CrimePsych

One tends to wonder whether an emotivist view of ethics will ultimately result in a case of moral nihilism. Firstly, lets examine what exactly is emotivism and then have a look at a few problems faced by it. Emotivism is a form of non-cognitivism and was first put forward for consideration by A. J. Ayer in his book Language, Truth and Logic. Although more sophisticated versions of non-cognitivism were later penned by people such as Charles Stevenson, Simon Blackburn, Allan Gibbard and Richard Hare, Ayer’s version is the most unadorned yet still highly confrontational of these developed theories.

Ayer’s argument for his particular form of non-cognitivism considered various forms of cognitivism and found them all to be questionable or improbable. He considered both naturalism and non-naturalism but ultimately found that all forms of cognitivism fail and thus concluded that the best, if not only way to make any sense of moral judgments was to opt for a completely different strategy towards them, thus he took the side of non-cognitivism and more to the point emotivism as a whole.

Ayer denied from the very beginning that moral judgements express beliefs, he concluded that moral judgements are more a case of communicating emotions, or your own personal sentiments of support or condemnation to the world. These particular emotions or sentiments never claimed to represent how the world was but simply put forward an individuals personal feelings or attitudes and therefore they cannot be scrutinised for truthfulness or falseness.

If you were to say to someone ‘Killing small defenceless children is wrong’ it is the same as saying that ‘I think you acted wrongly by killing those small defenceless children’. The content of the statement has not changed, you have simply added your own personal feelings, or expressed your own sentiments in regards to killing small defenceless children. Is this a true moral judgement? To emotivism it is, and whether this statement is true or open to discussion as they are your own sentiments or emotions and hence are not truth-apt as previously stated.

Another point to acknowledge is that if one is to state ‘There is a fire in a house down the street’, this can be assessed for truthfulness or falsity as you are making a claim about how the world is as opposed to the fear that the house could be yours and someone may be trapped inside. This second statement cannot be truth-apt and therefore cannot be assessed for truthfulness or falsity as it has no such representative function. It does not claim that the real world is a certain way, it does not state anything at all, it simply expresses your personal feelings about a statement that has been made. Even if one was to say aloud a sentence regarding your feelings it still does not try to represent anything, it simply states your personal emotions.

It is sometimes difficult to decipher the difference between a persons beliefs and a person emotions or sentiments, and this is what can make understanding emotivism that much harder as attention to detail and wording is needed at all times. A belief is defined as conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence, while an emotion is defined as;

A) the affective aspect of consciousness, feeling
B) a state of feeling
C) a psychic and physical reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling and physiologically involving changes that prepare the body for immediate vigorous action.

These two definations, although not as clear as one would like it to be, do shed some light on the difference between a belief and an emotion. A belief is something based on evidence and is asserted as being true, someone may give you reasons to support a particular belief but this does not mean it summons up any particular type of emotion or sentiment in you, while an emotion is not asserted as being true, it is simply your opinion, and is not based on any sort of evidence, it is also possible to associate a physiological effect with emotions where beliefs are devoid of this.

As you can see there is an extremely thin line between a belief and an emotion, and based upon the available definitions one tends to wonder whether the word ‘belief’ in common usage may be better replaced by the word ‘emotion’ as it is improbable that people who use the world ‘belief’ are describing things that are devoid of emotion. Generally though, people who have a certain belief also have an emotion attached to that belief, rightly or wrongly it is impossible for somebody to have a strong belief without any sort of emotional feeling attached to it. This is one of the problems troubling emotivism as a whole and is referred to as the implied error problem which we will discuss a bit later.

Ayer’s argument against non-naturalism was austere yet effective. Moore claims that all moral judgements are truth-apt, and are rendered true or false by the concrete ideals surrounding the non-natural, simple and unanalysable properties that define moral integrity. Now according to logical positivists, of which Ayer was one, there are only two ways that a statement can be considered to be literally significant. The first being that a statement must be empirically verifiable, or alternatively it must be analytic i.e. its truth is evident from the meaning of the words the proposition contains.

For example, one can quite easily claim that ‘If I drop a bowling ball off a tall building it will fall’, as per the definition of empirically verifiable, one needs to be capable of proving or disproving this statement by observation or experiment, hence such a claim is literally significant. Also a statement such as ‘All living human beings have a heart beat’ is literally significant. One could claim that this second statement is also empirically verifiable as it is quite easy to prove by experiment given the right resources or skills, but that is unlikely to be necessary as its truth is evident from the meanings of the words contained in the statement and no right-minded individual could objectively claim otherwise.

According to the logical positivist moral judgements come under the category of being literally significant and as such if a commonly accepted moral judgement or statement is neither empirically verifiable or analytic then it cannot be assessed in terms of truthfulness and falsity as it is not truth-apt.

However one thing to keep in mind is that not all statements are either empirically verifiable or analytic such as statements about the dawn of the universe. While no empirical or analytical evidence can be provided for such claims they are commonly accepted as true. Another thing to consider is that when Ayer attempted to construct a criterion with which to judge those statements that are empirically verifiable he encountered extensive amounts of trouble. He was unable to formulate a criterion that did not count any arbitrary statements.

Regretfully or not, Moore seems to sink his own ship by agreeing with Ayer that moral judgements are not analytical. What his reasoning behind this statement was is unclear however it does raise some very major issues for the non-naturalist as they are now left with the claim that moral judgements are literally significant based on the fact that they are empirically verifiable.

On the subject of naturalism though a much simpler rejection is called upon and is an application of the Open-Question Argument. Ayer quite simply states that “Since it is not self-contradictory to say that some pleasant things are not good, or that some bad things are desired, it cannot be the case that the sentence ‘x is good’ is equivalent to ‘x is pleasant’ or to ‘x is desired’. And to every other variant of utilitarianism with which I am acquainted the same objection can be made”.

