What we need, and what we currently lack, in order to account for Wittgenstein’s ideas about ethics, and—as part of that—in order to investigate the personal nature of these ideas, is a proper notion of the grammar of moral language. We are not, that is, in a position to even tell Wittgenstein’s biography, for we do not yet have clear the language in which such a biography can be told.
Many discussions on Wittgenstein’s views on ethics have a biographical tone. Like for Socrates, for Wittgenstein ethics was a matter of self-knowledge—a personal matter. Wittgenstein is thus unlike the typical, typically theoretical, moral philosopher, for whom moral philosophy is primarily an intellectual enterprise, and for whom it is possible to separate the intellectual aspect of one’s life from the rest of that life; for whom, to do moral philosophy is not to talk about, to work on, oneself. To this extent the tone of those many discussions I mentioned is justified. Nevertheless, those discussions tend not to be very helpful. And this, I believe, is because the fact that ethics for Wittgenstein was a personal matter does not mean that in investigating his views on ethics we may exchange the philosophical for the merely biographical. That is, many of the discussions I mentioned employ a conception of the biographical that would have been very foreign to Wittgenstein.
What we need, and what we currently lack, in order to account for Wittgenstein’s ideas about ethics, and—as part of that—in order to investigate the personal nature of these ideas, is a proper notion of the grammar of moral language. We are not, that is, in a position to even tell Wittgenstein’s biography, for we do not yet have clear the language in which such a biography can be told.
7 Comments
3/22/2014 11:17:18 pm
What would having the language of ethics clear look like? Is it the logic of ethical claims we need to better understand? Is it something else about how they work (prescriptively, emotively, inner directedly)? How would we better understand biographical details from Wittgenstein's life by being clearer on ethics talk and why wouldn't ordinary language be enough? If Wittgenstein said that certain behaviors are "beastly" what else could that mean but that he disapproved of them? And then isn't the question just what does such disapproval amount to? Why should we take it seriously? Why should he have done so?
Reply
reshef
3/23/2014 09:44:37 pm
Thanks Stuart,
Reply
Stuart W. Mirsky
3/24/2014 02:48:36 am
But don't all of us already do ethics? I am thinking of James Q. Wilson's book The Moral Sense which makes the point that we don't typically reason to our values, we just have them and apply them. Although he is a social scientist and not a professional philosopher, his view strikes me as philosophically sophisticated. He proposes that what we think of as moral judgments are the outcome of evolutionary biology which has so constructed us to have certain needs and capacities (e.g., social living and the abilities to construct for ourselves such groupings because of behavioral inclinations) and that these produce in us what we call sympathy, a sense of fairness, of duty and so on, all of which underpin our moral judgments. You don't need philosophy to do any of that and thinking philosophically about it doesn't promise to make it any easier. It just might make it a little clearer to those of us who are curious and enable us to put things into the right conceptual places.
Reply
reshef
3/24/2014 03:00:39 am
Perhaps we all do ethics. That is, perhaps each of us is doing something that is called “ethics.” But that doesn’t mean that we are doing the same thing. We might, for example, be calling different things by the same name.
Reply
Stuart W. Mirsky
3/24/2014 04:36:29 am
Yes, we don't call making moral judgments "doing ethics" I suppose and yet we do it all the time, as Wilson points out, in every aspect of our lives. We do speak of "moralizing" I suppose but usually that has a pejorative connotation. But to the extent that, as philosophers, we are doing ethics, we are not so much making judgments of moral goodness and badness (everyone does that all the time and you don't have to be a philosopher to do it -- nor does being one seem likely to make us better at it!) as making judgments ABOUT what moral claims of goodness or badness amount to.
Reply
reshef
3/24/2014 07:50:10 am
I’m not really saying very much; certainly I’m not here saying much about the grammar of moral language. All I’m saying is that Wittgenstein is doing something that’s entirely different from what we might take him to be doing, and that these wrong expectations make it impossible for us to see what he is doing. I’m also saying that these wrong expectations are reflected in our making the wrong kind of (grammatical-logical) connections between his biography and his ethics.
Reply
Stuart W. Mirsky
3/24/2014 09:39:20 am
I take him to be attempting a run at ethical matters in the Tractatus, as he says he was, albeit indirectly, and to have largely ignored ethical concerns in his later work. I suppose he ignored these either because they presented no puzzles for him, having decided long since, as he apparently had, that ethics was "transcendental" as he put it in the Tractatus, or because he was following his own advice and being silent on something he thought outside the scope of discursive discourse.
Reply
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
See my
Academia.edu page Previous Notes Excluded Middle Moral Clarification The Will in the Tractatus Morality and Creation Moral Skepticism Understanding language and understanding music - The unity of a sentence, and the unity of a salad In what way secondary and absolute uses are nonsense (2) Another way of using nonsense Ethics as an Aspect of Philosophy - In what sense is there an ethical point to the Tractatus Interpretation as finding a way to say what the writer does - the Tractatus for example In what way secondary and absolute uses are nonsense Art is a matter of use - two claims, and a thought about the relation to ethics Both Aspects at the Same Time - in connection with Wittgenstein's early views on ethics Thinking and Willing Subjects in the Tractatus Two notions of "Family Resemblance" and a relation to Aspect-Perception The experience of thinking The Figurative and the Literal: two kinds of picturing: making reality thinkable What’s the Point of Figurative Language? ‘Juliet is the sun’ again – What kind of metaphor is it? Secondary and Absolute Uses of Terms – the Problem of Irresoluteness Secondary and Absolute Uses of Terms – the Problem of Examples Wrestling with Nonsense—A Protest: Absolute Senses, Secondary Senses, Gulfs between People, Difficulties of Reality, and Philosophy. What’s so bad about pain? Between Romantics and Anatomy: Religion and Pornography in Hanoch Levin The transcendence of ethics – two views Pain as form of behavior and pain as private object Archives
November 2019
-
Blogroll Kelly Jolley - Quantum Est In Rebus Inane Duncan Richter - Language Goes on Holiday Matt Pianalto - Problems of Life Ben Pierce - Expensive Coffee Lars Hertzberg - Language is things we do Breaking the Silence - Israeli Soldiers Talk about the Occupied Territories Hans Sluga Blog Mists on the Riverss - Ed Mooney Tags
All
|