On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice

A Wittgensteinian Perspective

J. Hermann

• Éditeur: Palgrave Macmillan
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137447180
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Analytic Philosophy

Taking inspiration from the later Wittgenstein, On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice explores the practical basis of human morality. It offers an account of moral certainty, which it links with a view of moral competence. Drawing on everyday examples, it is shown how morality is grounded in action, not in reasoning.

1

Introduction

1.1 Moral debates

Morality seems to be a field in which disagreement is pervasive. Debates about moral issues range from disputes about euthanasia and abortion to discussions about how we ought to treat animals.¹ A controversial ethical issue arising in relation to new forms of warfare involves the use of unmanned military airplanes, so-called military drones, which facilitate targeted killing. Drones are attractive as a means of reducing the number of military personnel who lose their life in armed conflict or come back wounded or traumatised. Moreover, they are relatively cheap and achieve a degree of precision that makes it possible to attack more specific targets. However, this last characteristic carries the risk of causing harm to far more innocent victims than conventional forms of warfare, since due to their robotic precision, drones tend to be deployed far more quickly than traditional bombers, and the precisely defined targets which they are deployed to attack tend to be close to civil locations.

Moral arguments in favour of the deployment of drones stand in contrast with arguments against their deployment. People disagree about how the reasons on both sides should be weighed. Does the possibility to protect the life of one’s own soldiers outweigh the presumably higher number of civilian victims? Should we abstain from using drones because once humans can kill from a distance, without putting their own life at risk, they will kill much more easily? There is also disagreement about related non-moral facts such as the likelihood of an increase in innocent victims due to the deployment of drones. These are some of the controversies. Now imagine a person participating in the debate and raising questions such as the following: Why should an increase in civilian victims be something to worry about? Why is killing innocent civilians in the course of a military operation a bad thing? Why is killing as such morally wrong?

These questions seem entirely out of place. The puzzlement they prompt points to the existence of agreement over moral matters, notwithstanding all the moral issues people disagree about. Were someone to raise such questions in the middle of a debate about the moral status of targeted killing, she would be regarded as making a joke, as lacking moral competence or as simply wanting to shock. There are no good reasons to doubt that killing innocent civilians is bad and that killing as such is wrong.

However, despite our lack of reasons for doubt in these cases, some philosophers try to come up with theories to explain or justify a moral conviction as basic as ‘Killing is wrong’.² They mistakenly believe that a conviction as fundamental within any moral theory as this belief has to be supported by reasons which are even more certain, on the grounds that a substantive moral theory ‘cannot ultimately rest on mere convictions’.³ As I shall argue, these philosophers try ‘to prove a philosophical thesis, the negation of which cannot be taken seriously’.

The claim that the inability to explain why it is wrong to kill people is ‘one of the most notorious scandals of moral philosophy’⁴ echoes Kant’s remark that it ‘remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us [ ... ] must be accepted merely on faith’.⁵ However, the assumption that we need to know what it is that makes wrongful acts of killing wrong in order to be able to judge cases in which the wrongness of killing is subject to doubt (for example abortion or euthanasia) is mistaken.⁶ Our everyday practices reveal that in justifying our moral convictions we sooner or later run out of reasons. At some point we cannot do more than repeat – though this time with stronger emphasis – a moral conviction the truth of which seems to be most obvious to us. I intend to show why this is so, and that it is nothing to be worried about.

In this introductory chapter, I shall present the four main claims of this study, discuss the ethical relevance of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, present the debate about the right view of justification that lies in the background of this book and provide an outline of the chapters which follow.

1.2 The limits of justification

The limits of reasonable doubt and justification are emphasised by Wittgenstein: ‘Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; – but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, that is, it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game’ (OC 204).⁷ In this quotation from On Certainty, Wittgenstein notes that at some point we stop justifying our beliefs.⁸ He rejects the view that the point where no further reasons are given is one where we reach propositions which we know to be true directly, without requiring any further reasons.⁹ In saying that ‘it is not a kind of seeing on our part’, he uses the language of epistemological and mathematical intuitionists, who claim that there are propositions which we know to be true immediately, through intuition.¹⁰ The propositions concerned are thought to express objective truths, that is truths which are independent of what people believe is true. The metaphor of ‘seeing’ that a certain proposition is true illustrates the view that the intuitive knowledge in question is as immediate as sensual experience. There is no inferential reasoning involved. Going beyond a mere rejection of the intuitionist position, Wittgenstein makes the positive claim that ‘it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game’.