As you can plainly see from this particular extract, the Open-Question Argument does not have the sort of weight that was actually attributed to it and thusly naturalism cannot be concluded to be a plausible claim.

Given that Ayer has denounced both naturalism and non-naturalism, but fails to provide a criterion with which to judge empirically verifiable moral judgements, his argument against non-naturalism is not convincing.

Ethical concepts are then sometimes referred to as pseudo-concepts by Ayer, and these thoughts are further strengthened by his comments about metaphysical concepts such as ‘Reality is one substance and not many’. What is Ayer trying to express by these statements? Ayer is simply saying that although moral judgements or statements are not empirically verifiable and are not analytic, and as such are not literally significant this does not result in moral nihilism. The fact that statements that are not literally significant are classified generally as nonsensical does not hold with moral judgements as they possess another sort of significance, emotive significance.

This generates a couple of problems for his theory that moral judgements are emotively significant, firstly how does Ayer evaluate those moral judgements that have emotive significance? What criterion does he use to make his evaluation? Secondly, and more challengingly, Ayer needs to state said criterion in such a way that it grants emotive significance to moral judgements but still denies it to statements made by the metaphysicians. Nowhere does Ayer attempt to resolve these two questions and as such his claims that moral judgements are emotively significant and not literally significant suffer, making them problematical to support or agree with.

The likely reason that Ayer does not attempt to answer either of these questions is because no adequate response can be formulated that can achieve what needs to be achieved. By denying metaphysics one eliminates a cavalcade of possibilities that cannot be tested nor answered with any sort of transcendental justification. It is impossible to test the nature of reality, one can only hypothesise on it within the realms of human knowledge.

Emotivism does suffer from other problems, all of which impact on its plausibility. The first of these is that expressivist theories, of which emotivism is one, commit what is know as the ‘speech-act fallacy’ by stating that even though a particular statement or judgement expresses an attitude there are plenty of times when these statements or judgements also say something. Based upon this a person would be lacking judgement if they relied solely on this in an argument for emotivism as a plausible theory, as it is an invalid argument.

To look at the definition of moral nihilism it means to deny that there are true moral principles. What exactly is a true moral principle and how do you define one? It is a difficult question and astoundingly troublesome to define as society knows all too well that different cultures around the world have different moral principles, and what may be considered heinous or evil in one culture may not be considered the same in another. For example, suicide bombers who believe they are doing the right thing and believe that by sacrificing their lives and destroying so many others that they will live forever in a heavenly afterlife where all their dreams will come true. It is challenging for most people to be able to understand or comprehend the motivation behind these actions and as such adds to the overall complexity of the emotivist view. This is one of the likely reasons why Ayer did not try and formulate a criterion with which to assess those moral judgements that are emotively significant. How can you formulate a criterion for assessing moral judgements if the emotions attached to certain actions differ the world over? In one country or society an emotion of outrage, loss and sadness for a man who murders his own wife for committing adultery is the customary reaction, and as such is considered to be morally wrong, but in another country it may be an accepted form of retribution to which no reaction or emotion is warranted.

This also leads us to another problematic scenario that Simon Blackburn brought to light. Emotivism also comes under the projectionism bracket and what we are actually doing when we make a judgement or statement is projecting our emotions onto the world. When we say ‘Rape is wrong’ we are treating ‘wrong’ as if it is a quality of rape, we are projecting our sentiments onto it in such a way that ‘wrong’ becomes a predicate of ‘rape’. What are the implications for moral judgements based on this? If we are to think and speak of goodness as a property, when said property doesn’t actually exist, isn’t our way of thinking and speaking critically flawed? This leads to the elimination of our particular form of moralizing, or at a bare minimum a re-evaluation and revision of it, as this way of thinking can realistically be nothing but a mistake.

This leads us closer to a text book definitional version of moral nihilism as if no clear moral judgements or values can be established due to contradictory ideas then how can there be any true moral principles? It begins to appear that although there are moral judgements and beliefs, there aren’t any, in the definitional sense, true moral principles. So if right and wrong are expressions of our own feelings or sentiments, and these are being projected onto the world, how can we take seriously any moral principles? This is the shocking reality of such a dilemma as to fully adopt an emotivist theory of moral judgements one needs to consider all its short comings, which unfortunately are vast and seem to establish a few critical flaws in it. Why would a person follow their own moral principles knowing that they are ungrounded? If right and wrong are attached to our feelings, emotions and sentiments then if any of these change our moral principles change too, this excites once again the hypothesis that there are no true moral principles and thus by definition moral nihilism occurs. It is likely to be impossible for the emotivist to separate morals from being mind dependent as this is where our sentiments, feelings and emotions stem from, if one takes away the mind you can no longer call it emotivism as the basis for moral principles now takes a sharp curve away from its initial origin toward some unknown.

It appears that moral nihilism is an unavoidable outcome of emotivism and it is likely that Ayer realised this as he, as previously stated, did not attempt to answer a couple of the problems that were particularly troublesome. As evidenced in the Introduction to his second edition of Language, Truth and Logic he states: “In putting forward the principle of verification as a criterion of the meaning, I do not overlook the fact that the word ‘meaning’ is commonly used in a variety of senses, and I do not wish to deny that in some of these senses a statement may properly be said to be meaningful even though it is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable”.

This unfortunately is a weak defence for emotivism and as such it appears that its explanations for the source of moral judgements and the theory as a whole suffer, the dilemmas it tries to work through are not successfully solved and regretfully moral nihilism is the outcome. This is somewhat disappointing because the theory as whole seems to have a lot of promise but until such times as a response to these problems can be formulated it cannot be treated as a plausible account of moral judgements.