Ethics after Wittgenstein

Contemplation and Critique

Richard Amesbury, Hartmut von Sass, Richard Amesbury, Hartmut von Sass

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350087163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia etica e morale

What does it mean for ethics to say, as Wittgenstein did, that philosophy "leaves everything as it is"? Though clearly absorbed with ethical questions throughout his life and work, Wittgenstein's remarks about the subject do not easily lend themselves to summation or theorizing. Although many moral philosophers cite the influence or inspiration of Wittgenstein, there is little agreement about precisely what it means to do ethics in the light of Wittgenstein. Ethics after Wittgenstein brings together an international cohort of leading scholars in the field to address this problem. The chapters advance a conception of philosophical ethics characterized by an attention to detail, meaning and importance which itself makes ethical demands on its practitioners. Working in conversation with literature and film, engaging deeply with anthropology and critical theory, and addressing contemporary problems from racialized sexual violence against women to the Islamic State, these contributors reclaim Wittgenstein's legacy as an indispensable resource for contemporary ethics.

Part One

Ethics and Wittgenstein

1

Ethics as We Talk It

Lars Hertzberg

1 Are Ethical Judgments Nonsense?

Wittgenstein’s reticence concerning questions in moral philosophy is a famous theme. It is often linked to the remarks in Wittgenstein’s only sustained treatment of ethical issues, the “Lecture on Ethics,” where he makes the claim that the attempt to put absolute value into words is a violation of the conditions of sense.¹ However, the idea that there is a direct connection between these two matters is not unproblematic. For one thing, if the idea of the nonsensicality of judgments of absolute value precluded his writing or speaking about ethics, the lecture itself ought not to have come about. Or put it like this: in giving the lecture he showed that he thought one could talk about talk about ethics—and there’s no reason why he should have abstained from doing that in the future, in analogy with talking about talk about the mind, meaning, etc.

For another thing, his views about nonsense certainly changed during his career; so, whatever would have constituted a reason for not talking about ethics in the period up until 1930 would not have stayed the same during the 1930s and 1940s.

It is also very hard to know what to make of his claim, in the “Lecture,” that absolute value judgments cannot be made. He imagines two dialogues. In the first, someone is told his tennis game is not much good; he shrugs off the criticism by saying that he does not care about playing any better—in which case, supposedly, the critic will say, “Ah, then that is all right.” In the second dialogue, someone says, “You’re behaving like a beast,” and the other person answers, “I know I behave badly, but then I do not want to behave any better.” According to Wittgenstein, it would here be out of the question for the first person to respond by saying that in that case it is all right. Rather, he suggests, the first person’s response would be: “Well, you ought to want to behave better.”

There is, of course, a distinction to be made between telling a person there is something she has to do if she wants to bring about certain results and telling her there is something she has to do regardless of her goals. I am not sure whether that is a good way of marking off the ethical. Anyway, the conversations imagined by Wittgenstein are rather stilted, not to say weird. Be that as it may, Wittgenstein makes the important claim that the speaker who says, at the end of the latter conversation, “You ought to want to behave better,” is making an absolute judgment of value. In other words, he is suggesting that a sensible thing, indeed the only sensible thing, to say in the course of a (supposedly) more or less normal piece of human interaction is something that, by his own lights, makes no sense. This raises the question of how Wittgenstein’s use of the concept of nonsense is to be taken.

There is a strange duality in the rhetoric surrounding the talk of nonsense in the lecture. On the one hand, Wittgenstein is putting the distinction between sense and nonsense in fairly straightforward, restrictive terms: nonsense, he says, is whatever is not factual (he also contrasts nonsense with “true propositions” and “true scientific propositions”—here, he might rather have talked about propositions with truth-value). But on the other hand, he speaks about the distinction in more dramatic, or shall we say romantic, terms: nonsense is an abuse of language; it is an absolutely hopeless running against the walls of the cage of language (which he then immediately paraphrases with the less radical claim that ethics can be no science). At the same time, he expresses his deep respect for our tendency to speak in these ways.

Well, what is the force of Wittgenstein calling certain uses of words nonsense? Does Wittgenstein mean that we ought to resist the temptation to speak in these ways, or is he actually encouraging us to indulge in it? Is telling the guy who says he’s OK with behaving like a beast he ought to want to behave better also a case of running—hopelessly?—against the walls of the cage?

