Ayer's Emotivism and Moral Disagreement — Epoche B2
Emotivism and the Disagreement It Cannot Have: Ayer, Stevenson and the Cost of Verification The credit and the question A. J. Ayer's emotivism is often credited with a good account of moral disputes that will not resolve [1] . If moral utterances express feeling rather than state fact, the thought runs, then two people can be opposed on a moral question without either having got anything wrong, and this is why some quarrels grind on for ever. Recent metaethics has a name for the phenomenon, given currency by Max Kölbel's 2004 paper of that title: faultless disagreement [2] . This essay argues that the credit is misplaced, and that the reason is in Ayer's own text. His position in Language, Truth and Logic (1936) is not that moral disagreements are faultless. It is stronger and less convenient: that there are no disputes about value at all, only disputes about fact wearing moral clothing. A view on which the disagreement disappears cannot be a view on which the disagreement is faultless. The machinery a non-cognitivist needs was supplied eight years later by C. L. Stevenson [3] , and it is an addition rather than a clarification — and even it delivers only half of what is wanted. Ayer's theory and the principle that forces it Emotivism in Ayer is a consequence of the verification principle, not an independent theory of ethics. A sentence is factually significant, on that principle, only if some observation would count for or against it. Analytic sentences are excluded because they say nothing about the world; everything else must submit to experience. Chapter VI of Language, Truth and Logic applies the test to ethics and reports that moral sentences fail it. No observation bears on whether an act is wrong, as distinct from whether it occurred, what it caused and what the agent intended. Ayer's conclusion is that the ethical term adds nothing to the factual content of the sentence in which it occurs. To say that someone acted wrongly in taking the money is to say that they took the money, with the disapproval showing. He is careful to distinguish this from subjectivism. If moral utterance reported the speaker's feelings it would be true or false, and it would be true whenever the speaker did indeed feel that way. Ayer denies this. The utterance expresses the feeling as a wince expresses pain, and a wince is neither true nor false. What Ayer says about disagreement The same chapter takes up moral argument directly, and the answer is uncompromising. When we appear to be arguing about values, Ayer says, we are arguing about the facts of the case: what was done, in what circumstances, with what motive, and how the act should be classified. We are trying to bring the other person to see the situation as we see it, in the confidence that if they did, they would feel as we do. If every factual question is settled and the difference persists, argument is at an end. There is nothing further to appeal to, and Ayer observes that what remains is not reasoning but abuse. Put beside the notion of faultless disagreement, this is the wrong result. Faultless disagreement requires two things at once: that the parties genuinely disagree, and that neither is mistaken. Ayer secures the second by abolishing the first. On his account, once the facts are agreed there is no proposition the parties differ over, because there was never a proposition in play. Two people with opposed feelings about capital punishment are, on this analysis, in the position of two people with opposed feelings about the taste of coriander — and nobody thinks that is a disagreement at all. Stevenson's addition Stevenson's Ethics and Language (1944) supplies what Ayer lacks. His central distinction is between disagreement in belief and disagreement in attitude. Two people disagree in belief when they hold incompatible views about what is the case. They disagree in attitude when their favour and disfavour are directed oppositely at the same object, so that both cannot be satisfied, and each is trying to bring the other round. Moral terms, on Stevenson's account, have a dynamic use: they are instruments for redirecting attitudes, not merely symptoms of having them. This gets a genuine disagreement without a shared proposition, which is exactly the gap in Ayer. Whether it gets faultlessness is another matter, and Stevenson's own answer is discouraging for the modern use. He holds that most disagreement in attitude rests on disagreement in belief and dissolves when the beliefs are corrected. Attitudes remain open to criticism through their supporting beliefs. The residue of disputes that survive complete factual agreement is, on his view, small — and where it exists, the right description is not that both parties are faultless but that there is nothing there to be right or wrong about. A test case where faultlessness is least plausible Disputes about whether a particular war was justified are often produced as examples of moral disagreement that cannot be settled. They are in fact the worst possible case for faultlessness, and the reason is instructive. Parties to such a dispute do not behave as though nothing could show them wrong. They argue about whether the threat was imminent, whether the harm was proportionate to the objective, whether non-combatants were foreseeably killed, whether the stated aim was the operative one. These are factual questions, and people change their minds when the answers come in. That is Stevenson's diagnosis playing out: the attitudes are opposed, and the disagreement in attitude is sustained by disagreement in belief. It is also a difficulty for anyone who wants such cases as evidence of irreducible moral difference. The one thing the parties never do is treat the dispute as a difference of taste. Where the moral property sits Ayer's argument has a premise that is easy to miss because it is presented as a finding rather than a claim: that no observation bears on a moral question. Whether that is so depends