Ethics and Ayer's Logical Empiricism
This essay is concerned with the conception of philosophy espoused by A.J. Ayer. In particular, I shall look at his account of ethics, as outlined in Chapter 6 of his book Language, Truth and Logic, with a focus on addressing a rather problematic aspect of this account discussed in a recent seminar. I would also like to express some of my thoughts regarding the general approach to philosophy advocated in Language, Truth and Logic. It should also be noted that I will be referring to Ayer's brand of logical positivism throughout the essay as 'logical empiricism'
Ayer begins Language, Truth and Logic as follows."The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of philosophical enquiry."
So what did Ayer mean by 'the traditional disputes of philosopher's and what is philosophy? According to one influential understanding that was one of the main targets of Ayer's criticism, philosophy is a quest for transcendent truths, beyond the reach of ordinary or scientific inquiry.
Ayer's viewpoint is encapsulated in his 'criterion of verifiability', a criterion to be employed in an attempt to determine whether a statement was literally meaningful or whether a statement was meaningless. According to Ayer, all meaningful statements are either analytic (logical) or synthetic (empirical). Analytic statements express the necessary truths of logic and mathematics and an analytic statement's validity "depends solely on the definitions of the symbols it contains" . A statement is considered synthetic if and only if some sensory observation is, at least in principle, relevant to determining its truth or falsity. If propositions fail to conform to such criteria, they fail to conform to conditions under which a sentence can be literally significant. Such propositions are therefore not really propositions at all, but rather meaningless 'pseudo-propositions'.
"The function of philosophy', he declared, 'is wholly critical'; 'it is an activity of analysis'; and the idea that philosophy is 'a search for first principles' was a superstition from which we are freed by the abandonment of metaphysics" .
Surely enough, Ayer set about applying the ideas of logical empiricism to ethical questions, resulting in the implication that ethical statements are meaningful if and only if they are either analytic or empirically verifiable. He believes that they are neither.
"We begin by admitting that the fundamental ethical concepts are unanalysable, inasmuch as there is no criterion by which one can test the validity of the judgements in which they occur. "
Mp>This belief leads him to adopt an emotivist theory of ethics. Emotivism is the belief that there are no unbiased or supreme objective ethical truths, but rather what we believe to be ethically right or wrong. Furthermore, ethical statements are not verifiable and therefore cannot be true or false, rather they serve to express subjective states; ethical truths and ethical knowledge are impossible. Ethical expressions add nothing to our factual knowledge of a situation in the world."The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus 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'. "
Ayer is careful to distinguish his emotivist ethical theory from subjectivist ethical theory. "For whereas the subjectivist holds that ethical statements actually assert the existence of certain feelings, we hold that ethical statements are expressions and excitants of feeling which do not necessarily involve any assertions."
"Now it is clear that moral statements are different from empirical ones; and if 'genuine factual statement' is defined to mean 'empirical', then it will follow that moral statements are not genuinely factual. But should this definition be accepted? "
Well, I am not entirely sure that this definition should be accepted, an uncertainty on which I shall now elaborate.
Firstly, we must look at Ayer's analysis of empirical statements. His views on the nature of perception were to change throughout his lifetime, though he most certainly was not a na�ve realize but a representationalist who dabbled with phenomenalism.
Take a typical empirical statement such as 'This is green". What would Ayer have meant by 'this'? The pronoun in question is not referring to the object denoted by the noun that the pronoun substitutes; rather it is referring to the 'sense-data' experiences by the statement's stater. So if the predicate 'is green' is filled with the noun 'grass' to yield the empirical statement 'Grass is green', it is the sense-data representing the grass that the predicate is saying something about. So our empirical statements, or statements of fact, actually refer to the contents of our sense-data.
Material things 'are logical constructions out of sense-contents' ; and 'to say anything about [a material thing] is always equivalent to saying something about [sense-contents]'
Let us now contrast a simple example of an empirical statement with a simple example of a moral statement in an attempt to investigate the differences between moral and empirical statements and to what extent Ayer's distinction is justified.
