Wittgenstein and Ethical Inquiry

Wittgenstein adn Ethical Inquiry by J.Jeremy Wisnewski  (pg 3)

 

The early Wittgenstein, as is well known, claimed that there was no such thing as an ethical proposition.  Propositions assert something about the world (facts); ethics, as concerned with something beyond the world (values), can thus not be propositional: "It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.  Ethics is transcendental."  This position is largely mirrored in the content of Wittgenstein's 1929 "A Lecture on Ethics":

 

My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who have ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religoin was to run against the boundaries of language.  This running against the walls of our cages is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science.  What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense.

 

Here, too, one sees an insistence on something like the fact/value distinction.  What can be asserted in the ethical sphere cannot count as knowledge.  There can be no science of values, on Wittgenstein's 1929 view, because a science can only express facts in the world.

 

The later Wittgenstein, however, has often been read as repudiating this view of ethics.  Having seen that language can function in many ways, a door seemed to open to new approaches to ethical inquiry: ethical dilemmas can be resolved, one reading of Wittgenstein goes, in the same way that our philosophical problems can.  To solve an ethical problem, one must clarify a misunderstanding one has concerning some specific ethical concepts. 

Posted via email from Jim Nichols