Wittgenstein's Error

The early Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus made waves in the twentieth century between the world wars, considered ethics beyond the reach of philosophical inquiry because its propositions, he held, lacked content. In Tractatus 6.42 he said “. . . there can be no ethical propositions” and followed, at 6.421, with:

. . . ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.)

In this (aside from the invocation of the “transcendental”!) he was fully in line with the tradition in Empiricist philosophy, since Hume, that ethical propositions do not express objectively discernible claims about things in the world but serve, rather, to express our feelings about such things. And feelings about things can be neither true nor false themselves, neither right nor wrong. They just are particular states in which we happen to find ourselves. Whatever we take to be the case about the world, as we find it, cannot imply anything about how we ought to feel about it. . . .

. . . On this Humean view we can neither be blamed nor condemned for what we feel, and what we feel can neither imply anything factual about the world nor itself be taken to be implied by the way the facts present themselves to us since we may react in any number of ways to the phenomena of the world. . . . But in that case we cannot be praised or blamed for being such creatures since we are not what we are by our own choice and ethics is, finally, about judging our options, the choices we make. . . .

Wittgenstein, whose early philosophy was much influenced by this post-Humean empiricism, as expressed in the work of the early analytic philosophers at Cambridge led by Bertrand Russell, came to think a little differently however. As he goes on to say immediately after at 6.422 in the Tractatus:

The first thought in setting up an ethical law of the form “thou shalt . . . ” is: And what if I do not do it. But it is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense. This question as to the consequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant. At least these consequences will not be events. For there must be something right in that formulation of the question. There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself. (And this is clear also that the reward must be something acceptable, and the punishment something unacceptable.)

Immediately following, at 6.423, he adds:

Of the will as the bearer of the ethical we cannot speak. And the will as a phenomenon is only of interest to psychology.

Then, at 6.43:

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.

Wittgenstein moves here toward an account of ethical valuing which, while not rejecting the Humean analysis, endeavors to find a place for ethical concerns despite their exclusion from the realm of meaningful content. As he later suggested with regard to the Tractatus, its thrust, on his view, was not so much to show how ethical matters are excluded from our areas of concern but to show how ethics occupies a different, albeit still legitimate, position in our world. But he is not transparent about this in that work. At 6.52 he writes . . .

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Was Wittgenstein Wrong on Ethics?

According to Paul Livingston of the Philosophy Department of the University of New Mexico, in early 1930 Wittgenstein reportedly told Waismann and Schlick, in a reference to the matter of ethics, that philosophical inquiries about ethics amounted to trying to run "up against the boundaries of language," suggesting that, in his view, there was little of conceptual significance that could be said explicitly about the classical ethical questions in philosophy (alluding, of course, to the manner in which philosophical thinkers in his time approached the matter):

This running up against the boundaries of language is Ethics. I hold it certainly to be very important that one makes an end to all the chatter about ethics – whether there can be knowledge in ethics, whether there are values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In ethics one always makes the attempt to say something which cannot concern and never concerns the essence of the matter. . . .

This is clearly in keeping with his suggestion about The Tractatus that the real point of that effort, which laid out what he then took to be the limits of substantive linguistic expression, was ethical. Presumably, and in light of the above passage and in keeping with his talk on Ethics a few weeks earlier, delivered to the Heretics Society at Cambridge, he held the view that one could say nothing of substance concerning this matter . . .

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Wittgenstein on Heidegger and Ethics

In a draft paper not yet open for quoting, Paul Livingston of the philosophy department at the University of New Mexico explores the relationship between Wittgenstein and Heidegger based on two instances when the two thinkers mentioned one another. While Livingston’s commentary on this is not available for citation (it is publicly readable in draft if you google "Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein") there would seem to be no obstacle to quoting what Livingston himself quotes in relation to his thesis.

He begins with a quote ostensibly of Wittgenstein’s to Schlick and Waismann dated December 30th, 1929. It was first published, he reports, in the January,1965 issue of the Philosophical Review in German with a translation to English by Max Black. Here we have the Wittgenstein known to the members of the Vienna Circle and still in the shadow of his early thinking as we find it in the Tractatus, before the change that eventually led to the Philosophical Investigations and other later work.

The Wittgenstein we see is a man interested in ethical concerns but clearly reluctant to engage in a philosophical inquiry about them:

I can very well think what Heidegger meant about Being and Angst. Man has the drive to run up against the boundaries of language. Think, for instance, of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. All that we can say can only, a priori, be nonsense. Nevertheless we run up against the boundaries of language. . . .

