According to Logical Positivism philosophy is ‘about establishing the means by which the truth or falsehood of certain propositions can be demonstrated.’
If it is not possible to establish whether a proposition is true or false, then it is ‘meaningless’. According to Logical Positivists, there are three types of statements: analytic or logical; synthetic or empirical; and meaningless. An example of an analytic statement would be ‘all triangles have three sides’. This is analytic because it contains within itself a means for verifying its validity. It is a tautological statement as saying ‘triangles’ is the equivalent to saying ‘a three sided shape’. They both carry the same meaning and so it would be unreasonable to claim the statement ‘all triangles have three sides’ is false unless a new definition of the word ‘triangle’ is introduced. An example of the second type of statement (synthetic) is ‘the house is big’. This statement is synthetic because it needs an external source of information in order to determine its truthfulness. Given the statement ‘the house is big’, you would then have to either confirm this for yourself by visiting the house, or you would have to ask someone who had seen the house’s dimensions. The predicate is not included in the statement and therefore it must be verified, usually empirically. The final type of statement is the meaningless statement. An example of such a statement is ‘Tim Minchin is funny’ or ‘murder is wrong’. Now this statement is not meaningless in the everyday sense of the word. It is not unintelligible or incomprehensible. It has grammatical meaning as a declarative containing subject, verb, and object. Yet in a philosophical sense, the statement carries no meaning. This is because in saying ‘Tim Minchin is funny’ I am, in fact, saying ‘I like Tim Minchin as a comedian and therefore think he is funny’. This statement cannot be tested either logically or empirically which causes it to fall outside the realm of philosophically meaningful statements. From this we can see that ethical statements such as ‘stealing is wrong’ or even ‘murder is wrong’ are meaningless, because they cannot be proven. As a result of this evaluation, we can conclude that in the case of logical positivism, ethical language holds no meaning.
A significant name is the field of emotivism is A.J. ‘Freddie’ Ayer. He published the book entitled ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ in 1934, in which he explored the ‘verification’ of factual statements or propositions. Ayer followed the Logical Positivist line of thinking in the way that he say propositions as either analytic, synthetic, or meaningless. He believed ethical statements to be ones that have no ‘objective validity whatsoever’ and that since they make ‘no statement at all’ it would be foolish to ask whether they are true or false. Ayer referred to these statements as ‘pure expressions of feeling’ which ‘do not come under the category of truth and falsehood.’ This argument is seen in the ‘boo-hurrah’ theory. This theory states that when we introduce a proposition such as ‘stealing is wrong’, all we are doing is expressing a negative feeling towards the act of stealing (so we are saying ‘boo’ to stealing). In opposition to this, if we say ‘helping the poor is good’, we are simply saying ‘hurrah’ to helping the poor. We aren’t making judgements, just expressing our likes and dislikes.
Charles Stevenson would disagree with this theory for several reasons. Firstly, he saw that there are usually genuine arguments within ethics that are more than a simple like or dislike. If we come across two people, one who says that abortion is right and one who says it is wrong, we can see that they aren’t merely expressing a feeling. The pro life person might have a strong belief in the sanctity of life due to their fundamentalist beliefs and as a result of this, they may be leading a campaign against abortion. The pro choice person may value the quality of life and the right to one’s own body and see it as being more important and therefore may be supporting the rights of others through petitions and politics. The disagreement cannot be labelled as a simple ‘boo-hurrah‘ statements. It is genuine because it entails acting along with believing. Stevenson’s second point stated that moral terms have a sort of ‘magnetism’. This means that the particular terms we choose have a persuasive power to them which both upholds our own beliefs and persuades others to think the same. The final point is that empirical verification is not enough for ethics. As a result of his final two points, according to Stevenson, all moral propositions use words which have cognitive and emotive meaning. For example, the phrase ‘non consensual sex’ has the same cognitive meaning as the word ‘rape’ but the latter holds much more emotive meaning. If someone wished to explain that non consensual sex is wrong, they would be more likely to say ‘rape is wrong’ because of its additional connotations and the strong emotional response that often accompanies it.
Another problem with Ayer’s line of thinking is the possibility of subjectivism taking over. Using emotivism we can reduce morality to a sort of ‘I’ll do X because I prefer it.’ This wouldn’t be too much of a problem if we could rely on humans to act morally, but we can’t. If this theory were used, Hitler would have been completely justified in demanding the slaughter of the Jews. To compensate for this, normative ethical theories attempt to define goodness, comparing it to something else. Situation ethics compares goodness with acts that produce the most agape love, whereas Utilitarianism compares goodness with acts that produce the greatest pleasure for the greatest number. This might have been successful, but GE Moore claimed that to compare goodness to anything else would be a fallacy. He said that goodness is something far more instinctual, and compares it to the primary colours. We can recognise it, but we cannot pin it down to a concrete definition. He concluded with the quotation ‘goodness is goodness and that is the end of it’.
In conclusion, we can see that it is difficult to know that an ethical statement has meaning unless you are directly affected by it. For example, you would be much more likely to understand that rape is fundamentally wrong if you had been the victim of rape or you were close to someone else who was. Ethical language does not seem to have any logical meaning, simply because it cannot be proved. Ethical statements are an expression of our personal opinions, not moral laws or judgements, and therefore hold no meaning in philosophy.