Wittgenstein, Ethics and Basic Moral Certainty

Abstract

Alice Crary claims that “the standard view of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics” is dominated by “inviolability interpretations”, which often underlie conservative readings of Wittgenstein. Crary says that such interpretations are “especially marked in connection with On Certainty”, where Wittgenstein is represented as holding that “our linguistic practices are immune to rational criticism, or inviolable”. Crary's own conception of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics, which I call the “intrinsically‐ethical reading”, derives from the influential New Wittgenstein school of exegesis, and is also espoused by James Edwards, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall. To my eyes, intrinsically‐ethical readings present a peculiar picture of ethics, which I endeavour to expose in Part I of the paper. In Part II I present a reading of On Certainty that Crary would call an “inviolability interpretation”, defend it against New Wittgensteinian critiques, and show that this kind of reading has nothing to do with ethical or political conservatism. I go on to show how Wittgenstein's observations on the manner in which we can neither question nor affirm certain states of affairs that are fundamental to our epistemic practices can be fruitfully extended to ethics. Doing so sheds light on the phenomenon that I call “basic moral certainty”, which constitutes the foundation of our ethical practices, and the scaffolding or framework of moral perception, inquiry, and judgement. The nature and significance of basic moral certainty will be illustrated through consideration of the strangeness of philosophers' attempts at explaining the wrongness of killing.

Notes

1. Crary talks undiscriminatingly of “our linguistic practices” and “our practices” (e.g. 2005, 278, where this occurs in the same sentence).

2. Wittgenstein's distinction is reminiscent of Kant's distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, except that Wittgenstein insists that no propositional content can be given to one side of the distinction.

3. It might be rejoined that the immanence of “the ethical” makes it not a possible object, but rather a condition, of experience. But this rejoinder belongs to the same kind of metaphysical language‐game as that played by those that New Wittgensteinians accuse of arrogating an illusory/delusory birds‐eye view of “language” and “the world” as such. Given that Crary characterises New Wittgensteinians as being committed to the renunciation of “metaphysical theories” and the possibility of “a point of view on language as if from outside from which we imagine that we can get a clear view of the relation between language and the world” (2000a, pp. 1, 6), one wonders how they manage to attain a viewpoint from which to (think they can?) discern the omni‐pervasiveness of “the ethical”?

4. Moore contrasts what he (says he) knows to be the case with “merely something which I believed” (1959, p. 146).

5. I mean it is true that the hand that Moore was exhibiting did indeed exist when he asserted “Here is one hand”, not that it is true that he knew that he had that hand, as he asserted. Wittgenstein's objection was that Moore did not know what he asserted he knew, not that what he asserted was not true. Crary, and other New Wittgensteinians, would reject the foregoing because they maintain that such utterances are unintelligible, hence incapable of truth or falsity, and therefore are not even assertions (I address this view in the following section).

6. It might be objected that Wittgenstein does say here that we have knowledge, of some kind, of the objects of basic certainty (Michael Hauskeller put this objection to me). But this is knowledge only in the attenuated metaphorical sense in which we say in ordinary language that someone “knows what she's doing”, meaning simply that she's a competent performer, or that she can be held responsible for what she does, not that she stands in an epistemic relation to the taken‐for‐granted nature and conditions of her action.

7. As James Conant (1998, p. 224) puts the point, the kind of reading of On Certainty that I outlined above “presupposes… that there is an ‘it’—a judgement that thus‐and‐so—which cannot be doubted (and hence cannot be claimed as a piece of knowledge)”.

8. As with their reading of the Tractatus, the Crary/Conant reading of On Certainty requires an ingenious, but convoluted, interpretive story to explain away Wittgenstein's seeming to have something to say—about the role of basic certainty in our epistemic practices, and about language and its relation to reality, respectively.

9. Cf. Conant on Moore's Sätze: “it is not clear, when these words are called upon in this context, what is being said—if anything” (1998, p. 241).

10. Moral wrongfulness does not feature in any of the eight definitions of “murder” listed in my dictionary, where the primary definition given is unlawful killing—“the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another” (Collins English Dictionary, Fifth Edition, 2000).

11. L. W. Sumner, for example, asserts that “not all instances of murder are morally wrong”, and even—most implausibly—claims that “this contention is common to utilitarianism and most other moral theories” (1976, p. 147).

12. Ewin (1972, p. 128) misreads Moore when he says that “it was only occasional murder that he thought he had shown to be wrong”. Moore does not claim even this much; he claims only to have shown that “in all known conditions of society” where the rate of murder falls well short of universality, “it is generally wrong for any single person to commit murder” (1903, p. 156, my emphasis).

13. For Feldman (1992, p. 157), the inability to “explain why it is wrong to kill people” is “one of the most notorious scandals of moral philosophy”. It was Kant's complaint that it “remains a scandal to philosophy” that “the existence of things outside of us... must be accepted merely on faith” to which Moore (1959, p. 127) was responding in his “Proof of an external world”.

14. This is the response I've often elicited upon asking people what they think the badness of death consists in.

15. As Wittgenstein put it: “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death” (1988, 6.4311).

16. See Rosenbaum (1989) for a contemporary defence of this argument.

17. In admonishment to Hamlet for his tautologous statement that there is a “villain” in Denmark who is an “arrant knave” (Act I, scene V).

18. I mean “knows” in the figurative sense specified in note 6.

19. As Wittgenstein points out, “one may be wrong even about ‘there being a hand here’. Only in particular circumstances is it impossible” (1979, §25). It is the latter that Moore sought to exploit.

20. After writing this I came across Renford Bambrough's “proof that we have moral knowledge”, which proceeds “by an exactly analogous argument” to Moore's. Bambrough's proof consists in “saying, ‘we know that this child, who is about to undergo what would otherwise be painful surgery, should be given an anaesthetic before the operation. Therefore we know at least one moral proposition to be true’ ” (1979, p. 15).

21. In my view, Wittgenstein uses the term “language‐game” in On Certainty in a very loose, non‐specific, non‐conceptual way (much more so than in Philosophical Investigations). In this remark, “the language‐game” is just shorthand for: Our routine ways of going on in the world of familiar things and familiar practices. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein refers to “the human language‐game” (1979, §554).

22. Alice Crary kindly sent me a pre‐publication copy of her paper “Wittgenstein and ethics”, and I am very grateful for the stimulation it provided. I have been greatly helped also by the comments of Adrian Haddock and Michael Hauskeller. Danièle Moyal‐Sharrock has been especially helpful and supportive.