Global Journal of Management and Business Research, A: Administration and Management, Volume 22 Issue 9

V. H omosexuality and the E thical E motivism of A yer and S tevenson: an A ppraisal Ayer's emotivism states that moral judgments do not function as statements of fact, but rather as expressions of one's emotions, feelings attitude towards an action. He claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes. For him, moral language is meaningless because it is non- verifiable, for Stevenson moral language has no factual nor cognitive content, but only an emotive meaning. For him, moral propositions are neither true nor false; they arenot meaningless, but merely allow us to express our emotions. Following this view, it means that moral judgments and ethical concepts such as good and bad have nothing else but emotive meanings or significations. This is tantamount to relativism and subjectivism. 90 Consequently, the reduction of an ethical issue like Homosexuality to relativistic factors, makes morality a free enterprise (where moral agents are free to institute their individual their personal moral norms or standards of behaviour). Hence, ethically speaking, emotivism is quite untenable. When a person says that an action is bad, he or she is not simply expressing his own personal feelings about that action as Ayer and Stevenson seem to claim. Rather, the person is claiming that there is something in that action which renders it intrinsically bad, morally evil or wrong. One is not just trying to manipulate other people's emotions to endorse such action; rather one is making a factual statement which can be either true or false. In line with this reasoning process, when one says that ‘homosexuality is good,’ such a claim is factually false because it superlatively negates the objectivity of the moral wrongness of homosexuality. Moral statements therefore are not just expressions of personal feelings, but objective statements of facts about human actions. 91 The ordinary system of ethics, as elaborated in the works of ethical philosophers, is very far from being a homogeneous whole. Not only is it apt to contain pieces of metaphysics, and analyses of non-ethical concepts: its actual ethical contents are themselves of very different kinds. They may be divided into four main classes. 92 There are, first of all, propositions which express definitions of ethical terms, or judgments about the legitimacy or possibility of certain definitions. Secondly, there are propositions describing the phenomena of moral experience, and their causes. Thirdly, there are exhortations to moral virtue. And lastly, there are actual ethical judgments. It is unfortunately the case that the distinction between these four classes, plain as it seems, is commonly ignored by ethical philosophers, with the result that it is often very difficult to tell from the works of ethicists what it is that they are seeking to discover or prove. 93 T he distinction between the expression of feeling and the assertion of feeling is complicated by the fact that the assertion that one has a certain feeling, often accompanies the expression of that feeling, and is indeed a factor in the expression of that feeling. The main objection to the ordinary subjectivist theory is that the validity of ethical judgments is not determined by the nature of their author’s feelings. 94 Emotivism claims that moral utterances are neither true nor false but are expressions of emotions or attitudes. It leads to the conclusion that people can disagree only in attitude, not in beliefs. So, people cannot disagree over the moral facts, because there are no moral facts. It also implies that presenting reasons in support of a moral utterance is a matter of offering non-moral facts that can influence someone’s attitude . It seems that any non- moral facts will do, as long as they affect attitudes. Perhaps the most far-reaching implication of emotivism is that nothing is actually good or bad . 95 There simply are no properties of goodness and badness. There is only the expression of favorable or unfavorable emotions or attitudes toward something. Neither ethical subjectivism nor emotivism provide support for any particular moral standards. They are not systems designed to define or support a particular moral or ideological viewpoint, nor do they provide a foundation for justifying moral standards. The reason for this is that they are not moral systems, they are meta-ethical theories. They are theories about the true nature and origin of morality, not justifications for any particular set of moral standards. 96 Despite early popularity, ethical emotivism is not a popular position today and it is widely considered to be an unduly and unhelpfully simplistic form of Non-Cognitivism. At the psychological level, ethical emotivism is unlikely to feel correct. If one suggests that a certain action is right or wrong, it implies a claim that is true and reflects how one takes the world to be (reflecting a moral belief in one’s mind). For instance, one cannot simply boo an action in a rather academic and indirect way. Moral statements are supposed to be truth-apt and descriptive moral judgments . 97 The most telling and obvious objection to 78 Global Journal of Management and Business Research Volume XXII Issue IX Version I Year 2022 ( ) A © 2022 Global Journals The Ethical Emotivism of A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson: A Tendentious Explanatory Matrix for Human Homosexual Behaviour 90 Carl Wellman (1968) “Emotivism and Ethical Objectivity,” American Philosophical Quarterly 5 (2):90 - 92. 91 Gunnar Björnsson & Tristram McPherson (2014) “Moral Attitudes for Non-Cognitivists: Solving the Specification Problem,” Mind 123 (489): 22-25. 92 Mark van Roojen (2013) “Moral Cognitivism versus Non- Cognitivism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2013 (1): 21-23. 93 Nathan Nobis (2004) “Ayer and Stevenson’s Epistemological Emotivisms,” Croatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1):59-61. 94 Uriah Kriegel (2021) “Moral Judgment and the Content-Attitude Distinction,” Philosophical Studies 179 (4):1135-1137. 95 Nathan Cofnas (2020) “Are Moral Norms rooted in instincts? The sibling incest taboo as a case study,” Biology and Philosophy 35 (5): 47-48. 96 Jeremy Fischer (2020) “Why Are You Proud of That? Cognitivism About "Possessive" Emotions,” Southwest Philosophy Review 36 (2):87-89. 97 Frank Hindriks & Hanno Sauer (2020) “The Mark of the Moral: