What are the moral habits of a given person or group of people, and what causes them to have precisely those habits and feelings?
And this enquiry falls wholly within the scope of the existing social sciences.6
28 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
5A. J. Ayer, “Critique of Ethics and Theology,” in Lan- guage, Truth and Logic (1936; reprint, New York: Dover, 1952), 107. 6Ayer, 112.
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The emotivist points out that while moral utterances express feelings and attitudes, they also function to influence people’s attitudes and behav- ior. So the sentence “Stealing money is wrong” not only expresses feelings of disapproval, it also can influence others to have similar feelings and act accordingly.