Does Wittgenstein simply mean to make us aware that there are other ways of speaking than reporting facts? Of course, people do things like asking questions, giving orders, etc. To characterize these ways of speaking as “running one’s head against the walls of a cage” seems overly dramatic. Besides, Wittgenstein shows no interest at this stage in exploring what is involved in calling a judgment factual, simply taking it for granted as an unambiguous notion—this, on the other hand, is a problem that he does address in his later work.

Or is Wittgenstein, rather, making some deeper point about ethical discourse in particular? Is he, perhaps, gesturing toward the fact that our ways of speaking about ethical issues run counter to assumptions commonly made about what takes place in human conversation? Or differently put, is he thinking of some particular way in which the attempt to get a clear view of ethical talk lends itself to philosophical misunderstanding? The problem, on this account, would lie, not in the ways we talk, but in the ways philosophers are inclined to construe our talk. The cage in question, then, would be that of the philosopher’s presumptions, not of human language as actually spoken. Wittgenstein’s use of the word “nonsense,” on this reading, is ironic: “if you are right, then you will have to discard all this as nonsense—which we all agree would be absurd.” I am putting this forward as a possible reading of Wittgenstein’s lecture—I don’t know how plausible it is.

2 A Restricted View of Meaningful Talk

Be that as it may, Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus as well as in the “Lecture on Ethics,” is expressing what we might call a diminished or restricted view of meaningful speech; similar views recur in different forms in much twentieth-century analytic philosophy. What I have in mind are views according to which only some of the forms of what we are used to thinking of as normal speech are genuine or meaningful or rationa l ways of speaking; in a milder version, certain forms of speaking are held to be paradigmatic of what it is to speak meaningfully or rationally. In the Philosophical Investigations, the idea of such a diminished view—or rather, a variety of diminished views—recurs, but now as a source of philosophical temptation. I shall try to articulate some of the characteristics of such views and also try to spell out what might make them attractive to philosophers. I shall then point out some aspects of ordinary conversation that tend to get neglected in the diminished view. Finally I shall present some cases of what might be considered everyday conversations addressing ethical concerns, and suggest what might tempt us to think of them as falling outside the limits of meaningful speech, even though there seems to be nothing obscure or untoward in what the speakers are saying.

On one version of the diminished view, to speak genuinely is to assert that something is the case. As Wittgenstein says (Tractatus 4.5), “The general form of a proposition is: This is how things stand.” The truth of an assertion is to be assessed by comparing how it represents things with the way things really are. If a listener trusts the speaker’s judgment, she will take him to be in a position to decide that the assertion accords with the facts, and if she believes him to be sincere, she will take herself to have reason to believe what is said. Accordingly, the assertion is apt to contribute to, or to make her modify, her conception of how things stand in the world.

On this account, the giving and receiving of assertions can be construed as a straightforward form of rational interaction, involving determinate criteria of success. Now, I am not arguing that the attempt to make communication intelligible played any explicit role in Wittgenstein’s thinking in writing the Tractatus—such mundane matters did not concern him at that time. I am, however, trying to sketch out a background, often unspoken and maybe unconscious, which helped shape much thought about language among analytic philosophers during the twentieth century.

Commands, it seems, can easily be brought under the same heading as assertions. In case the speaker has a call on the addressee’s obedience, his issuing a command provides the addressee with a reason for acting accordingly. What constitutes obedience is determined by the state of affairs represented as what is required in the formulation of the command.

In §§ 22 and 23 of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein addresses the diminished view of speaking. In § 22 he discusses Frege’s idea that each assertion can be thought of as consisting of an assumption prefixed with an assertion sign. Wittgenstein suggests that the “assumption” could be thought of as a sentence-radical, which can then be put to different uses: to say how things are, to order a person to make something the case, or to ask whether it is the case. That is to say, it might be thought that these ways of speaking either are or could easily be brought under the purview of what in the lecture (and in the Tractatus) is represented as senseful language. In each case, representation remains at the core of sense. Here we have the diminished view of speaking in essence. In the next paragraph, Wittgenstein asks, “But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command?” and then he goes on to say, by way of contrast with the diminished view,

There are countless kinds; countless different kinds of use of all the things we call “signs,” “words,” “sentences.” And this diversity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence and others become obsolete and get forgotten.²

He then lists some twenty examples of different language games; it is important to note that none of his examples would seem to fit under the description of moral discourse as traditionally conceived (i.e., involving words like “ought,” “right/wrong,” “good/evil”).

Wittgenstein ends the section by writing,

It is interesting to compare the diversity of the tools of language and of the ways they are used, the diversity of kinds of words and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (This includes the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)³

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