Emotivism

As we have seen, noncognitivists hold that moral judgments are something different from ordinary beliefs - a different sort of state of mind that is more like desire, and that is why moral judgments have a more intimate connection to motivation than ordinary beliefs do. There are historical precursors to noncognitivism throughout history. Some of these were influential philosophers who were not traditionally interpreted as being noncognitivists, but from the perspective of clearer statements of noncognitivism in the twentieth century can also be interpreted as accepting it. Some gave clearer statements of noncognitivism but were not widely influential, or not for that reason. But the first widely read and promulgated defenses of noncognitivism in print arrived in the mid-1930’s, and defended a range of related noncognitivist views that came at the time to be known as ‘emotivism’, in part due to the influence of our reading for this class.

A.J. Ayer

The first of two prominent introductions of emotivism in the mid-1930’s was in chapter 6 of A.J. Ayer’s extremely widely read book Language, Truth, and Logic. Ayer was a young British philosopher who had studied in Vienna among the logical positivists and returned to England and published a short book that gave a very accessible introduction to many of the positivists’ ideas. The central idea of logical positivism is the verification theory of meaning, which says that if there is no way to verify that a sentence is true, then it is meaningless. Ayer held that there is no way of observing or verifying by experiment that any moral claim is true, and so he argued that all moral claims are meaningless. Chapter six of his book is devoted to describing what moral language might be useful for, even though it is meaningless. If you don’t know about it yet, there is a great anecdote about A.J. Ayer meeting Mike Tyson at a party at the height of Tyson’s boxing career.

C.L.Stevenson

In North America, at Yale, Charles Stevenson was arguing for a kind of emotivist view about moral language and thought from a very different kind of argument than Ayer’s. Whereas Ayer’s argument was high-level and had very little to do with ethics, Stevenson’s argument draws on his appreciation for some of the nuances of how moral (or ethical) language is actually used. So we’re going to read Stevenson as our leading example of the kind of view that Smith is trying to push back against in his chapter. The painting of Stevenson above is by the philosopher Renee Bolinger, who earned her PhD at USC in 2017 and has taught since at Princeton University and now the University of Michigan, where Stevenson himself taught for much of his career. It is in the expressionist style - an allusion to the fact that Stevenson’s views are a predecessor to the contemporary form of noncognitivism known as metaethical expressivism.

Reading

To prepare for class, please read ‘The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms’. As you read, ask yourself what Stevenson means by his metaphor that using moral language is more like watering a desert than describing it. Has Smith been fair to the noncognitivists, in his descriptions of their view? Do you think that he has been fair to their motivations, or to the sophistication with which they might hold their view?