What does it mean to be ethical?

My Agenda

A Wittgensteinian treatment of what it means to be ethical – A reading of Wittgenstein’s answer to the question as it strikes me

Ethics is of paramount significance/importance to Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s Ethics

Going from logic to ethics

·       The limits of my language is the limits of my world (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt)

·   “The limits set by ethics is the limits of my world” = “ethics is expressed within human culture through language”  -> “ethics is expressed through language”

o   Ethics is one important element that defines the worldview of a person.

So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.

Propositions can express nothing that is higher.

It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.

Ethics is transcendental.

(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

It is clear, however, that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the usual sense of the terms. (6.42-6.43)

         See Moore (1989), Sullivan (2013), Mulhall (2015)

·       Verificationism -> Non-cognivitism about ethics?

·       What language fails to do in conveying ethical pronouncements only serve to show just how difficult it is to be ethical, and how mistaken we possibly are in thinking that ethics is just a matter of theory choice and debates about theory choice.

Wittgenstein’s Ladder

·       Atomic fact -> states of affairs -> facts (states of affairs that actually obtain i.e. are not merely possible)

·       E.g. “rock” = rock

·       Necessity of logic: Whether an object’s atomic fact (i.e. its referring term) can be included within a state of affairs (i.e. its sentence) is already inherent within the object

·       What goes beyond the limits put in place by logic is nonsense

·       Logic is supreme

The difficulty of ethics

Tension: “ethical propositions do not exist; ethical action does exist.”

·       It is impossible to cash ethics out in language;

·       Ethics is supremely important in human culture

·       Question: How do we manage something so important and yet so unconveyable?

·       How one sees the world with regards to ethics is not a matter necessarily of what one utters; Rather, how one sees the world with regards to ethics is what one allows into one’s worldview

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. (7)

In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself.” (2.012)

If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states of affairs are also given.” (2.0124)

If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language. (6.43)

Answer to what does it mean to be ethical

·       To be ethical is

         (1) to be aware of the importance to be ethical and;

         (2) to adopt an ethical consciousness/worldview/perspective

·       Problem: In the three strands, the word “ethical” appears almost as if we already know what it means

         See Conant (1995)

·       The ethical can only be arrived at, as it were by a leap of faith, not by reasoned understanding put forth to one as by a priest or one’s parents. One must pursue an ethical consciousness as one were fulfilling a requirement or a task

·       Being ethical:

(1)   Peter Singer

(2)   Simone Weils

References

Moore (1989) “Transcendental Idealism in Wittgenstein, and Theories of Meaning”

Sullivan (2013) “11 Idealism in Wittgenstein: a further reply to Moore”

Mulhall (2015) “Adrian Moore’s Wittgenstein”

Conant (1995) “Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors”