Moral Certainty in the Texts of Alfred Ayer and Jean-Paul Sartre

In the wake of our prolific 20th century wars and violence, many intellectuals have become afflicted with unrelenting moral cynicism. Having long ago folded the terse apercu “if their lips are moving, they’re lying” into our strategy for dealing with the world, we view most statements of ethical belief as nothing but embryonic lies. Our dubiousness comes not of course ex nihilo—but rather because most of the devastation wreaked on the human race in the last 100 years came carefully wrapped in someone’s moral certitude. Nazism, Stalinism, Manifest Destiny--history is marked by a steady colonnade of jack-booted tantrums, all invoked to impose someone’s shining moral certainty on the world.
Philosophers have long plumbed the pathology of ethical certitude. From Socrates to John Stewart, iconoclasts have invariably excoriated human tendentiousness. In the 1940’s, two particularly cogent explorations of human moral delusion emerged in the texts of John Ayer and Jean-Paul Sartre. In both Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic and in Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism, arguments were made for the cremation of old moral frameworks. Both writers contended that human ejaculations of morality must be probed until the folds of their mendacity are peeled back, and their untruth lay quivering in the glare of our persistent doubt.
Ayer and Sartre represent two approaches to a pressing question of our century: how are we to shape our human moral future? The question has cleaved a rift into the world, a chasm between two sides represented on the one hand by thinkers like Ayer and Sartre, who reject established morality as rationally corrupt, and a cabal of conservatives who rally the view that morality is god-given and immutable. We are in the teeth of a battle for the human soul, one raging between the old moral certainties and new interrogations of those certainties.
A comparison of the philosophical-ethical frameworks of Ayer and Satre, and of the plausible ramifications of those frameworks, presents its own significance. We are in the center-boil of a modern crisis, one precipitated in scientific explosions of knowledge that have turned old ideas of God and moral certitude on their head. Ultimately, Ayer’s and Sartre’s formulations of morality pose cogent nexi for considering what will be our post-modern moral future.
An interrogation of the moral frameworks of Ayer and Sartre would contain a natural intricacy, as both offer rich theoretical pockets which can be analytically rifled through. Sources would be almost limitless, as the ideas espoused by the two men were often controversial, and thus relentlessly parsed in the call-and-response deliberations of academia. Finally, the interrogation would offer a potential for reaping new conclusions: new quantum, historical and neurophysiological discoveries (such as that of human neurogenetic changeability) have exposed new contexts for judging and sifting both views. The discussion would be split into two halves: one side exploring the idea that traditional morality has become both theoretically untenable and realistically insufficient, and the other mediating an approximation of what a replacement morality would look like. This explication of morality, anchored as it would be to the positivism of Ayer and the existentialism of Sartre, and contextualized against our new scientific paradigms, would ultimately result in ideas for framing the human moral future that are both dialectically elegant and ultimately absolutely necessary for us to live, at least in perpetuity.