Meta-ethics: Emotivism Flashcards
Meta ethics + Emotivism definitions
A discipline in ethics that attempts to understand the nature of ethical statements, attitudes, properties, and judgements.
Emotivism is a meta ethical theory that claims there are no objective moral values (anti-realism) and that no one can have knowledge of moral facts (non-cognitivism).
Logical positivism
- scientific method for verifying knowledge (process of verification) which excluded the possibility of moral facts.
- influenced by Hume, sentiment as a source of right and wrong. Feelings > reason. Common feeling for each other’s welfare.
- You can’t go from a factual statement (‘is’) to a moral one (‘ought’), moral facts not like scientific ones, conclusion that these are not facts at all.
- statements true or false depending whether someone could check the facts referred to. No possible evidence for or against statement means it is meaningless.
Logical positivism- Wittgenstein
- presents this view of language- ‘Tractatus’ (1921)
- influenced philosophers in the Vienna Circle, where logical positivism was developed.
- influence spread by Ayer in ‘Language, Truth, and Logic’ (1936). Two kinds of propositions (truths through definition and truths through sensory experience- tautologies vs not being able to point towards moral facts.
- therefore, all moral statements are meaningless.
Hume’s fork
- the belief that language is either analytic or synthetic.
- statements about objective world must be true by definition (analytic) or verifiable by sensory experience (synthetic)
- argued moral statements are neither analytic nor synthetic- expression of emotion or sentiment.
- moral statements don’t fit on either prong- objectively meaningless.
- moral statements do have meaning, but not objective meaning
- therefore, objective moral laws do not exist, emotivism as a non-cognitive approach.
- Ayer built on this.
Ayer’s development on Hume
- agreed statements are either analytic or synthetic, and that moral statements have no factual basis.
- therefore, these are not factual -> moral statements aren’t empirical.
- statements about reality need to be verified true or false- verification principle.
- expression of morality is mere expression of emotion.
Analytic truths
True by definition, like mathematics or statements like ‘All bachelors are unmarried’. The truth is know immediately, when we understand what bachelor means.
Synthetic truths
Verified by experience. May or may not be true and we look to find out. eg. ‘The sun is shining’ or ‘Nothing can escape a black hole’. May not actually be true but through investigation we can determine that the sun is shining day and night even if we can’t see it, and black holes emit Hawking radiation.
Building on open question argument
Ayer presented the idea that it is not contradictory to say some pleasant things are good and some bad things are desired.
Pleasure does not equate to goodness.
Verification principle
- claims that a statement only has meaning if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable. (meaning of words or empirical evidence)
- Language, Truth, and Logic- applies principle to ethical language. ‘Murder is wrong’- not analytic, no empirical investigation. We can show the product of grief and pain, or action carried out in anger. But we cannot demonstrate that it is wrong.
- moral judgements do not state truths or falsehoods, and are therefore literally meaningless.
- Ayer uses this to critique emotivism.
(could respond with critique of verification principle)
Development of theory
- Moral judgements express feelings, ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’ = moral disapproval.
- Moral language expresses our feelings + aims to arouse feelings in others to get them to act in certain ways.
- First distinguished from subjectivism.
- Compares to Moore’s intuitionism.
Comparison to other ethical approaches
Intuitionism
- agrees with Moore that ‘X is wrong’ cannot mean ‘X would cause unhappiness’
- open question argument -> never a contradiction to say ‘X would cause unhappiness but it is right to do it nonetheless’
- agrees ethical naturalism is wrong
Non-naturalism
- also rejected; Moore believed moral judgements are about non-natural properties. Neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, they are ultimately true or false.
- Ayer responds to this as unsatisfactory- need to provide some criterion for deciding between conflicting intuitions (cannot verify through intuition)
- Need empirical criterion to fulfill the verification principle- but cannot weigh intuitions in this way.
- moral judgements are not genuinely meaningful, express our own feelings and approval or disapproval, and to arouse these feelings in others.
Approaches in ‘Language, Truth, and Logic’
- Utilitarians- argue that ‘good’ is equivalent to pleasure.
- Subjectivists- see ‘good’ as equivalent to a ‘feeling of approval’
- Intuitionists because ‘unless it is possible to provide some criterion by which one may decide between conflicting intuitions, a mere appeal to intuition is worthless as a test of a propositions validity’- if we say we just know it is right, this is only of psychological interest
Subjectivism
moral judgements assert or report approval or disapproval, different to emotivism due to difference in expressing disapproval and asserting it.
- ‘X is wrong’ = generally disapproved of. Cannot be right because it is not contradictory to say ‘Most people approve of X, but X is wrong nonetheless’ (example of racism in history)
- ‘speaker subjectivism’ = ‘I disapprove of X’, the facts that make moral judgements true are facts about the individual speakers mind.
- however, emotivism claims that moral judgements do not express any kind of truth of falsehood, because they are not cognitive.
Boo-hurrah
- The theory states that we use ethical words to express our feelings or attitudes and to evoke similar feelings or attitudes in other people. Hence, ‘… is wrong’ or ‘… is right’ amount only to ‘Boo! ‘ or ‘Hoorah!
- expression of personal approval or disapproval
Example of ‘animal experimentation is evil’
- not informative about the world, not making a proposition that we could check and verify and falsify.
- ‘the presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content’- expressing feelings like saying ‘Boo to primate experiments!’
