QuestionsWhat makes something right?"Stealing is wrong" describes nothing: it is a cry of indignation
What makes something right?Morality questioned

"Stealing is wrong" describes nothing: it is a cry of indignation

Emotivism

Alfred Jules Ayer 1910 · 1989A sentence no experience could verify is meaningless, and 'God exists' is one of them.
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What it claims

"stealing is wrong" is neither true nor false. It is like saying "You stole that money!" in a tone of indignation: one expresses an emotion and seeks to make others share it.

Why

"Stealing is wrong" adds no fact to "you stole" and is not true by definition; such words express feelings.

The same idea through history
David Hume1751Hume holds that morality is a matter of sentiment, not reasoning: reason establishes the facts, then a feeling of approval or blame decides vice and virtue. But he does not yet say that moral judgements are neither true nor false.
Alfred Jules Ayer1936Ayer draws the consequence of the verification criterion: a moral word adds no fact, it expresses an emotion and seeks to arouse one. Chapter VI caused a scandal and made the thesis famous.
Charles L. Stevenson1944Stevenson turns it into a full theory: a moral word has an "emotive" meaning that expresses an attitude and seeks to make others share it. He distinguishes disagreements about facts from "disagreements in attitude".
In short

""Stealing is wrong" describes nothing: it is a cry of indignation" is an argument by Alfred Jules Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic, ch. VI (1936), 1936) on the question "What makes something right?" (answer: morality questioned). Its claim: "stealing is wrong" is neither true nor false. It is like saying "You stole that money!" in a tone of indignation: one expresses an emotion and seeks to make others share it. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Language, Truth and Logic, ch. VI (1936)
Valid with an implicit premise

When I say "you were wrong to steal that money", do I tell anyone more than "you stole that money"? For Ayer, no. The word "wrong" describes no further fact: it shows my indignation, like a tone of voice or exclamation marks. So moral judgements are neither true nor false. They express emotions and seek to arouse them in others. Ayer does not say morality is unimportant: he says it is not knowledge.

P1Saying "you were wrong to steal that money" adds no fact to "you stole that money": no observation can tell a "wrong" theft from a theft, full stop.
P2"Stealing is wrong" is not true by definition either: one can say without contradiction that the greatest happiness is sometimes wrong, or that a pleasant thing is not good. So "good" means neither "useful" nor "pleasant" nor "approved".
P3There is no third way: a moral "intuition" proves nothing, since what seems obvious to one person seems false to another and no criterion settles between them. And a sentence is true or false only if it is true by definition or verifiable by experience.
P4Yet moral words are not empty: they show the speaker's feelings, and they also serve to arouse feelings in others, and so to move them to act.
P5 · implicit premiseIf a sentence is neither true nor false but still has a role, that role is to express and arouse feelings: no other role matters here.
So "stealing is wrong" is neither true nor false. It is like saying "You stole that money!" in a tone of indignation: one expresses an emotion and seeks to make others share it.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where "stealing is wrong" is neither true nor false and does have a role, but that role is not to express an emotion: for example to give an order valid for everyone ("do not steal"). This is Hare's line, below, and Ayer himself says some moral words have the force of a command.
P1, P2 and P3 give the first half of the conclusion: "stealing is wrong" is neither an observable fact, nor true by definition, nor a truth grasped by intuition, so neither true nor false. P4 and P5 give the second half: what the sentence does is express and arouse emotions. The debate is mainly about P3 (the verification criterion, disputed elsewhere on the site) and about the conclusion itself: can a sentence that is only a cry be used in reasoning (Geach)?
Analogy. At the stadium, when your team scores, you shout "Yes!". That shout is neither true nor false: it shows your joy and carries others along. For Ayer, "stealing is wrong" is much more like "Boo, stealing!" than like "it is raining". The difference: nobody asks whether "Yes!" is correct, whereas we do ask that about a moral judgement.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

P
Peter Geach (the Frege-Geach problem) 1965 · attacks the conclusion

Take this reasoning: "If tormenting the cat is bad, getting your little brother to do it is bad. Tormenting the cat is bad. So getting your little brother to do it is bad." It is valid. But in the first sentence, "tormenting the cat is bad" expresses no indignation: one can accept it without disapproving of anything. If the meaning of the sentence were only a cry, it would not have the same meaning in both premises, and the reasoning would collapse. Yet it holds. A sentence keeps the same content whether or not it is asserted.