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Toward a Comprehensive Account of Value Discourse

Still working my way through Hall, on the 12th chapter now and have reached a point, I think, where I have enough of a sense of where he is headed with his analysis to make some comments:

Hall builds his account of valuing, and moral valuing specifically, on the notion that valuing just is emotion and that it occurs in parallel (though intermixed with) occurrences of perception (perceiving). He proposes that there are parallel linguistic forms within what he calls our conventional language (ordinary language governed by a convention-based grammar) which reflect or express the underlying elements (emotion and perception), with each having its own distinct logic, also occurring in rough parallel. Thus he argues that the polarities of truth and falsity represent the dichotomies intrinsic to perceptive/descriptive language, as represented by the truth tables of logic, while a favorable/non-favorable/indifferent trichotomy characterizes emotional language. Both forms of language, he proposes, in keeping with their underlying (natural) basis, i.e., reflecting the two ways we relate to the world around us, have semantic content. That is, they refer to entities outside themselves. This referential trait, he holds, is an expression of the fundamentally intentional nature of both.

For Hall, then, the solution to the problem posed by Hume's is/ought dichotomy is to demonstrate that Hume missed the linguistic/semantic character of value claims and to show that oughts and is's are interconnected because of their parallel reliance on the intentionality of the language user. . . .

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Acts, Intentions and Agents

Writing at page 174 of his book, Our Knowledge of Fact and Value, Hall makes the point that

Our moral and aesthetic judgments are not about our emotions; they are renditions of our emotions, having the same object as our emotions have, saying (in part) exactly what our emotions say. They are expressions of emotions.

Here, it seems to me, is the crux of Hall's claims about value and our knowledge of it. He seems to want to say that valuing is just the expression of our emotions and that emotion language is like descriptive language (contra Hume) in that both are directed at objects, both refer and thus both types of language say something that is determinable from the facts. But there are certain differences in the logic he notes, for descriptive statements are true or false based on the adequacy with which they depict the facts which our perceptions capture for us while:

Evaluative sentences in conventional language receive whatever probability they have from their truthfulness to emotions.

He adds

I need not remark that the 'truthfulness' to which I refer is not correctness of depiction but faithfulness of translation.

In this way, Hall sets out to explode the Humean account which severs fact from value. . .

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The Case for a "Sentimentalist" Account of Moral Claims

I've rethought the Prinz article on the argument for "sentimentalism" as an explanation of moral valuing and now think that this does deserve a post of its own. Jesse Prinze presents his case for explaining moral valuation as emotional reactions based on some scientific studies of actual moral judgment-making among subjects in relation to their detected, hypothezised or reported emotional states in that article. He does this in light of the powerful critique offered by David Hume centuries ago which asserted that moral claims are just expressions of sentiment, reflecting our human inclinations to approve or disapprove of things around us and the training and education we have received which develops certain sentiments in us and, perhaps, suppresses others.

Since Hume this has been an important challenge to those wishing to make something more of moral valuation than just the idea that it merely expresses some feelings we happen to have because feelings, as Hume suggested, cannot really be argued for while moral claims seem to involve argumentation (we think we can give reasons for the claims of this sort that we can make, reasons which others will find convincing if understood aright). . . .

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How to Derive "Ought" from "Is"

Back when I was in college and taking up philosophy, the received opinion concerning ethics claims, the standard doctrine espoused by all my teachers, was that, since Hume at least, we can all agree that one can't derive "ought" statements from "is" statements, that is claims about what we ought to do in any given case do not follow based on the descriptions of the facts of the case alone. Of course, this is moderated somewhat by the realization that some "is" statements present us with reasons to make "ought" claims to the extent that we are so inclined and that we believe others share the same inclinations that we do. Confronted with a fact that prompts us to choose X, for instance, we will naturally expect that someone else with values like ours will be susceptible to the same prompt and recognize the same reason to act as we do. To the extent moral assertions are built on that, it is possible to move in a seemingly logical way from what there is to what we ought to do about it. But the problem, particularly in the moral case, boils down to situations where the prompts themselves are in question.

If seeing someone in danger or in pain serves to prompt me to try to alleviate the conditions causing the other person pain or putting them in danger, it doesn't follow that that prompt will have the same effect on someone else. Nor does it follow that it should have that effect on me if it so happens that it doesn't. This is the problem of deriving oughts from is's. And it lies at the very heart of the moral case.

Since Hume this has been standard stuff in moral philosophy . . .

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