Modern Moral Philosophy' (1958) for the parallel-but-distinct critique; J.L. Mackie Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) for error theory as alternative; Simon Blackburn Ruling Passions (1998) for quasi-realism as contemporary descendant; David Wiggins Hahn essay; Peter Kivy Hahn essay.","works":["Language, Truth and Logic (1936) Chapter 6 'Critique of Ethics and Theology' for the original emotivist statement","'On the Analysis of Moral Judgments' (1949, in Philosophical Essays)","the introduction to Logical Positivism (1959)","'Are There Objective Values?' (Freedom and Morality 1984)","the reply to David Wiggins in the Hahn volume on 'Ayer on Morality and Feeling: From Subjectivism to Emotivism and Back?'","the reply to Peter Kivy on aesthetic emotivism"],"reception":"C.L. Stevenson Ethics and Language (1944) for the parallel American emotivist tradition; R.M. Hare The Language of Morals (1952) and Freedom and Reason (1963) for prescriptivism as descendant; Philippa Foot 'Moral Beliefs' (1958) and Natural Goodness (2001) for the cognitivist response; G.E.M. Anscombe 'Modern Moral Philosophy' (1958) for the parallel-but-distinct critique; J.L. Mackie Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) for error theory as alternative; Simon Blackburn Ruling Passions (1998) for quasi-realism as contemporary descendant; David Wiggins Hahn essay; Peter Kivy Hahn essay.","status":"Emotivism in LTL Chapter 6 is one of the most-cited and most-criticized positions in twentieth-century moral philosophy. Stevenson's Ethics and Language (1944) developed the parallel American version; Hare's prescriptivism is the most sophisticated descendant. The cognitivist tradition (Foot, Anscombe, McDowell, Wiggins) has been the major opposition; Mackie's error theory is a different non-cognitivist alternative; Blackburn's quasi-realism is the contemporary descendant of the emotivist programme that preserves the surface grammar of moral discourse while refusing the cognitivist commitments. The Hahn-volume essays by Wiggins and Kivy are the major late-career engagements; Ayer's replies refine and defend the position.","era":"1910-1989","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Freedom and Morality","page":"pp. 42–43","canonical":"","quote":"Could not the disagreement about the rightness or wrongness of Brutus's action be held to consist rather in the expression of conflicting attitudes than in the assertion of incompatible statements? Just as in the example of the oysters, the bestowal on the action by the opposing parties of what appear to be incompatible predicates would be logically deceptive.","label":"Freedom and Morality, pp. 42–43"},{"n":2,"work":"Language, Truth and Logic","page":"p. 106","canonical":"","quote":"And 106 as we have already rejected the \"naturalistic\" theories which are commonly supposed to provide the only alternative to \"absolutism\" in ethics, we seem to have reached a difficult position. We shall meet the difficulty by showing that the correct treatment of ethical statements is afforded by a third theory, which is wholly compatible with our radical empiricism.","label":"Language, Truth and Logic, p. 106"},{"n":3,"work":"Philosophical Essays","page":"pp. 261–262","canonical":"","quote":"Let me now say what it is not. In the first place, I am not saying that morals are trivial or unimportant, or that people ought not to bother with them. For this would itself be a judgement of value, which I have not made and do not wish to make. And even if I did wish to make it it would have no logical connection with my theory.","label":"Philosophical Essays, pp. 261–262"},{"n":4,"work":"Philosophical Essays","page":"p. 248","canonical":"","quote":"Thus, in the present instance, it is no doubt correct to say that the moralist does make statements, and, what is more, statements of fact, statements of ethical fact. It is correct in the sense that if a vote were taken on the point, those who objected to this way of speaking would probably be in the minority.","label":"Philosophical Essays, p. 248"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"logical-positivism-verificationism","label":"Logical positivism / verificationism: are metaphysical statements literally meaningless because they fail the verification principle?"},{"slug":"phenomenalism-and-sense-data","label":"Phenomenalism and sense-data: are physical-object statements reducible to statements about actual and counterfactual sense-experience?"},{"slug":"empiricist-theory-of-meaning-and-the-analytic-synthetic-dist","label":"Empiricist theory of meaning and the analytic/synthetic distinction: are there only analytic and empirical truths, with no synthetic a priori?"},{"slug":"causation-induction-probability","label":"Causation, induction, probability: is causation regular succession (Humean), and is induction justified through probability rather than necessary connection?"},{"slug":"other-minds-and-personal-identity","label":"Other minds and personal identity: is the argument from analogy the right route to knowledge of other minds, and is personal identity bodily-criterial with mental-continuity supplementation?"}]}