Tonni asked:

What characteristics does Ayer assign to ethical statements? How does his view of their nature affect
the evaluation of traditional ethical theories? Assuming that Ayer's position is correct, is there need for
any further work to be done in ethics? If so, whose task is it?

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Ayer is an ethical noncognitivist. This means that if his view is correct, then ethical statements do not
have truth values. He's committed to that view as a consequence of his larger project, logical
positivism. Positivism states that meaningfulness only occurs in statements that are verifiable. Since
there aren't any scientific experiments that we could run to test or verify the hypothesis that "murder is
wrong", it follows that it, and other ethical statements, aren't meaningful at all.

Of course, he does recognize that people say things like that, and that they're not just spouting
gibberish. Ayer's solution is to interpret ethical statements as expressing the speakers' attitudes about
their subjects. For example, if I were to say "murder is wrong," I wouldn't be stating a fact, I'd be doing
pretty much the same thing if as I said "murder!!!" with vocal inflection and facial expression indicating
disapproval.

My opinion, which is a rather common one, is that Ayer's position is pretty unreasonable. After all, we
take ourselves to be making statements of fact when we make ethical judgements — that's why it's
possible to disagree. If I say murder is wrong and you say it's not, then I think you're mistaken.
There's no way that Ayer can account for this; how could I think that your vocal inflection is
inaccurate?

If Ayer's position were correct, then I think that normative ethics and metaethics would both have to
be pretty pointless, so no, I don't think there'd be any more work to do there. But there are other fields
in the same region as ethics that might still have some work to do. Ayer actually mentions a couple
himself in Language, Truth and Logic.Moral Psychology might still be worthwhile. Given certain
virtues that are generally considered desirable, it's still a useful (and empirical) question as to what
kinds of lifestyles, etc. are conducive to those aims. Ayer rightly considers this to be more a matter of
psychology or sociology than of philosophy, but it's probably all that's left of ethics, once Ayer's done
with it.

Ayer lays his position out pretty clearly in Chapter VI of Language, Truth and Logic.. It begins on page
102 of the Dover edition that I have (with a blue spiral on the cover).

Jonathan Ichikawa