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Emotivism is a meta-ethics view that claims that ethical sentences do not express 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. (2025). 9781134935727, Routledge. ISBN 9781134935727 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 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, 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."
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 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 Verificationist 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:
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 that 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:
Imperatives cannot be proved, but they can still be supported so that the listener understands that they are not wholly arbitrary:
The purpose of these supports is to make the listener understand the consequences of the action they are being commanded to do. Once they understand the command's consequences, they can determine whether or not obedience to the command will have desirable results.
In second-pattern analysis, rather than judge an action directly, the speaker is evaluating it according to a general principle. For instance, someone who says "Murder is wrong" might mean "Murder decreases happiness overall"; this is a second-pattern statement that leads to a first-pattern one: "I disapprove of anything that decreases happiness overall. Do so as well."Wilks, Emotion, 15, gives a similar example
Logical methods involve efforts to show inconsistencies between a person's fundamental attitudes and their particular moral beliefs. For example, someone who says "Edward is a good person" who has previously said "Edward is a thief" and "No thieves are good people" is guilty of inconsistency until he retracts one of his statements. Similarly, a person who says "Lying is always wrong" might consider lies in some situations to be morally permissible, and if examples of these situations can be given, his view can be shown to be logically inconsistent.Stevenson, Ethics, 115–18
Rational psychological methods examine facts that relate fundamental attitudes to particular moral beliefs;Wilks, Emotion, 25: "These are methods in which we scrutinise the factual beliefs that mediate between our fundamental and our derivative moral attitudes; where we argue about the truth of the morally relevant facts that are called upon in support of our or other people's derivative moral attitudes, eg. as when we argue about whether or not there is a causal connection between pornography and sexual violence." The moral "beliefs" Stevenson spoke of are referred to as "derivative moral attitudes" by Wilks in an attempt to avoid confusion between moral beliefs and "factual beliefs". the goal is not to show that someone has been inconsistent, as with logical methods, but only that they are wrong about the facts that connect their attitudes to their beliefs. To modify the former example, consider the person who holds that all thieves are bad people. If she sees Edward pocket a wallet found in a Public space, she may conclude that he is a thief, and there would be no inconsistency between her attitude (that thieves are bad people) and her belief (that Edward is a bad person because he is a thief). However, it may be that Edward recognized the wallet as belonging to a friend, to whom he promptly returned it. Such a revelation would likely change the observer's belief about Edward, and even if it did not, the attempt to reveal such facts would count as a rational psychological form of moral argumentation.Stevenson, Ethics, 118–29
Non-rational psychological methods revolve around language with psychological influence but no necessarily logical connection to the listener's attitudes. Stevenson called the primary such method "'persuasive,' in a somewhat broadened sense", and wrote:
Persuasion may involve the use of particular emotion-laden words, like "democracy" or "dictator",Stevenson, Ethics, 141 or hypothetical questions like "What if everyone thought the way you do?" or "How would you feel if you were in their shoes?"Wilks, Emotion, 26
James Urmson's 1968 book The Emotive Theory of Ethics also disagreed with many of Stevenson's points in Ethics and Language, "a work of great value" with "a few serious mistakes that led Stevenson consistently to distort his otherwise valuable insights".Urmson, Emotive Theory, 38
According to this view, it would make little sense to translate a statement such as "Galileo should not have been forced to recant on heliocentricism" into a command, imperative, or recommendation - to do so might require a radical change in the meaning of these ethical statements. Under this criticism, it would appear as if emotivist and prescriptivist theories are only capable of converting a relatively small subset of all ethical claims into imperatives.
Like Ross and Brandt, James Urmson disagrees with Stevenson's "causal theory" of emotive meaning—the theory that moral statements only have emotive meaning when they are made to change in a listener's attitude—saying that is incorrect in explaining "evaluative force in purely causal terms". This is Urmson's fundamental criticism, and he suggests that Stevenson would have made a stronger case by explaining emotive meaning in terms of "commending and recommending attitudes", not in terms of "the power to evoke attitudes".Urmson, Emotive Theory, 38–40, 64
Stevenson's Ethics and Language, written after Ross's book but before Brandt's and Urmson's, states that emotive terms are "not always used for purposes of exhortation."Stevenson, Ethics, 83 For example, in the sentence "Slavery was good in Ancient Rome", Stevenson thinks one is speaking of past attitudes in an "almost purely descriptive" sense. And in some discussions of current attitudes, "agreement in attitude can be taken for granted," so a judgment like "He was wrong to kill them" might describe one's attitudes yet be "emotively inactive", with no real emotive (or imperative) meaning.Stevenson, Ethics, 84 Stevenson is doubtful that sentences in such contexts qualify as normative ethical sentences, maintaining that "for the contexts that are most typical of normative ethics, the ethical terms have a function that is both emotive and descriptive."
Foot argues that the virtues, like hands and eyes in the analogy, play so large a part in so many operations that it is implausible to suppose that a committal in a non-naturalist dimension is necessary to demonstrate their goodness.
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