Ayer replies
S
Simon Blackburn 1984 · The expressivist reply
Blackburn keeps Ayer's idea but refines it. "If lying is wrong, getting your brother to lie is wrong" expresses an attitude about our attitudes: we approve of disapproval of the second following upon disapproval of the first. Someone who accepts both premises and rejects the conclusion is not illogical in the strict sense, but his attitudes clash: he has a "fractured" sensibility, which cannot itself be approved of.
B
Bob Hale 1986
It is not the same thing. Having clashing attitudes is a fault of practical coherence, like wanting both to lose weight and to eat three cakes. But rejecting the conclusion of a valid argument is a logical contradiction. Blackburn's solution does not recover the argument's real validity.
The debate goes on (our summary) Blackburn, then Gibbard and others, have proposed subtler versions of a "logic of attitudes". The problem remains the most discussed one against any theory that makes moral judgements expressions of attitudes, and there is no agreement that it has been solved.
G. E. Moore (objection reported by Ayer) 1922 · attacks the conclusion

If a moral judgement only expressed what the speaker feels, we could no longer argue about values. Someone who says "thrift is a virtue" and someone who replies "it is a vice" would not contradict each other: each would only be saying what he feels. Yet we obviously do argue about values.

Ayer replies
A. J. Ayer 1936 · Ayer's reply (same chapter)
Ayer accepts the consequence: we never really argue about a value, but about facts. When we want to convince someone, we show him that he was wrong about the motive of the act, its effects or the circumstances, hoping that once he agrees on the facts he will take the same attitude as we do.
Charles L. Stevenson 1944 · Correction by a fellow emotivist
Some disagreements remain when everyone agrees on the facts: they are "disagreements in attitude", where two people want incompatible things. Moral debates mix both kinds of disagreement. So we do argue in morality, but not always about what is true.
The debate goes on (our summary) Ayer himself admits the limit of his reply: when the other person agrees on all the facts but has different values, argument is of no further use, and "we finally resort to mere abuse". For his critics, that is exactly what goes wrong: it seems one can be right or wrong about slavery, even when everyone agrees on all the facts.
R
R. M. Hare 1952 · attacks premise 5

Moral words do not serve primarily to express emotions but to guide action: "you ought to tell the truth" is a kind of command, and one that holds for everyone in the same situation, including me. This makes moral reasoning possible: if I refuse to apply my rule to myself, I contradict myself. A mere cry of indignation has no such logic.

Ayer replies
A. J. Ayer 1936 · What Ayer had already said
Ayer had noted that some moral words give the sentence the force of a command: "it is your duty to tell the truth" contains the command "tell the truth", and "it is good to tell the truth" is little more than a suggestion.
The debate goes on (our summary) So Ayer sees the "command" aspect, but places it next to emotion without drawing a logic from it. Hare keeps the idea that a moral judgement is not a description, but gives it rules (holding for everyone), which makes morality far more rational than in Ayer.
What today's voices say
Defend it
Steven "Destiny" BonnellHe treats moral claims as expressions of feeling, close to Ayer's emotivism. We have no source where he names Ayer.
Alex O'ConnorIn his own words: "I'm an ethical emotivist" (2024), and "I'm an emotivist about ethics" with Sam Harris.
Criticize it
Abigail ThornIn her 2014 video on the Frege-Geach problem, she calls it the central problem of noncognitivism, the view that moral sentences only express feelings.
William Lane CraigHe argues that on this view, saying that sawing off an innocent person's head is wrong would only express emotional distaste, with nothing objectively wrong.