Writing in an omnibus compilation of Wittgensteinian scholars on the subject of Wittgenstein's approach to Ethics, Wittgenstein's Moral Thought, Edited by Reshef Agam-Segal and Edmund Dain, Duncan Richter who teaches philosophy and ethics at the Virginia Military Institute, reminds us that, like G. E. Moore and Henry Sidgwick before him, Wittgenstein thought the terminology of ethics (words like "good," "right," etc.) could not be reduced to any naturally occurring element in the world. Unlike the Utilitarians who hold that goodness is definable as whatever makes the greatest number of us happiest (or some variant of that condition), or deontologists who, writing in a Kantian tradition, take the good or whatever we deem right to mean fulfilling one's duty, however defined (Kant offers one way, others may offer another), for self-styled ethical intuitionists like Moore and Sidgwick the good is an indefinable because it is a simple feature we discern in things. It cannot be reduced to anything else. But if it can be discerned in things, it cannot be pinned down in any natural way, as some particular feature of the thing or activity which we count as "good" or "right."

In his article, Sketches of Blurred Landscapes, Richter reminds us that, while Wittgenstein shared the view that goodness is indefinable, he held this to be so for a different reason . . . .