Emotivism

Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes. Hence, it is colloquially known as the hurrah/boo theory. Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, but its development owes more to C. L. Stevenson.In moral deliberations we must be acquainted beforehand with all the objects, and all their relations to each other; and from a comparison of the whole, fix our choice or approbation. … While we are ignorant whether a man were aggressor or not, how can we determine whether the person who killed him be criminal or innocent? But after every circumstance, every relation is known, the understanding has no further room to operate, nor any object on which it could employ itself. The approbation or blame which then ensues, cannot be the work of the judgement, but of the heart; and is not a speculative proposition or affirmation, but an active feeling or sentiment.I did, and do, follow the emotivists in their rejection of descriptivism. But I was never an emotivist, though I have often been called one. But unlike most of their opponents I saw that it was their irrationalism, not their non-descriptivism, which was mistaken. So my main task was to find a rationalist kind of non-descriptivism, and this led me to establish that imperatives, the simplest kinds of prescriptions, could be subject to logical constraints while not descriptive.The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if 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 of it. It is as if I had said, 'You stole that money,' in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks. … If now I generalise my previous statement and say, 'Stealing money is wrong,' I produce a sentence that has no factual meaning—that is, expresses no proposition that can be either true or false. … I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments.If our opponent concurs with us in expressing moral disapproval of a given type t, then we may get him to condemn a particular action A, by bringing forward arguments to show that A is of type t. For the question whether A does or does not belong to that type is a plain question of fact.If told to close the door, one may ask 'Why?' and receive some such reason as 'It is too drafty,' or 'The noise is distracting.' … These reasons cannot be called 'proofs' in any but a dangerously extended sense, nor are they demonstratively or inductively related to an imperative; but they manifestly do support an imperative. They 'back it up,' or 'establish it,' or 'base it on concrete references to fact.'The imperative is used to alter the hearer's attitudes or actions. … The supporting reason then describes the situation the imperative seeks to alter, or the new situation the imperative seeks to bring about; and if these facts disclose that the new situation will satisfy a preponderance of the hearer's desires, he will hesitate to obey no longer. More generally, reasons support imperatives by altering such beliefs as may in turn alter an unwillingness to obey.'This is good' has the meaning of 'This has qualities or relations X, Y, Z … ,' except that 'good' has as well a laudatory meaning, which permits it to express the speaker's approval, and tends to evoke the approval of the hearer. depends on the sheer, direct emotional impact of words—on emotive meaning, rhetorical cadence, apt metaphor, stentorian, stimulating, or pleading tones of voice, dramatic gestures, care in establishing rapport with the hearer or audience, and so on. … A redirection of the hearer's attitudes is sought not by the mediating step of altering his beliefs, but by exhortation, whether obvious or subtle, crude or refined.Suppose, for instance, as a child a person disliked eating peas. When he recalls this as an adult he is amused and notes how preferences change with age. He does not say, however, that his former attitude was mistaken. If, on the other hand, he remembers regarding irreligion or divorce as wicked, and now does not, he regards his former view as erroneous and unfounded. … Ethical statements do not look like the kind of thing the emotive theory says they are.… There is no doubt that such words as 'you ought to do so-and-so' may be used as one's means of so inducing a person to behave a certain way. But if we are to do justice to the meaning of 'right' or 'ought', we must take account also of such modes of speech as 'he ought to do so-and-so', 'you ought to have done so-and-so', 'if this and that were the case, you ought to have done so-and-so', 'if this and that were the case, you ought to do so-and-so', 'I ought to do so-and-so.' Where the judgement of obligation has referenced either a third person, not the person addressed, or to the past, or to an unfulfilled past condition, or to a future treated as merely possible, or to the speaker himself, there is no plausibility in describing the judgement as command.It may seem that the only way to make a necessary connexion between 'injury' and the things that are to be avoided, is to say that it is only used in an 'action-guiding sense' when applied to something the speaker intends to avoid. But we should look carefully at the crucial move in that argument, and query the suggestion that someone might happen not to want anything for which he would need the use of hands or eyes. Hands and eyes, like ears and legs, play a part in so many operations that a man could only be said not to need them if he had no wants at all.Philosophers who have supposed that actual action was required if 'good' were to be used in a sincere evaluation have got into difficulties over weakness of will, and they should surely agree that enough has been done if we can show that any man has reason to aim at virtue and avoid vice. But is this impossibly difficult if we consider the kinds of things that count as virtue and vice? Consider, for instance, the cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance, courage and justice. Obviously any man needs prudence, but does he not also need to resist the temptation of pleasure when there is harm involved? And how could it be argued that he would never need to face what was fearful for the sake of some good? It is not obvious what someone would mean if he said that temperance or courage were not good qualities, and this not because of the 'praising' sense of these words, but because of the things that courage and temperance are. Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes. Hence, it is colloquially known as the hurrah/boo theory. Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, but its development owes more to C. L. Stevenson. Emotivism can be considered a form of non-cognitivism or expressivism. It stands in opposition to other forms of non-cognitivism (such as quasi-realism and universal prescriptivism), as well as to all forms of cognitivism (including both moral realism and ethical subjectivism). In the 1950s, emotivism appeared in a modified form in the universal prescriptivism of R. M. Hare. Emotivism reached prominence in the early 20th century, but it was born centuries earlier. In 1710, George Berkeley wrote that language in general often serves to inspire feelings as well as communicate ideas. Decades later, David Hume espoused ideas similar to Stevenson's later ones. In his 1751 book An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume considered morality not to be related to fact but 'determined by sentiment': G. E. Moore published his Principia Ethica in 1903 and argued that the attempts of ethical naturalists to translate ethical terms (like good and bad) into non-ethical ones (like pleasing and displeasing) committed the 'naturalistic fallacy'. Moore was a cognitivist, but his case against ethical naturalism steered other philosophers toward noncognitivism, particularly emotivism. The emergence of logical positivism and its verifiability criterion of meaning early in the 20th century led some philosophers to conclude that ethical statements, being incapable of empirical verification, were cognitively meaningless. This criterion was fundamental to A.J. Ayer's defense of positivism in Language, Truth and Logic, which contains his statement of emotivism. However, positivism is not essential to emotivism itself, perhaps not even in Ayer's form, and some positivists in the Vienna Circle, which had great influence on Ayer, held non-emotivist views. R. M. Hare unfolded his ethical theory of universal prescriptivism in 1952's The Language of Morals, intending to defend the importance of rational moral argumentation against the 'propaganda' he saw encouraged by Stevenson, who thought moral argumentation was sometimes psychological and not rational. But Hare's disagreement was not universal, and the similarities between his noncognitive theory and the emotive one — especially his claim, and Stevenson's, that moral judgments contain commands and are thus not purely descriptive — caused some to regard him as an emotivist, a classification he denied: Influential statements of emotivism were made by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in their 1923 book on language, The Meaning of Meaning, and by W. H. F. Barnes and A. Duncan-Jones in independent works on ethics in 1934. However, it is the later works of Ayer and especially Stevenson that are the most developed and discussed defenses of the theory. A. J. Ayer's version of emotivism is given in chapter six, 'Critique of Ethics and Theology', of Language, Truth and Logic. In that chapter, Ayer divides 'the ordinary system of ethics' into four classes: