Lexluthor1000

Til að bæta fyrir ömurlega léleg afköst á net-ritvellinum birti ég hér ritgerð sem ég var að klára um siðfræði heimspekingsins Wittgenstein. Ef einhver les þetta þá er sá hinn sami geðveikur en jafnframt verður hann þeim mun fróðari um málfræðivillur í umfjöllun um siðferði

Wittgenstein wrote little explicitly about ethics. Yet there are profound ethical themes and implications in his work. His main achievement was in his development of a new conception of philosophy but perhaps more importantly he developed a new philosophical method - a new approach for philosophical problems. Although he did not apply his method to ethics (at least not to any real extent) his work is nevertheless filled with ethical implications. In this paper I will go over some of Wittgenstein’s comments about ethics and also try to apply his method to ethical problems and debate.

Throughout history, there have been few, if any, real ‘solutions’ to the problems that have been put forward by philosophers. Philosopher’s diligent pursuit for new ways of looking at old problems have on the contrary, in most cases, opened the possibilities for interpretation even further. This has lead to countless schools of philosophy that for the most part can’t seem to agree on anything. In many cases the debate has been lead to a standstill where opponents keep repeating the same arguments over and over.

Wittgenstein wanted to break this standstill. In his early work and again in his later work he tried to dig into the core of the philosophical problems put forward by his predecessors. With his methods he hoped to reveal the ‘nonsense’ he thought was clouding our judgment – he wanted to find a definitive means of resolving these problems and to make philosophy a science with real solutions and answers. As he said to M.O´C Drury in 1930, “my father was a businessman, and I want my philosophy to be businesslike, to get something done, to get something settled” (Drury 1981: 110). In his pursuit for the inflexible truth, Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and claimed that he had thereby answered all the questions that philosophy could possibly answer. He held that the questions that were not answered there, were in fact, nonsense or beyond the realm of philosophy and ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (TLP: 7).

The Tractatus
In the preface to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein states that there is nothing outside the limit of language. But his view is in fact that there is “nothing factual outside the limits of language” (Pears: 96). But there are things that fall beyond the limits of language, these things belong to another kind of discourse - the most important of these things are religion, morality and aesthetics. He claimed that these things fall into the category of silence, not just scientific silence but that “any attempt to put nonscientific truths into words would necessarily distort them by forcing them into the mould of scientific discourse” (Pears, 97).

For Wittgenstein, the real task of philosophy is “to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science – i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy – and then whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions” (TLP: 6.53). But this negative result is not what he had in mind. Ethics (as well as aesthetics and religion) are not themselves nonsensical. What is nonsensical is to try to say anything about them. “There are indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (TLP: 6.522). Because ethics, lies outside this world “outside the realm of facts and their constituent states of affairs – nothing can be said about them.” (Grayling: 31) ‘Showing’ rather then ‘saying’ is all that is possible.

Even though Wittgenstein talked very little about ethics in the Tractatus, he still states that is what the Tractatus is in the end really about. To understand this we have to grasp a point, which Wittgenstein stresses in relation to his main argument. He says that we cannot use language to talk about language - we can’t say that propositions have a certain structure the elements of which are linked, through the picturing relation, with elements of the world. The logical structure of language, and their relation become obvious when we see them correctly. In an identical way, we can’t say things of an ethical nature, for they are beyond the limits of language and they are therefore nonsense.

A possible explanation of Wittgenstein’s aim is that he wants to protect matters of value from the “debunking encroachments of science” (Grayling: 47). Science describes facts about the world, but the world is in a sense accidental – things in the world are as they are but they might as well have been some other way. But Wittgenstein wants to underline his feeling that value is to important to be based on accidental objects. And because the sphere of fact and value are separate, the propositions of fact can’t be used to clarify or talk about value.

At the end of the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that good or bad acts don’t make any difference to the world. They don’t change anything about the facts of how things are in the world but they “alter the limits of the world” (Grayling: 48). They change how the world is to the moral agent. Wittgenstein says: “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man” (quoted from Grayling: 48). This proposes that ‘goodwilling’ produces its own reward - happiness for the good-willed agent - and the unhappiness for the bad-willed agent.

The Lecture on Ethics
In November of 1929, Wittgenstein gave a lecture on ethics to the Heretics Society at Cambridge University. In this lecture he again argues against the statement that there can be any logical discourse about ethics. At the start of the lecture, Wittgenstein tries to give a definition of what he means by ethics. He starts of by the definition given by Moore “ethics is the general enquiry into what is good” and then he gives a number of other definitions. By naming these definitions, he hopes that the audience will step by step begin to get the general idea of what he means because according to him there is no one real definition. Therefore he uses the notion, which he later called family resemblance – even though every family member is unique there is still some quality (or qualities) that binds them together. He describes ethics as the enquiry into what is valuable, or really important. He says that it could also be said to deal with the meaning of life, what makes life worth living or the right way of life.

Wittgenstein, again, goes to Moore in the next part of his lecture. He now says that each of the expressions he mentions can be used in two very different senses – a relative sense and an absolute sense. There is no problem in using the relative sense of these statements; a good chair is one that fulfils a determined function, and to say that a road is the right road is to say tat it is the right road relative to a particular destination. But this is not the same when we turn our sights on ethics. Ethical statements or actions are good without having any specific purpose. What is right is absolutely right, regardless of our destination. If we try to answer questions on why such-and-such is the right thing to, we sooner or later come to a standstill where the only argument is based on our particular value system. Wittgenstein therefore states that with the absolute use of these terms we are in fact trying to say something that is unsayable.

According to the Tractatus, propositions have meaning in virtue of representing the state of affairs. But the propositions of ethics do not and therefore they can be said to have no meaning. And of course, since they do not depict states of affairs, these moral statements cannot be validated with the respect to reality and the use of such terms as true or false is nonsense. As a result of this, ethical statements seem to be essentially murky. By comparing fact and value we are only making is murkier. A fact like “the sky is blue” can be imagined otherwise. Most people would have no objection to the statement that the sky might become green or red. With this, the facts of the world would change but the world would still essentially be the same. But ethical statements don’t have this quality. Doubtlessly, most people would object to the notion that with some change of the world or with a different perspective, lying or murdering would become justified as general rules. To say this would be to imply that ethics are relative but clearly this cannot be the case. Surely, in each possible world, murder can’t be right. Wittgenstein sees that the problem is the ‘action-guiding’ (Johnston) nature of value terms – that is what makes them so mysterious. The right road would be the one that everybody who saw it would have to choose, regardless of his or her destination. But this is clearly not the case so Wittgenstein comes to a dead-end.

“That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions are not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expression, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language.

This running against the walls of our cage 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 no add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” (Lecture on Ethics: 6)

The unusual claims of the Tractatus have their “origin in an attempt to come to terms with everyday moral experience. Thus one of his central concerns is to do justice to our respect for the ethical, our sense of its profundity.” (Johnston: 98). However Wittgenstein seems to unbeatable obstacles. He comes to the conclusion that moral propositions are nonsensical. They are useless because they try to say what can’t be said. However much he respects the pursuit of these ethical “truths”, he states that it is nonetheless utterly hopeless.

With his lecture, Wittgenstein doesn’t try to make the subject matter become clearer to his audience. On the contrary, his lecture makes our understanding of the subject even fuzzier. The philosophical attempt to understand ethics seems hopeless but Wittgenstein does not condemn ethics as misleading. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy provides the basis on which to develop a new account of ethics.

The Philosophical Investigations
There is a radical change between Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophies. For our topic, the most radical change is his abandonment of the idea that the structure of reality determines the structure of language. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein turned this idea on its head and said that in fact it’s our language that determines our view of reality because we see reality through language. This change cuts very deep and entails far more than the thorough theory about reality that he put forward in the Tractatus. He destabilized any theory that tries to base a blueprint of thought, or a linguistic practice, on some base in reality. If these things need any justification, it must lie within them, because there are no independent points of support outside them (Pears: 13).

The strange thing about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is that it’s so broken. The Tractatus is based on an unbroken and whole theory that has a clear target and a mostly clear way of reaching that target – the fundamental essence of language has to be isolated and portrayed so that its construction and restrictions may be determined. The Philosophical Investigations on the contrary is a much more piecemeal treatise. Even if the structure of the two books is essentially the same, there is still much easier to wander of the path because there is no distinctive road map or clear destination. The combining factor however is Wittgenstein’s commitment to the structure and limits of language but the distinction is that in the Investigations there is no complete theory. As has been stated earlier, Wittgenstein thought that with the Tractatus, he had given a solution to every philosophical problem. When he recognized that at the foundation of his theory, there was am erroneous theory of language, he made a new but not entirely different start. He now discarded the idea of finding the structure and limits of language from an ‘abstract logical theory’ (Pear: 16) and decided he would find the boundaries through empirical investigation. He now worked with the idea that language is a essential and indispensable part of human life and interaction and therefore it should be viewed as such.

In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein concluded that the real problem was trying to answer what we refer to as philosophical questions. He now argued that what we fail to recognize is that philosophical questions are “not genuine questions but rather the manifestation of conceptual confusion” (Johnston: 2). He abandoned the idea that philosophy should be focused on truth and instead set his sights on clarity. His approach implied that there were no real answers because the questions themselves were wrong and misguided. The philosophical problems aren’t in fact philosophical – they are linguistic.

Wittgenstein’s aim – as before – is to teach us to pass from a disguised nonsense to patent nonsense. He shines light on the misconceived analogy that underlies the disguised nonsense and applies it to a case to which it is clearly unsuitable. This exposes the cause of our puzzlement. We are seduced by a resemblance in surface grammar into overlooking differences, which spring less readily into view. Magnifying nonsense is one way of showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle (see PI §309), although, not the only way. It’s a technique of recognizing plain nonsense. It helps us to get a clear overview (Übersicht) of the mess in our rules. The point of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is not to teach doctrines or theses, but to destroy houses of sand; and to teach us a knack. This will give us the ability to fend for ourselves when confronted by philosophical problems. Of course, this method has a common goal with other methods, viz. to make perspicuous the violation of the bounds of sense that is characteristic of philosophical problems and predicaments. Instead of making theories about philosophical problems, he stated that we should dissolve these problems by finding and eliminating the misunderstandings that cause them in the first place. Wittgenstein cast off the thoroughly organized method of the Tractatus and adopted instead a gradual approach designed specifically not to result in an ordered or structured theory.

At the core of Wittgenstein’s later study of philosophical problems is the idea of overview (Übersicht). It proposes that certain rational problems are not to be resolved by adding additional information or by inventing descriptive hypotheses, but rather trough the structured presentation of what we already know. The problem lies in our inability to see things as they really are and therefore what we need is to put our scrambled thoughts to order. According to Wittgenstein, to get away from the conceptual confusions manifested in philosophy we need to get an oversight of the particular segment of language concerned. Because we are “[p]uzzled by the deceptive similarities of surface grammar, we must note grammatical differences and seek to map out the network of conceptual relations involved” (Johnston: 7).

To Wittgenstein, philosophy is (or at least should be) about concepts – not values or assumptions. Therefore its aim shouldn’t be justification or explanation but the achievement of clarity. And since philosophical problems reflect the lack of conceptual clarity, their solution cannot consist in the ongoing detection of truths, which will definitively answer philosophies questions. A Wittgensteinian study of ethics will therefore not unravel a complete system, like for instance Kant’s, because as I’ve stated the objective is clarity. Wittgenstein’s method “was to avoid systematic theorizing” (Grayling: 98). Because of this, it will be nonsubstantive in the sense of simply unfolding our concepts and practices without justifying them. According to Wittgenstein, we can give justifications but they eventually reach an end, and at this stage one can only describe: ‘this is what we do’.

But even if the “right” or “ethical” ways aren’t once and for all determined that doesn’t mean that we can do what we want or that every act is ethical. But Wittgenstein doesn’t want to give us reason; it’s more like a practice. Because every context is essentially particular I am accountable for what I do.

Different societies have different codes of ethics. What is widely accepted in one culture can be declared sacrilegious in another. To better clarify this point, we can look at the Inuits. They live in remote and inaccessible regions. Today they are just under 25.000 and they live in small, secluded groups, mostly in North America and Greenland. The traditions of the Inuits are very different from the western tradition; it’s not uncommon for the men to have more than one wife and they would share their wives with visitors as a sign of their hospitality. On the surface, the Inuits also seem to have less respect for human life - it’s not uncommon that newborn children, especially girls, are left carried out and left to die. The decision to carry out your child is left up to the parents and is not socially condemned. Furthermore, old people are left out on the ice when they become too weak to be of any help to the family.

To person in a modern western society, these actions seem very barbaric. We think of our own lifestyle as being so natural and right that many of us find it very hard thinking about others leading their lives in such a completely different manner. When we hear about these things we tend to instantly class the people who practice them as barbarians. But the Inuits are not an isolated case. Through the ages, different cultures have had different customs and different codes of ethics. “It would be childish to think that every man in every time had our ideas about right and wrong” (Rachels: 34).

These differences between cultures and even within the same cultures at different times, has led some philosophers to the conclusion that there is no universal code of ethics, that morality is relative to the society and time that we live in. Therefore we can’t condemn some rituals as being right or wrong because that would suggest that we have an independent measurement for rightness. The idea of ‘Cultural Relativism’ implies that our everyday ideas about collective and universal morality are discarded. And furthermore, no set of ethics can be classified above any other set.

And if every culture is ‘right’, these ideas seem to suggest a status quo. If no codes of ethics can be classified as above or below our own, we can’t condemn societies where, for instance, slavery is allowed or torture is an accepted practice. The only standard for our actions would be our own society and therefore if we lived in Germany at the time of the third Reich, anti-Semitism would be just and even necessary. Furthermore, there would be no basis for ethical development or improvement within a society, because the ‘new’ society would be just as good (or bad) as the old society. We could even take cultural relativism further and say that because different people have different codes of ethics, there can be no basis for moral rules, even within societies. In his essay, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Wittgenstein criticizes the attempt to extend the method and concepts of science to all fields because this can cause conceptual confusion. “Thus, within the sphere of philosophy, it has become a part of established orthodoxy that when an individual states the reason for his action he is in fact making a disguised causal claim. Wittgenstein considered this claim to be an important confusion. “ (Johnston: 38)

Wittgenstein rejects ethical or cultural relativism. For him, the absence of an independent decision procedure does not eliminate the possibility of considered and meaningful judgment. Because “if you say there are various systems of ethics you are not saying that they are all equally right. That means nothing. Jus as it would have no meaning to say that each was right from his own standpoint. That could only mean that each judges as he does” (Rhees - quoted from Johnston: 143). Even if each society thinks of itself as being ethically unique, Wittgenstein’s says there is no independent way of choosing between them. But this does not mean that societies are wrong to claim a unique status, because that would also be an objective standpoint that would lead to extreme relativism. Wittgenstein therefore has two grammatical points “first that the appeal to ‘independent’ assessment – be it in terms of logic or of reality – makes no sense; and second, that for this reason assessing a moral standpoint itself always involves advancing substantive claims.“ (Johnston: 143).

To talk about truth and objectivity when we are talking about ethics is a grammatical confusion because the power of an idea does not come from its truth-value. “Indeed, it could not do so, for qua injunction it would make no sense to say either that it was true or that it was false” (Johnston: 146). When we say that some moral judgment is true, we are simply repeating that judgment or confirming our dedication to it. If we say that we believe something to be the case or that some act is right and then include the statement that we might be wrong, we are saying nothing more than what we have said can be denied. To talk about truth is therefore based on confusion because then we are talking about morality with the language of science. But moral judgments can’t be investigated empirically – we can’t find solutions to them by examining reality. Furthermore, we cannot discover the ‘true nature of goodness’ (Johnston: 143) because then we are again making the same error of thinking that we can validate moral judgments with our observations. However, it can’t be said that thinking about how we should act is misguided. What is misguided is the idea that our thoughts can be associated with truth. If we come to the conclusion that it is somehow wrong to cheat we would be adding nothing to this conclusion if we would say that it’s true that it’s wrong to cheat. And once again, we could not validate our statement with our investigation of reality.

It is crucial to understand Wittgenstein’s distinction between moral and empirical judgments. The fact that we all use the same concepts to signify the world means that our empirical judgments take place within an agreed framework where differences are resolvable. Our rules of language lay down what it would mean for such-and-such to be the case and hence provide criteria which enable us to determine whether the assertion is or isn’t correct.

Moral judgments, on the other hand, are concerned with how to act rather than with stating how things are; the character and foundation of certainty are deeply different in the two backgrounds. Moral judgments don’t make claims about the world but propose rules of conduct, and therefore disagreements about them cannot be resolved by reference to the facts. In making a moral judgment the person assumes a substantive position, and therefore the foundation of the judgment is an individual response. It’s however important to realize that this does not imply that moral judgments are subjective or arbitrary. In fact, quite the opposite is true - what sets a moral judgment apart from an expression of preference is the claim to universal validity, the claim that it is “not just one way of judging human action but the correct way of judging it” (Johnston; 202).

As I’ve said before, the problem we face when we try to understand ethics is that we run into a wall when we try to define its correctness. We can either talk about it in the same way as we talk about facts and truth or we have to dismiss the fact that it has any truth-value at all and therefore we have to consider it as illogical. But it should be clear that when we talk about truth in ethics we are clearly not talking about the same thing as when we talk about truth in an empirical sense – there are clear grammatical differences. When we talk about truth in the ethical sense, this truth has no foundation in reality or in our observations, “Rather, in this context the claim to truth or objectivity expresses the claim that one set of judgments about how people should act is uniquely correct and that the standards embodied in these judgments ought to be recognized by everyone just because this is so” (Johnston: 203). The moralist objects to the statement that we can have more than one right code of ethics and that we can choose between these codes of ethics. But there is nothing the moralist can say to substantiate his claim that his code of ethics is correct. He can of course try to persuade us but his persuading will again have no foundation in reality.

In each judgment that we make, the statement that there are intrinsic differences between actions or types of action is inherent. The result of this argument is that these differences are separate from our judgments. Therefore, we can’t assert that objectivity is an unnecessary part of ethics. By refusing to accept the statement that ethical judgments reflect independent standards we are also refusing to accept the statement that there are intrinsic differences between actions. Furthermore we then have to accept the statement that when we judge actions we are simply expressing our own fondness for one code of ethics above another. By this we are clearly ruling out any possibility of moral judgments because we are “abolishing the notion of objective right and wrong” (Johnson: 204)

The idea of ‘bedrock’ (Johnston) is a critical notion when we try to clarify Wittgenstein’s view of ethics. Making judgments about action automatically involves a substantive reaction on the part of the individual. When faced with a number of possibilities, we have to decide which possibility we consider right. We could also make the choice that every possibility is right and therefore discard the idea of rightness. There’s no logical difference between our reasons for judging and our judgment.

Rather than giving the judgment an independent or unquestionable foundation, they elucidate the reaction, which it manifests and hence leave someone assessing the judgment facing the same substantive decision as that made by the person who first advanced it. Just as the offering of reasons for action eventually gives way to acting, so too the offering of reasons for one’s moral judgments eventually gives way to one’s judging thus-and-so and acting accordingly – ultimately, one reaches bedrock and is confronted by a reaction, a substantive commitment to the idea that acting and judging in one particular way is correct. (Johnston: 204)

Our emphasis on bedrock, and hence our account of ethics in general, may seem to undermine the scope for discussion in ethics; to illustrate that this is not so, it is worth considering the implications our conclusions have for moral argument. As we have seen, because of the nature of moral judgments there is no such thing as bringing evidence to demonstrate their correctness nor is it possible to prove their validity. Evidence may play a role in establishing the nature of the case at issue, but how one should judge the case couldn’t itself be deduced from any particular evidence. Similarly, while there may be proof within a particular moral framework, that framework will itself always be potentially controversial – from a logical point of view, it si simply one possibility among others. However, if moral judgments can be established neither empirically nor conceptually, what possibilities for argument and rational discussion are there?

In so far as the search for greater comprehensiveness and system is an inherent feature of ethics, there is scope for the attempt to think through a particular moral position and elaborate the particular view of the world it embodies. In part, of course, this is the role metaphysics played in the past. Our investigation of ethics has shown, however, that any such accounts would be neither empirical nor conceptual, but substantive. The error of both contemporary moral philosophy and traditional metaphysics is the failure to distinguish between conceptual and substantive issues; our aim has been to show that recognition of this distinction is the sine qua non of any clear thinking about ethical matters.