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Ayer's Ethical Theory: Emotivism or Subjectivism?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

David Wiggins
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Extract

In 1936, in a chapter of Language, Truth and Logic clearly influenced by Hume (though inconsistent with Hume) and influenced also (Ayer later conjectured) by Ogden's and Richards's The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Ayer claimed that judgments of value, in so far as they are not scientific statements, are not in the literal sense significant but are simply expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false. To say ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’ is not to state any more than one would have stated by merely saying ‘you stole that money’. To add that the action was wrong is not to make a further statement about it, but simply to evince one's moral disapproval. ‘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 mark. The tone or the exclamation mark adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings of the speaker’ (LTL, 107).

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 30 , September 1991 , pp. 181 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1991

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References

1 Thus Ayer comes by his own route to anticipate a conclusion reached in different ways and with different motivations from his by McDowell, John, (1985, 117–120)Google Scholar and by myself at p. 187 of ‘A Sensible Subjectivism?’, in (Wiggins, , 1987, 187).Google Scholar

2 I would also note that, if Hume's claims were amended on the model of Ayer's (using his ‘is to be approved of), the possibility would loom that Hume was not irrevocably committed by his subjective starting point or by his doctrine of the sovereignty of moral subjects to the claim (Treatise, 547)Google Scholar that ‘There is just so much vice or virtue in any character as every one places in it and ‘tis impossible in this particular we can ever be mistaken.’ The subjectivist can say something more subtle than this. Hume makes a start upon this himself in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’.

3 See notes 1 and 2.

4 In Language, Truth and Logic Ayer had a fourfold division of ethical propositions. These were roughly (1) definitions (2) descriptions of the phenomena of moral experience (3) exhortations (4) actual ethical judgments. The analysis of (4) was the only thing Ayer invested with strictly philosophical interest. For Ayer's relaxation of this restrictive ruling, see ‘Are there objective values?’, op. cit. paragraph 3 following; also the sixth paragraph from the end.

5 Then in Principia the idea of the natural is extended to the metaphysical. A metaphysical property is a property that stands to some supersensible object in the same relation in which natural properties stand to natural objects. See Lewy, , 1964–1965.Google Scholar

6 See my ‘A Sensible Subjectivism’ and chapter 4 of (Wiggins, , 1987Google Scholar also, ibid. Postscript sections 3, 4).

7 Even if isolated cases of this could be produced, the point is that they are not at all typical of normal disagreement.

8 Hume's essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ points the way here.