Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Nothing to be said?

          This insistence on the irrelevance of theory to ethics could lead us to assume that Wittgenstein argues against all philosophical investigations of ethics - an assumption that would cause trouble for the interpreter of his remarks on ethics (and, for example, cut this chapter rather short). Some commentators have argued in favor of this conclusion (especially Richter 1996), but there are convincing reasons to resist it. What we find Wittgenstein opposing is a particular form of moral philosophy with a particular purpose, namely that of building a moral theory, and this accords with his general view of the goal of philosophical activity as 'elucidations', 'clarification', or a 'perspicuous representation of our use of language' (TLP 4.112; BT sec. 86; see also TLP 6.54 and PI §122). In his critique of moral philosophy, Wittgenstein does not express reservations about the possibility of reflecting on ordinary ethical discussions or of elucidating ethically significant uses of words, and the claim that he has no such reservations finds support in the fact that Wittgenstein's own remarks on ethics are not restricted to the critique of moral philosophy. 
This is from Christensen, p. 797. [Etiquette-related update: I have met Anne-Marie Christensen a couple of times, so should I call her by her first name as I would in real life? Or, since people reading this are unlikely to have met her, should I be more formal? I don't want to be coldly formal or condescendingly familiar. Maybe she will be so annoyed by this post that cold formality becomes the only option. (I hope not.)]  I want not so much to defend my 1996 position as to reconsider it in the light of her objection. The issue once seemed fairly simple to me, then I started to think I had simply got it all wrong, but now it seems difficult. It's this difficulty that I want to explore.

It might help to go step by step. So:
This insistence on the irrelevance of theory to ethics could lead us to assume that Wittgenstein argues against all philosophical investigations of ethics - an assumption that would cause trouble for the interpreter of his remarks on ethics (and, for example, cut this chapter rather short).
I don't think so, because I don't think that interpreting a philosopher's remarks or writing an account of a philosopher's views is itself philosophy. Many philosophers would agree with that, but others, with whom I'm likely to be in sympathy, would consider it naive. One often has to do philosophy, to evaluate arguments  for instance, when interpreting, in order to apply the principle of charity. But Wittgenstein did not present a lot of arguments of that kind, and philosophy as he understands it does not, it seems to me, include textual interpretation or summary. His later philosophical method involves such activities as assembling grammatical reminders and imagining possible uses of language that strange tribes might make. Interpreting Wittgenstein is a different kind of activity, it seems to me.

Next:
What we find Wittgenstein opposing is a particular form of moral philosophy with a particular purpose, namely that of building a moral theory, and this accords with his general view of the goal of philosophical activity as 'elucidations', 'clarification', or a 'perspicuous representation of our use of language'
I agree with this. The last part is the hardest part:
In his critique of moral philosophy, Wittgenstein does not express reservations about the possibility of reflecting on ordinary ethical discussions or of elucidating ethically significant uses of words, and the claim that he has no such reservations finds support in the fact that Wittgenstein's own remarks on ethics are not restricted to the critique of moral philosophy.
I agree that Wittgenstein does not express reservations about the possibility of reflecting on ordinary ethical discussions, and that Wittgenstein's own remarks on ethics are not restricted to the critique of moral philosophy. Even here, though, I'm not sure about the phrase "remarks on ethics." Of course if by "ethics" we mean moral philosophy then Wittgenstein's remarks on ethics are restricted to the critique of moral philosophy. When does he ever discuss it without censure? But that would be an obviously unfair 'criticism' to make. It clearly isn't what Christensen means. The problem is that it is not all that clear to me what she does mean, what we should understand as "Wittgenstein's own remarks on ethics." If ethics means something like how to live then just about everything he ever said or wrote could be treated as a remark of his on ethics. Christensen herself brings this out (when she observes that ethics is not a particular area of life, for instance), and there is evidence for it in such remarks of his as that he was thinking about both logic and his sins (in a conversation with Russell, in which Russell had asked him which of the two he was thinking about) and that he saw every problem from a religious point of view. There are two aspects to this point: according to a certain Wittgensteinian view (associated with Cora Diamond and Iris Murdoch especially) ethics is a facet of everything we do, say, or think, it is not something that applies to or covers only certain kinds of actions (say, those that benefit or harm others) or kinds of sentences (say, those involving words or concepts such as goodness or duty); secondly, (and this is part of the point of my paper "Wittgenstein's Ethics") Wittgenstein himself provides as good an example as any of how this can be, which makes his remarks in particular likely to have ethical significance.  

