Harmony with Nature: Bridging Midgley's Moral Realism and Ayer's Emotivism — Epoche B2
Why 'Harmony with Nature' Cannot Settle the Quarrel between Midgley and Ayer This note tests a claim that looks attractive and is false: that Mary Midgley's ethical naturalism [1] and A. J. Ayer's emotivism [2] , though officially opposed, converge once we notice that both can make sense of an appeal to living in harmony with nature. They do not converge. The appeal is one that either side can absorb, which is precisely why it settles nothing. The interesting result is negative, and it is worth stating carefully, because the same mistake is easy to make with any vivid case. What emotivism actually claims A. J. Ayer set out emotivism in Language, Truth and Logic (1936). The background is the verification principle: a sentence is factually meaningful only if it is either true by definition or capable of being confirmed or disconfirmed by experience. Moral sentences pass neither test, so Ayer concluded that they make no factual claim at all. They are not true and not false. In the technical vocabulary, they are not truth-apt : they are not the kind of sentence that has a truth value. A theory that denies truth-aptness to moral judgements is called non-cognitivism ; emotivism is one version of it. Ayer's own statement of the view, in the chapter 'Critique of Ethics and Theology', is worth reading slowly: If I say to someone, 'You acted wrongly in stealing that money,' I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, 'You stole that money.' In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. Two features of this passage are regularly misreported. First, emotivism is not subjectivism. Ayer is not saying that 'stealing is wrong' means 'I disapprove of stealing'. That would be a factual claim about the speaker's psychology, and it would be true or false. Ayer's point is that the moral word adds no claim whatever; it expresses an attitude in something like the way a tone of voice does. Second, Ayer did not hold the view in one fixed form. In the introduction to the second edition (1946) he weakened the verification principle and gave a more careful account of what expression amounts to. Arguing against the 1936 formulation as if it were his last word is a common unfairness. What Midgley claims, and what she does not Mary Midgley's naturalism is a different sort of doctrine, and it is easy to overstate. In Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978) she argues that we cannot understand human motivation, and therefore cannot do ethics, while ignoring what ethology and evolutionary biology tell us about the kind of animal we are. Her targets are two pictures she thinks are equally false: that human beings are blank slates on which culture writes whatever it likes, and that beneath the culture there is a bestial chaos held in check by reason. Against both she argues that we have a structured nature — a repertoire of needs, motives and capacities that constrains which ways of living can go well for us. Notice what that argument establishes and what it does not. It is a claim about the sources and subject matter of morality: ethics answers to facts about a particular animal. Whether it commits Midgley to a metaethical thesis that moral sentences are true or false in virtue of natural facts is a further question, and one on which her writing is less explicit than partisans on either side pretend. She wrote as a critic of philosophical over-simplification rather than as a system-builder in metaethics [3] . So the safe description is this: Midgley is a naturalist about the sources of morality who plainly assumes that some moral claims are correct and others mistaken. That assumption is enough to put her in conflict with Ayer, and I shall rely on nothing stronger. A test case: water in a Balinese subak Consider a real institution. In Bali, irrigated rice terraces are managed by subak , associations of farmers who share a water source and coordinate planting and fallow periods through a system of water temples. Coordination matters because the interests conflict: water taken upstream is water denied downstream, and synchronised fallow periods suppress pests but cost an individual farmer a harvest. Disputes over allocation are frequent, and the associations exist largely to settle them without violence. Members of a subak may well justify the arrangement by saying that it keeps the community in harmony with the natural order. Suppose they do. Which metaethical theory does that support? Why the example is metaethically idle Neither. Both theories can describe the case completely, and neither is embarrassed by anything in it. On Midgley's side the description is straightforward. Human beings are social animals dependent on a shared resource; a rule that prevents the resource from collapsing serves needs that we really have; the farmer who claims the arrangement is a good one is saying something correct about how creatures like us can live well together. On Ayer's side the description is equally straightforward, and this is the point that people underestimate. Ayer can grant every empirical fact in the case. He can grant that unregulated diversion destroys the terraces, that the farmers know this, and that the practice survives because it works. What he denies is only that the final sentence — 'and therefore the arrangement is good' — states a further fact. In his account it expresses the community's endorsement and helps to propagate it. Nothing in the ethnography contradicts him, because the disagreement is not about what happens in Bali. It is about what a moral sentence does. This is the general moral of the note. A case can only discriminate between two theories if the theories predict different things about it. Midgley and Ayer differ over the semantics of moral language, not over the ecology of rice terraces, so no amount of ecological detail can adjudicate between them. An appeal to harmony with nature is not a