Alfred Julius Ayer and the analysis of the moral judgments

Abstract

In this article I analyze the ‘emotivist-empiricist’ position that Alfred Julius Ayer presents when he approaches ethics in his text: Language, Truth and Logics:  Critique of Ethics and Theology. I also question his ideas about the theoretical ethics; as in his Philosophical Essays, the discussion is focused on the differentiation between ethics and metaethics. Thus, in ‘the analysis of the moral judgments’ the same study mechanisms are not used as in the emotivist perspective, since it is analyzed how the ethical statements, besides belonging to the field of meta-ethics, also permit to observe what men do when proposing moral judgments, which is ‘not moralizing per se’. To reconstruct both positions, it is necessary to go over the similarities and differences between this thinker and other philosophers who approach the same matter, such as Stevenson, Carnap and Hare.