Ayer on the Nature of Ethical Judgments
Ayer makes a truly original and remarkable statement about moral judgments and ethical judgments which some scholars have summarized as a phenomenon called emotivism. Within this theory, there is the belief that moral judgments aren't necessarily truthful; they're an expression of sentiments of approval or disapproval (Ayer). Thus, according to this construct saying something like murder, stealing, lying or cheating is "wrong" merely expresses how the speaker feels about it. But to say that something is "wrong" because the speaker doesn't necessarily like something, doesn't mean that the action described is wrong. The only truth exhibited is in the sentiments of the speaker. As Ayer explains, "[I]f I say to someone 'You acted wrongly in stealing that money', I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, 'You stole that money.' In adding that this action is wrong, I am not making any further statement about it, I am simply evincing my moral disapproval about it. It is as if I had said, 'You stole that money,' in a peculiar tone of horror, or written with the addition of some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker" (Ayer). According to Ayer, the idea of stealing, lying, cheating, hurting others and the "wrongness" implied in these actions is not factual, simply an expression of the moral judgment of the speaker. There is no right or wrong to it.
As certain scholars have found, Ayer's basis for emotivism is based on the following principles: the verification principle, the narrowness of ethical statements, and something which is referred to as non-cognitivism. According to Ayer, the verification principle is as follows: "A synthetic proposition is meaningful, and hence can be true or false, only if it is empirically verifiable. All literally meaningful propositions are either analytic -- true by definition...
Hence, the moral judgments that people utter about killing or hurting others are simply not empirically verifiable. While they may
play on the sensibilities and heart strings of members of
society and may cause us horror or revulsion, they are still not things which can be verified in their "wrongness." As Ayer explains, ethical statements simply cannot be translated into messages of fact (123). This is a result of their synthetic quality, which makes them untrue by definition (123). As a result of this, they have a certain degree of non-cognitivism which means that they're not exactly meaningful and have neither truth nor falseness ascribed to them (123). Thus, in line with non-cognitivism is emotivism which means that a moral judgment is simply an
emotion.
As other scholars explain, Ayer's
theory is nothing more than a case of moral subjectivism. This means that when one encounters an ethical judgment such as the ones expressed as examples for the purpose of this paper, the only truth one encounters is that they communicate the attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and opinions of the person speaking (Pollard). This is viewed as a type of moral relativism (also known as individual relativism since it views and shapes
morality as being in
connection to the individual. This view of morality, is a type of meta-ethical theory which expresses a perspective on the nature of
ethics, and what types of behaviors can be viewed as right vs. wrong. "Some say moral subjectivists conceive moral judgments such as 'It's wrong to torture hamsters for fun" as like aesthetic judgments such as 'Rodin's The Thinker is Brilliant', 'Strawberry ice-cream is my favourite'…