Take the statement 'This siren is loud', certainly a verifiable, meaningful statement. To determine whether the statement is true or false, its stater may activate the siren and analyse their resultant audio sensation. One person does so and finds out that the siren is quite loud. Now say that another person puts forward the negation of same statement, and carries out the same action to determine whether it is true of false. This particular person though has a considerably different frequency response graph and is unable to experience the loudness that the first person associates with the frequency of the sound emitted by the siren. So for the first person the statement 'This siren is loud' has been verified and is true and for the second person the statement 'This siren is not loud' has been verified and is true.
As both statements refer respectively to the sensory experiences of those who made the statements, we should not like to say that either of the statements is false or meaningless because for an empirical statement to be true and meaningful, it must refer to content of sense-data and that is just what both statements do.
Ayer writes that "as we hold that such sentences as 'Thrift is a virtue' and 'Thrift is a vice' do not express propositions at all, we clearly cannot hold that they express incompatible propositions. "
Such evasion is not possible with empirical statements though. How should we treat the apparently incompatible empirical statements just given if we are to maintain that both are true and meaningful? We can treat these contrary statements by considering their relation to be one of intersubjective incompatibility. Although one person states that the siren is loud and the other person states that it is not, their statements as such do not refer to the siren in an objective sense and are therefore true and meaningful in virtue of their accurate expression of a subjective sensory experience and not incompatible in virtue of ontological neutrality.
Ayer remarked that "the main objection to the ordinary subjectivist theory is that the validity of ethical judgements is not determined by the nature of their author's feelings. "
Such a remark can be construed so as to argue for the acceptance of literal significance of ethical statements, for if the validity of empirical judgements is determined by the nature of their author's sensory experiences, why can't this also be the case for ethical judgements? A subjectivist theory of ethics, in which the validity of ethical judgements is determined by the nature of the author's feelings, may be an acceptable way in which to treat ethical statements as having literal meaning.
To determine whether a statement asserting the moral rightness or wrongness of an action is true or false, its stater need only witness the action that the statement refers to and analyse their emotional response to it. With respect to broader ethical issues, a person who, say, states that 'euthanasia is morally wrong', can determine the truth or falsity of their statement by exposing themselves to matters pertaining to the issue and analysing their emotional response. Also, it may often be the case though that the witnessing of an action preceded the ethical statement. If we have two people who state contrary, yet literally meaningful ethical statements, we can appeal to the notion intersubjective incompatibility in order to avoid imputations of dispute to their relation. If such an attempt to promote the literal significance of ethical statements through subjectivism is rejected by detractors, then perhaps supporters can seek restitution by demoting the literal significance of empirical statements.
If "ethical statements are expressions � of feeling[s] which do not necessarily involve any assertions" then equivalently empirical statements could be regarded as expressions of qualia which also do not necessarily involve any assertions.
Ayer reduces the sentence 'Stealing money is wrong', a sentence which has no factual meaning-that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false", to the sentence 'Stealing money!!'- "where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed" . Could I similarly reduce the sentence 'Grass is green' to the term 'Grass'?
Despite this brief illustration of attributing some sort of meaningfulness to ethical statements, there are still important differences between empirical and ethical statements. It is the differing extents to which each type of statement can be investigated and the difference in the intentions behind their utterances that justify an inequity in the degree of meaningfulness ascribed to the two types of statements. Ayer could have taking advantage of these differences as a basis for his division between empirical and ethical statements.
Take for instance the siren example discussed earlier. It was established that the two contrary yet literally significant empirical statements were respective references to the contents of the sense-data experienced by those who uttered the statements. The properties of the stove though, or the relation between the objective stove and its sense-data representation, can be analysed on a further level. Irrespective of the way in which the term 'loud' is used to construct literally meaningful empirical statements, analysis of these statements can be extended by carrying out intensity measurements of the sound emitted by the siren and subsequently correlating various statements of the form 'X is loud' and 'X is not loud' with statements asserting decibel measurements. It is not clear that we have some such way of gauging ethical statements.
