Wittgenstein famously claimed in his early work that ethics (a form of valuation applied to human actions) is not in the world but outside it and thus "transcendental." He asserted this but did not explain it, likening ethics to aesthetics and, indeed, religious belief. In the same sense that these things seemed to the early Wittgenstein to be outside the realm of factual assertion (our artistic and religious inclinations are not reducible to facts about the world or things in it), so, too, did he hold that our ethical claims are a type of inclination. But that did not mean that, for him, they are to be ignored or discarded. Rather, as he told others at the time and later, he had the utmost respect for all three modes of human behavior (religion, the appreciation of art and ethics). Yet, as far as the matter of ethics may go, which is to say determining what is right or wrong to do when we deal with the world, he did not hold out hope for the use of reasoning as a means of furthering our understanding of ethical matters, either in making ethical choices or in explicating that activity.

Even though moral discourse, the linqua franca of ethics, seems to be about offering reasons to do one thing rather than another in certain situations (typically where others' interests are in play), on Wittgenstein's transcendentalist approach, there would seem to be nothing to be said. So how, then, do moral judgments make themselves felt in the world? . . .