Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes.Garner and Rosen, Moral Philosophy, chapter 13 ("Noncognitivist Theories") and Brandt, Ethical Theory, chapter 9 ("Noncognitivism") regard the ethical theories of Ayer, Stevenson and Hare as noncognitivist ones.Ogden and Richards, Meaning, 125: "'Good' is alleged to stand for a unique, unanalyzable concept … [which] is the subject matter of ethics. This peculiar ethical use of 'good' is, we suggest, a purely emotive use. … Thus, when we so use it in the sentence, 'This is good,' we merely refer to this, and the addition of "is good" makes no difference whatever to our reference … it serves only as an emotive sign expressing our attitude to this, and perhaps evoking similar attitudes in other persons, or inciting them to actions of one kind or another." This quote appears in an extended form just before the preface of Stevenson's Ethics and Language. 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,Pepper, Ethics, 277: "[Emotivism] was stated in its simplest and most striking form by A. J. Ayer." but its development owes more to C. L. Stevenson.Brandt, Ethical Theory, 239, calls Stevenson's Ethics and Language "the most important statement of the emotive theory", and Pepper, Ethics, 288, says it "was the first really systematic development of the value judgment theory and will probably go down in the history of ethics as the most representative for this school."
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.Brandt, Ethical Theory, 221: "A recent book [The Language of Morals] by R. M. Hare has proposed a view, otherwise very similar to the emotive theory, with modifications …"Wilks, Emotion, 79: "… while Hare was, no doubt, a critic of the [emotive theory], he was, in the eyes of his own critics, a kind of emotivist himself. His theory, as a consequence, has sometimes been depicted as a reaction against emotivism and at other times as an extension of it."
History
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.Berkeley, Treatise, paragraph 20: "The communicating of Ideas marked by Words is not the chief and only end of Language, as is commonly supposed. There are other Ends, as the raising of some Passion, the exciting to, or deterring from an Action, the putting the Mind in some particular Disposition …" Decades later, David Hume espoused ideas similar to Stevenson's later ones.Stevenson, Ethics, 273: "Of all traditional philosophers, Hume has most clearly asked the questions that here concern us, and has most nearly reached a conclusion that the present writer can accept." 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.Moore, Ethics, x: "Although this critique [of ethical naturalism] had a powerful impact, the appeal of Moore's nonnaturalistic cognitivism was, by contrast, relatively weak. In the decades following Principia, many philosophers who were persuaded by the former ended up abandoning cognitivism altogether in favor of the position that distinctively ethical discourse is not cognitive at all, but rather an expression of attitude or emotion."
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,Wilks, Emotion, 1: "… I do not take Ayer's ethical theory to hinge in any necessarily dependent sense upon his verificationist thesis … I take his ethical theory to hinge upon his verificationist thesis only to the extent that it assumes logic and empirical verification (and combinations thereof) to be the only means of firmly establishing the truth or falsity of any claim to knowledge." and some positivists in the Vienna Circle, which had great influence on Ayer, held non-emotivist views.Satris, Ethical Emotivism, 23: "Utilitarian, rationalist and cognitivist positions are in fact maintained by the members of the Vienna Circle who wrote in the fields of ethics, social theory and value theory, namely, Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Viktor Kraft and Karl Menger."
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.Hare, Language, 14–15: "The suggestion, that the function of moral judgments was to persuade, led to a difficulty in distinguishing their functions from that of propaganda. … It does not matter whether the means used to persuade are fair or foul, so long as they do persuade. And therefore the natural reaction to the realization that someone is trying to persuade us is 'He's trying to get at me; I must be on my guard …' Such a reaction to moral judgments should not be encouraged by philosophers." After Pepper, Ethics, 297. 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:
Proponents 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.Urmson, Emotive Theory, 15: "The earliest statement of the emotive theory of value terms in the modern British-American tradition (as opposed to statements in such continental writers as Haegerstroem, which became known to English-speaking philosophers only comparatively late and had no early influence) was, so far as I know, that given by I. A. Richards in a general linguistic and epistemological work, The Meaning of Meaning …"; Urmson, Emotive Theory, 16–17; Brandt, Ethical Theory, 206: "The earliest suggestions of the theory in the [20th] century have been made by W. H. F. Barnes and A. Duncan-Jones." 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
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: "Propositions which express definitions of ethical terms, or judgements about the legitimacy or possibility of certain definitions" "Propositions describing the phenomena of moral experience, and their causes" "Exhortations to moral virtue" "Actual ethical judgments"Ayer, Language, 103 He focuses on propositions of the first class—moral judgments—saying that those of the second class belong to science, those of the third are mere commands, and those of the fourth (which are considered in normative ethics as opposed to meta-ethics) are too concrete for ethical philosophy. While class three statements were irrelevant to Ayer's brand of emotivism, they would later play a significant role in Stevenson's.
Ayer argues that moral judgments cannot be translated into non-ethical, empirical terms and thus cannot be verified; in this he agrees with ethical intuitionists. But he differs from intuitionists by discarding appeals to intuition as "worthless" for determining moral truths,Ayer, Language, 106 since the intuition of one person often contradicts that of another. Instead, Ayer concludes that ethical concepts are "mere pseudo-concepts":
Ayer agrees with subjectivists in saying that ethical statements are necessarily related to individual attitudes, but he says they lack truth value because they cannot be properly understood as propositions about those attitudes; Ayer thinks ethical sentences are expressions, not assertions, of approval. While an assertion of approval may always be accompanied by an expression of approval, expressions can be made without making assertions; Ayer's example is boredom, which can be expressed through the stated assertion "I am bored" or through non-assertions including tone of voice, body language, and various other verbal statements. He sees ethical statements as expressions of the latter sort, so the phrase "Theft is wrong" is a non-propositional sentence which is an expression of disapproval but is not equivalent to the proposition "I disapprove of theft".
Having argued that his theory of ethics is noncognitive and not subjective, he accepts that his position and subjectivism are equally confronted by G. E. Moore's argument that ethical disputes are clearly genuine disputes and not just expressions of contrary feelings. Ayer's defense is that all ethical disputes are about facts regarding the proper application of a value system to a specific case, not about the value systems themselves, because any dispute about values can only be resolved by judging that one value system is superior to another, and this judgment itself presupposes a shared value system. If Moore is wrong in saying that there are actual disagreements of value, we are left with the claim that there are actual disagreements of fact, and Ayer accepts this without hesitation:
C. L. Stevenson