This quotation sets the stage for the reflections contained in this study.¹¹ Fascinated by Wittgenstein’s cryptic but powerful remarks about the limits of justification and the primacy of acting, I shall explore their significance for the practice of justifying moral judgements. This exploration will be embedded in the broader enterprise of approaching morality from a Wittgensteinian understanding of language and meaning.

Many moral philosophers adhere to the mistaken assumption that the activities of justifying and evaluating actions and judgements are constitutive of all moral practices. These practices are, by contrast, some of our more sophisticated practices and as such presuppose what Meredith Williams calls ‘bedrock practices’.¹² I shall argue in favour of four main claims: (1) The demand for justification of a moral judgement or norm does not always make sense. (2) Practices of moral justification are grounded in ways of acting and reacting that are themselves unjustified. (3) Moral agency is first and foremost a matter of moral competence. (4) For morally competent agents, some moral beliefs are beyond doubt and not susceptible to justification. I shall call the view developed in this book the ‘practice-based view of morality’.

1.3 Why Wittgenstein?

The later Wittgenstein was relatively silent on questions of morality. Wittgenstein did not address ethical issues in the writings that follow his ‘Lecture on Ethics’. In On Certainty, he famously claims that ‘justification comes to an end’ (OC 192), but he is not concerned with moral justification. He reflects on the peculiar role of some empirical propositions, but not on that of some moral propositions. The examples he gives of language-games do not include activities of moral evaluation, morally praising and blaming, holding someone to account, and so on, but things like ‘[g]iving orders, and obeying them’, ‘[d]escribing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements’, ‘[r]eporting an event’, and ‘[m]aking a joke’ (PI 23).

Nevertheless, Wittgenstein’s later writings are of interest to moral philosophers. They teach us a way of doing philosophy that is equally suitable for reflection on moral questions. However, I disagree with those contemporary philosophers who ascribe a fundamental ethical concern to the later Wittgenstein.¹³ My understanding of the relation between Wittgenstein and ethics has to be sharply distinguished from what Nigel Pleasants calls ‘intrinsically-ethical readings’.¹⁴ According to those interpretations, everything Wittgenstein wrote has an ethical point.¹⁵

On my view, by contrast, the later Wittgenstein’s remarks on language, meaning, rule-following, training, justification and certainty, which I conceive of as not being ethical in nature, have implications for our thinking about ethical questions. I agree with Pleasants that there is ‘no distinctively moral viewpoint [ ... ] in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy’, but that this philosophy, and On Certainty in particular, ‘can be of help in our thinking about ethics and ethical issues’.¹⁶ Similarly, Judith Lichtenberg argues that ‘[a]lthough Wittgenstein never specifically discusses moral judgements, his explorations of the concepts of knowledge, certainty, belief, and justification in the context of non-moral judgements help illuminate the realm of the moral as well’.¹⁷

There is no good reason for restricting Wittgenstein’s conception of language to its non-moral uses. If the metaphor of the language-game is illuminating at all, it has to be applicable to that dimension of human life which is characterised by ‘promoting good and avoiding evil’, ‘encouraging virtue and discouraging vice’, and ‘avoiding harm to others and promoting their well-being or welfare’.¹⁸ Wittgenstein’s criticism of a particular conception of linguistic meaning and a related conception of rule-following can be applied to the moral dimension of life and language. His reflections on how justifications come to an end with regard to empirical propositions can illuminate the status of moral propositions such as ‘Killing is wrong’. His insight that doubt does not always make sense has implications for the question as to whether every moral belief can be meaningfully doubted. That we do not carry on justifying indefinitely is not only true of empirical justification, but also of moral justification.

However, caution is required when attempting to apply to the moral realm Wittgenstein’s claims relating to empirical propositions, empirical justification, and doubts concerning, for instance, the existence of the external world. Nothing would conflict more with Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy than simply translating his view of empirical justification into a view of moral justification. Wittgenstein rejects generalisations and asks the philosopher to look at the particular practice in order to understand it. I fully agree with Cora Diamond’s warning regarding an application ...