The big idea: Now Ayer aims the test at right and wrong. Say 'stealing is wrong'. Where does that leave morality?
Run it through the test
True by definition?
No.
Could any experiment measure it?
Not the wrongness itself, on top of the plain facts of the theft. Ayer says no.
Neither door — so morality isn't a set of facts.
So what is morality?: Not a set of facts — but something else entirely.
Ayer's answer is emotivism: a moral sentence doesn't report a fact, it voices an attitude.
Hold onto this: The key switch: a moral sentence isn't describing the world, it's expressing how the speaker feels and nudging others to feel the same.
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Ayer's picture of what a moral sentence really does is deliberately blunt.
The two jobs a moral sentence does: Say 'stealing is wrong'. On Ayer's view you've added no new fact to 'you took the money that wasn't yours'. What you've added is a tone of voice. It does two jobs.
The two jobs
Expresses disapproval
Roughly, 'stealing — boo!'. You're voicing a feeling, the way a groan expresses pain.
Tries to influence
You're also nudging your listener to share the feeling and act on it — 'don't do that, and don't approve of those who do'.
Voice a feeling, then nudge others to share it.
No truth-value: So the sentence isn't a report you could fact-check. It has no truth-value at all — there's nothing there to be true or false.
Checkpoint — emotivism: In one line: a moral sentence expresses the speaker's feeling ('boo!') and tries to influence — it states no fact, so it's neither true nor false. Hold that — it's what verificationism does to ethics.
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Emotivism is easy to misread, so it helps to say clearly what it doesn't claim.
Two things it does NOT say
- It does not say 'stealing is wrong' means 'I dislike stealing' — that would be a fact about your feelings, which could be true or false. Emotivism says the sentence expresses the feeling, like a wince, rather than reporting it.
- It does not say morality is unimportant: our attitudes drive how we live and treat each other.
Ayer's narrower claim: Ayer's claim is narrower — that moral talk has no cognitive content, not that it's worthless.
Go further — higher-level insight: Emotivism sits under a wider label, noncognitivism — the view that value-talk isn't in the business of stating knowable facts.
The 'disagreement' problem: Its sharpest challenge is the 'disagreement' problem: if I say 'boo!' and you say 'hooray!', it's unclear we even disagree rather than just feel differently — which seems to lose the idea of a moral mistake. Raising that is a strong evaluative move for part (b).