Pointless Arguments, Godwin's Law, Etc.

Godwin's Law states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

It's been literature / philosophy week around here. My post on Hume and recent comments left by various individuals over at P.Z. Meyers' blog have left me pondering both Godwin's Law and the thoughts of philosopher A.J. Ayer.



In his Language, Truth and Logic (1936), Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer, following in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell, laid out an emotivist theory of ethics, often referred to as the Boo-Hooray theory, which maintains that ethical statements cannot be true or false but are rather statements of emotional attitudes; e.g., when someone says "Thrift is a vice!" what they're essentially saying is "Boo thrift!" and likewise "Thrift is a virtue!" translates to "Hooray thrift!"

In Chapter 6, Critique of Ethics and Theology, Ayer offers his take on the nature of arguments between individuals working from different value premises, noting how and why such arguments degenerate into name calling and a smug sense of superiority.

"When someone disagrees with us about the moral value of a certain action or type of action, we do admittedly resort to argument in order to win him over to our way of thinking. But we do not attempt to show by our argument that he has the 'wrong' ethical feeling... we attempt to show that he is mistaken about the facts of the case. We argue that he has misjudged the effects of the agent's motive: or that he has misjudged the effects of the action, or its probable effects in view of the agent's knowledge... We do this in the hope that we have only to get our opponent to agree with us about the nature of the empirical facts for him to adopt the same moral attitude towards them as we do... But if our opponent happens to have undergone a different process of moral 'conditioning' from ourselves, so that, even when he acknowledges all the facts, he still disagrees with us about the moral value of the actions under discussion, then we abandon the attempt to convince him by argument. We say that it is impossible to argue with him because he has a distorted or undeveloped moral sense; which signifies merely that he employs a different set of values from our own. We feel that our own system of values is superior, and therefore speak in derogatory terms of his... It is because argument fails us when we come to deal with pure questions of value, as distinct from questions of fact, that we finally resort to mere abuse." (pb. 110-111)

In the process of refreshing my memory for this post, I looked at the Wikipedia entry for Ayer and found an amusing anecdote in the process:

"[Ayer] taught or lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: "Do you know who the f*** I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied: "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men" (Rogers 1999:344)."

Ayer's head butting didn't stop with Mike Tyson. He believed many of the questions traditionally considered inside the domain of philosophy couldn't be solved by philosophy and that it was pointless for philosophers to talk about them; unsurprisingly, this perspective wasn't particularly popular with many of his fellow philosophers.