The Emotional Expression Of Ayer

As a contemporary western famous moralist, A.J. Ayer is a recognized leading representative of emotivism in meta-ethics, who had done great contribution to the development of meta-ethics. By means of positivism, Ayer analyzed moral concept and moral terms in our daily life firstly. In the chapter6Critique of Ethics and Theology of his maiden work Language, Truth and Logic, he analyzed his ethics and systematized moral emotivism, some of which had positive effect on ethical foundations of theoretical research.This essay discusses Ayer’s emotivism in these four aspects:the features of Ayer’s emotivism, the content of Ayer’s emotivism theory, the challenge Ayer had to face, and the positive impact of Ayer’s emotivism:Part one:features of Ayer’s emotivism. This part discuss the non-cognitive feature of Ayer’s emotivism and consider him promote the discussion of "fact and value" by separating them, and then compare his theory with that of his successor Stevenson, signifying his radical emotivism position.Part two:state Ayer’s emotivism theory. This part discusses Ayer’s emotivism, including his critique of traditional theory, his special views on moral concept, moral statements and moral arguments, systematically demonstrates Ayer’s main points on ethics.Part three:the challenge Ayer had to face. Having researched on Ayer’s main thoughts on ethics, I summarize the challenge Ayer had to face and give corresponding response.Part four:the status of emotivism in the history and its positive impact.We should attach importance to analyze moral discourse, for understanding moral discourse is the precondition of doing research on ethics; We should pay attention to emotional meaning of moral judgment and moral discourse, this emotional meaning is the main feature of moral judgment, comparing with that of pure factual judgment. This emotional meaning has important meaning of getting a clear understanding of the feature of moral and the practicality of moral principal; additionally it has positive effect for ethical foundations of theoretical research and moral education activity.