Stealing That Watch Is Wrong

Debate about the true nature of social science has been ongoing for centuries. Many scientists argue against the notion that any of these disciplines are ‘real sciences’ because they do not conform to the standard scientific method held by the mainstream scientific community. Social scientists however, have been attempting to justify the explanatory power of such sciences including psychology and sociology. The common sense explanatory power of such disciplines can be seen in everyday life in the form of everyday human actions. Humans have used moral arguments to justify their actions or the actions of others since the invention of language. Logical positivists will argue, however, that a theory or proposition cannot be true or verifiable if

Ethical statements, he asserts, are merely the expression of a person’s emotions about a specific action. They have no factual information other than the issue they relate to. For example, the sentence “stealing that watch was wrong” would simply be stating the fact that the watch was stolen. Saying it was wrong is merely the expression of disapproval of the speaker and adds no meaningful content to the fact that a watch was stolen. An argument against this is that if ethical statements were only announcements of the speaker’s emotion, then it would not be possible for them to argue about the values of different morals. Ayer retorts by claiming that these kinds of arguments are never actually about values, but simply about empirical facts. He goes on to argue that “the postulation of real non-existant entities results from the superstition…that to every word or phrase that can be the grammatical subject of a sentence, there must be a real entity corresponding.” (Ayer, pp. 33). In other words, there is a common misconception held among people that if a word could be a grammatical subject, then it must have significance. Ayer, on the other hand, thinks that any propositions that seem to represent a valid metaphysical statement are actually the aggregate

If the value of morals can be debated, then his theory that they are simply expressions of emotions would be false. He avoids this by arguing that there is no such thing as arguments about the values of morals, they are all instead the conflicting expression of emotion about opposing empirical factors. However, this can evidently be seen as simply not true. There have been countless philosophical debates about values and morals that did not include emotions. This notion that morals cannot be debated is a very weak argument that contradicts thousands of years of philosophical history. An additional problem with this notion is that it is possible for an individual to think something is morally wrong without reacting to it emotionally, or even react to it