My name is Ima Emotivist. I’ve embraced emotivism as I’ve learned that moral judgments express only feelings, and not true or false judgments.
Let me tell you how I came to emotivism. I’m a double-major in philosophy and chemistry, with a special interest in philosophy of science. The British A.J. Ayer is my favorite philosopher. Like Ayer, I respect the scientific method, which I see as the only way to gain knowledge about the world. Scientific method has you propose a view and then do experiments to see if your view is correct. A view must be testable by sense experience—or else it makes no sense. This is the idea behind Ayer’s logical positivism philosophy.
I’m oversimplifying here. To be more precise, I must bring in technical terms; I hope I don’t bore you. Logical positivism holds that only two types of statement make genuine truth claims (claims that are true or false). First, there are empirical statements; these can in principle be shown by our sense expe- rience to be true or at least highly probable. Second, there are analytic state- ments; these are true because of the meaning of words. Here are examples:
Empirical (testable by sense experience): “It’s snowing outside.”
Analytic (true by defini- tion):
The empirical statement can be tested by sense experience; you go outside and look for snow. The analytic statement is true by definition, since we use “bachelor” to mean “single man”; so we don’t need to study bachelors to see that the statement is true. In general, science is empirical while mathematics is analytic. I hope you get the idea.
Logical positivism claims that any genuine truth claim is either empirical (testable by sense experience) or analytic (true by definition). If your statement isn’t one of these, then it’s meaningless. Let me give an example. Suppose that you say “True reality is spiritual”—but your claim isn’t empirical (testable by sense experience) or analytic (true by definition). Then you aren’t saying anything that could be true or false. You may perhaps be expressing feelings. But you aren’t making a truth claim if what you say isn’t empirical or analytic.
How would logical positivism apply to ethics? Is ethics empirical? Can “X is good,” like chemistry statements, be tested by sense experience? It seems not.
We should perhaps slow down here. Naturalism claims that “good” can be defined using ideas from sense experience. For example, cultural relativism defines “good” as “socially approved.” If this definition worked, then “X is good” would be a genuine empirical statement; we could test its truth by testing whether X was socially approved. So this definition would make ethics a branch of sociology. Unfortunately, however, such definitions don’t work. “Good” in our language doesn’t mean “socially approved,” since it’s consistent to say that some socially approved things aren’t good. This point should be familiar if you know about Moore’s famous refutation of naturalism.
So moral judgments aren’t empirical; moral principles can’t be proved or disproved by sense experience. Are they analytic (true by definition)? It seems not. So moral judgments are neither empirical nor analytic. It follows that they express not genuine truth claims but at most our feelings about things.
This is Ayer’s reasoning, and I think it’s solid. If we have a scientific attitude, then we’re inescapably led to the emotivist approach to ethics.
However, the scientific attitude isn’t the only road to emotivism. My boy- friend is an English major and cares nothing about science. But he loved emotivism when I explained it to him. He said that making “good” emotional brought it closer to the realm of poetry (his true love) and away from “cold, impersonal science.” He liked emotivism right away and didn’t even want to hear my reasoning in defense of it.
5.2 “Good” is emotional
This is still Ima. I need another section to clarify what emotivism holds. Emotivism sees a moral judgment as an expression of feeling, not a state- ment that’s literally true or false. Moral judgments are exclamations: “X is good” means “Hurrah for X!”—and “X is bad” means “Boo on X!” An exclamation doesn’t state a fact, and isn’t true or false. Since moral judgments are exclamations, there can’t be moral truths or moral knowledge.
Don’t take “hurrah” and “boo” literally. English has many words to express positive or negative feelings. Instead of “boo,” we could say “hiss,” “yeech,” or “tsk tsk”; or we might shake our finger in disapproval. These express different
shades of feeling and fit different contexts. There might not be any English exclamation exactly equivalent to “bad” (although we could invent one if we wished). The main point is that “bad” expresses negative feelings, as does “boo,” and functions like an exclamation.
Don’t confuse our view with subjectivism. We hold that moral judgments express feelings but don’t assert truths about feelings. These examples may make my distinction clearer:
Just express feelings (emotivism): “Brrr!”
“Ha, ha!” “Wow!” “Hurrah for X!”
Truths about feelings (subjectivism): “I feel cold.”
“I find that funny.” “I’m impressed.” “I like X.”
Suppose that you say “Brrr!” as you shiver in the cold. Your “Brrr!” isn’t literally true or false; it would be out of place to respond to it by saying “That’s true.” Now suppose that you say “I feel cold.” Here you’re saying something true—since you do feel cold. A moral judgment is like “Brrr!” (which just expresses your feelings), and not like “I feel cold” (which is a truth claim about your feelings).
This distinction lets us avoid some problems that subjectivism has. Suppose that Hitler, who likes the killing of Jews, says “The killing of Jews is good.” On subjectivism, Hitler’s statement is true (since it just means that he likes the killing of Jews). This is bizarre. We think Hitler’s statement is an exclamation (“Hurrah for the killing of Jews!”), and thus not true or false. We can’t say that Hitler’s moral judgment is false; but at least we don’t have to say that it’s true.
While moral judgments express our personal feelings, they also have social functions. We often use moral judgments to influence people’s emotions and to stimulate action. For example, I say to my baby sister, “It’s good to pick up our toys.” I’m trying to get her to have positive feelings about picking up her toys—and to act accordingly.
Sometimes we use moral judgments to influence ourselves. When the alarm went off this morning, I had to get up for chemistry lab; but I felt like staying in bed. So I said to myself, “It’s good to get up now!” This is like saying, “Hurrah for getting up now!” Part of me is a cheerleader, trying to influence the other part. Deep inside of me, different emotions fight for supremacy. To take another example, I sometimes feel like being nasty to someone, but part of me says “That’s bad—boo!”
Before closing this section, let me give you another strong argument for my approach. Emotivism is better than the other views because it’s simpler and explains more of the facts. In philosophy, as in science, a view is better if it’s simpler and explains more.
First, emotivism explains morality more simply. Evaluative judgments ex- press positive or negative feelings. What could be simpler? We don’t bring in things that are difficult to defend. Supernaturalists have to defend belief in God—with all the difficulties that that has. And intuitionists have to defend
objective, irreducible moral facts. Suppose that you’re a materialist; you hold that all facts about the universe are ultimately expressible in the language of physics and chemistry. How do objective, irreducible moral facts fit into such a universe? Are moral facts composed of chemicals, or what sort of weird thing are they? And how could we ever know such mysterious facts? Emotivism avoids these problems and thus explains morality more simply.
Second, emotivism explains more of the facts about morality. The reason we can’t define “good” in purely descriptive terms is that “good” is emotional. The reason we can’t resolve basic moral differences intellectually is that these differences are emotional (and so not purely intellectual). The reason we differ so much in our moral beliefs is that we feel differently about things. Once we accept emotivism, morality becomes more understandable.
Finally, emotivism accurately explains what we mean by “good” and “bad.” Yesterday I was at a restaurant with my boyfriend. Just for fun, we switched from “good” to “hurrah,” and from “bad” to “boo.” It felt funny at first, but it made sense. We could express everything that we wanted to say. And we didn’t feel that we changed what we were talking about (as we would if we switched from “good” to “socially approved” or “desired by God”). So emotivism is accurate linguistically. If you doubt this, try the same experiment yourself; but don’t be surprised if the waiter gives you a funny look.