CONCEPT
Emotivism
The doctrine — and, MacIntyre argues, the embedded cultural condition — that all evaluative judgments are nothing but expressions of preference. The reason AI ethics debates are interminable.
Emotivism was first formulated as an explicit philosophical doctrine in the 1930s by A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson: evaluative judgments are not truth-apt; they are expressions of the speaker's attitudes and attempts to influence the attitudes of others. MacIntyre's move in After Virtue is to argue that emotivism has become, independent of whether anyone explicitly defends it, the embedded cultural condition of modern moral discourse. We act as if our evaluative disagreements are expressions of incompatible preferences rather than substantive claims about the good, and this is why moral and political debates tend toward interminability. The application to AI ethics is direct: debates about whether AI is good or bad cannot be resolved within an emotivist framework because the framework denies the conceptual resources — a shared account of human flourishing — that would be required for resolution.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction between emotivism as explicit doctrine and emotivism as cultural condition is important. Few people, if asked, would endorse the claim that moral judgments
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