Furthermore, unlike empirical statements, normative ethical statements carry a tendentious intention and it is this that Ayer is attacking. Scientific investigation can help explain why it is the case that sensory experiences related to a particular object can differ between two people. It is pointless for the empirical statements to carry such intention as it adds nothing to their meaning and unimportant that one empirical statement be proved and its contrary be disproved. Consider, on the other hand, an ethical statement such as 'cloning is wrong'. Put simply in a subjectivist's perspective, for some people this ethical statement is true, for others it is false. On another level, intense ethical statements such as this are inherently unanalysable if accompanied by the unverifiable purport that the judgement they express is normative. Unlike an empirical statement in which its meaning solely consists in the analysis sense-data, such ethical statements with nothing factual to analyse are therefore meaningless. Hypothetically, even if scientific enquiry were to offer a complete explanation of emotional states, verification of intention of which I write would not be satisfied. Such satisfaction would require supra-sensible ethical first principles, a basis clearly susceptible to the metaphysical elimination of the criterion of verifiability.
Prior to concluding, I would like to briefly exchange some of my personal attitudes towards the central views of logical positivism as expressed in Language, Truth and Logic. Despite the book's flaws, I tend to generally concur with Ayer's arguments. It was to be expected that with the development of science (formerly known as natural philosophy) as an independent and efficacious branch of knowledge, the role of philosophy was to undergo revision. No longer viable are the ambitious, all-encompassing metaphysically speculative systems conceived of by great philosophers; philosophy still has a contribution to make, yet this contribution has been abated. The school of philosophers of which Ayer was a member, support the substitution of piecemeal, detailed and verifiable results for large untested generalities recommended only by a certain appeal to imagination. For these reasons I am sympathetic towards the comment that "if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is also true that philosophy is virtually empty without science" . Both disciplines should work together and neither should be indifferent to the other's purpose and method, a requirement lacked by the type of philosophy attacked by Ayer. Although I hold such views, I am not prepared to entirely dismiss metaphysical or rationalistic enquiry, or more generally, any form of enquiry that does not hold up to verificationism. Ayer's thesis strongly suggests a purely physical world and a physicalist philosophy of mind. Both of these related presumptions are far from beyond doubt and it may be possible that there are some things discoverable through rationalistic enquiry, such as information pertaining to consciousness. For those persuaded by Ayer's attack on metaphysics, consideration must also be given to whether it is metaphysics in itself which they reject or rather the method of the metaphysical enquiry he attacks, such as Bradley's Hegelianism . I mention this because a subsection of analytic philosophy, of which Language, Truth and Logic is a product, has focused on addressing metaphysical issues. The concession contained within the last few sentences may seem paradoxical, though I merely wish to convey my belief that certain topics traditionally associated with metaphysics should not be definitively consigned to the philosophical blacklist. Granted this concession, I maintain my belief that at this intellectual epoch, attention invested into relevant and acceptable metaphysical matters should be minimal, in comparison to the attention invested into and credence given to the type of philosophy espoused by Ayer as well as scientific enquiry.
This essay has assessed the emotivist ethics of A.J. Ayer's philosophy. An apparent conflict between his belied that empirical statements conform to the significant use of language and ethical statements do not was exposed and prompted a rethink about Ayer's conception of the rules that govern the significant use of language. It was suggested that if we are to accept the literal significance of representationalist empirical statements, then to ethical statements we must also ascribe such literal significance. In spite of this acknowledgement, to justify the preclusion of ethical statements being treated as equally significant and verifiable as empirical propositions, degrees of meaning were established and further reasons provided for the superiority of empirical statements as propositions.
I also discussed my attitudes towards Ayer's conception of philosophy and showed how my personal conception of philosophy is largely amenable to his.