Emotivism & Individualism
A Thought on Community

Emotivism is a meta-ethical belief held by quite a lot of people today, though they would not label it as such. It is the view that any ethical statement or claim is actually just an expression of an emotional stance. This belief relies on the idea that everyone has an ethical opinion or feeling, but quarantines it to just that — opinion and feeling. An ethical statement cannot be seen, through the lens of Emotivism, as being right or wrong. This is a dangerous belief to hold, and yet it is pervasive and persuasive. Emotivism is dangerous, since it eliminates the possibility of an ethical right answer. This belief relegates feelings into a category that connotes ‘worthless things’. Emotivism leads to a degradation of the importance of feelings and emotions. Emotions have a critical role in being a human and being humane. Emotivism shifts the view of emotions from important status, to non-consequential status, by sweepingly assigning all emotions to the category of subjective opinion — a euphemism for irrelevant.
The shift of focus, from truth to opinion, causes genuine emotion to be underplayed in terms of importance. “Sure you may feel that rape is wrong, but it’s just your feelings on the matter. What’s that? It’s against the law? Well, that’s because enough people with the same feelings made it against the law. Sure, it’s ‘wrong’ in a legal sense and maybe even in a moral sense, but those are both just the feelings of a majority of people.” This is an extreme, and hopefully uncommon example but, it illustrates just as well the wrong-headed logic of emotivism. In this case the answer of whether or not they are right or wrong is clear-cut, but there are times when it isn’t as clear. “Oh you feel that pornography is wrong, eh? Well that’s fine, you are entitled to your opinion. So long as you understand it is merely your opinion. You may have strong feelings, but that is all they are — feelings. After all, it’s not even illegal, so how could it be wrong.” Now, the ending of the statement is a bit overt, but the rest is a copy-and-paste argument of emotivism. Here we have a more complex issue, where emotivism can be applied to muddy the waters and confuse the masses by fixating on the form of opinion rather than the content of pornography consumption. The issue is complex and there isn’t an easy answer to the problem, but ‘pornography is wrong’ is not opinion, it is truth. The problem is not merely that emotivism regulates what constitutes fact however, there is a second prong. The problem of individualism is closely associated with the movement toward emotivism.
Individualism is the movement toward the total self-autonomy of a person. The importance of relationships, traditions, and heritage, are all minimized by the ideology of individualism. It is true that everyone is an individual, however individualism pushes this to extremes. The ideas of “self made man” and “captain of my own ship” are sentiments of this belief. Individualism fuels the same problem that emotivism does, from an additive angle. Individualism says that each person is a unit, completely self-reliant. self-sustaining, and autonomous. Emotivism adds to this that each individual possesses an opinion, and expresses those opinions using emotional language. Combine these two thoughts, and you brew up a dangerous concoction. Individualism cuts off a person from the community and says they are only an individual; emotivism cuts off a person from truth, and says they are only opinions. With these two beliefs, the following argument becomes possible, and even mildly persuasive: “I am my own person, with my own truths and beliefs and practices. You are your own person. You have your beliefs and truths, but you can’t push them onto me because they’re yours. As long as you practice your beliefs in private and they don’t affect the rest of us, it’s fine.” The first thing individualism does is single-out a person, in order to speak to them without addressing their context or culture. Once the person has been addressed as an individual, then emotivism can take over and relegate the beliefs of that “individual” to stay within “their personal lives”. The reality is that everyone exists within a community, a culture, a tradition, a context, and the personal lives of every individual will always affect those around them. Individualism is a naïeve belief because it rejects this idea of context.
On one hand, you have emotivism which downplays genuine emotion by confining all opinion and truth into emotional claims. On the other hand, you have individualism which downplays genuine individuals by cutting them off from their context. Both of these beliefs — emotivism and individualism — are dangerous and should be watched carefully. Opinions can be right in the degree to which they agree with truth. People are inseparable from the context they live in and come from. A few final warnings to close the article: watch out for the things that minimize truth or relegate feelings. And be cautious around the things that eliminate community or dispose of context. Beware of anything that destroys tradition; beware of anything that seperates people.