That might seem (and be) confused. If everything has an ethical aspect, how can this have anything to do with Wittgenstein in particular? The point is this. Everything can have ethical significance, and Wittgenstein appears to have been acutely aware of this and to have lived accordingly, which makes his life a rich source of examples to illustrate the point that everything can have ethical significance. He shunned ornament and luxury (in later life at any rate), seeing what kind of cups to drink from or what (not whose!) bed to sleep in as moral issues. He wanted to eat the same thing every day when staying with Norman Malcolm, again for ethical reasons. He believed in doing and saying things the right way. He cared deeply and passionately about just about everything he did and said (he tended to take things very seriously) and he cared about this caring. Attention to particulars and going the bloody hard way were central to his ethics, to his outlook on the world, to his view of how to live. It is the possibility of this kind of ethic that makes everything potentially a matter for ethics. If I doze in front of the television all weekend this might seem to have nothing to do with ethics (I am not wronging anyone, for instance) but Wittgenstein might well have disapproved. (As might Peter Singer.) So my action is a possible object of moral judgment. This is even more so if I ought to be somewhere else or doing something else. Perhaps I am complacently dozing while someone who needs my help is struggling. Perhaps I am dozing rather than attending a wedding or funeral that others think I should be at. And there is much more to ethics than judgment, as Murdoch, Diamond, and Alice Crary have brought out. As I recall, Bouwsma (implicitly) quotes Wittgenstein as saying, "Is Dewey dead yet? He ought to be." Is that a remark on ethics? It isn't about moral philosophy, but if the remark expresses a condemnation (I'm back to judgment again!) of Dewey's views then it seems to have ethical significance. But Wittgenstein's whole thought is suffused with ethical concern. So all his remarks really have such significance to some degree. Or so I'm inclined to believe.   

Which brings me to "elucidating ethically significant uses of words." What are these uses and how are they to be elucidated? It is not the words themselves that make their use ethically significant. "Pass the milk, please" is not normally ethically significant (although vegans might differ, of course). But it could be. It could be said in order to change the subject away from something controversial, or as a way of pointedly ignoring what someone else has just said. ("If you don't let me marry him I'll kill myself!" "Pass the milk, please.") Any words could be used in ethically significant ways, or just about any, it seems to me. 

Maybe I should distinguish a few points about the scope of ethics that I have not really distinguished above:
  1. Language is flexible enough that we can use it in ethically significant ways without having to use any particular set of words or phrases, so all language is potentially ethically significant
  2. On some ethical views (standard versions of deontology, for instance), ethics forbids certain things but allows others, leaving many of these other things not good but ethically neutral, whereas other kinds of ethical view (standard versions of consequentialism, say) apply to everything, so that every act and every omission is potentially subject to moral judgment--this is one sense in which ethics might be said to be global, universal, or ubiquitous
  3. Other ethical views (e.g. virtue ethics) care about not only what is done but the way it is done, and might therefore judge not only actions and decisions but also reactions, emotions, thoughts, and so on--this is another sense in which ethics might be said to be global, etc.
  4. Finally, ethics can be thought to be about more than judgments of what is right and wrong. It can apply to perception, so that it can be an ethical failing not to notice something. This might seem to come down to a judgment that such failure is wrong, but (perhaps because we are all limited when it comes to sensitivity and perception) it sometimes seems better to talk about better and worse than right and wrong in such matters. Relative insensitivity need not be judged wrong for it to be seen to be less than ideal. (It might even be wrong, unduly harsh, to judge it wrong.) If this all seems very obscure, think of issues of equality involving men and women, straight people and gay people, human beings and animals, people of different ethnicities, and so on. If I am generally pretty sympathetic to members of some other group but not as sympathetic as I should be am I wrong? Where on the scale of sensitivity do we draw the line between right (or acceptable) and wrong? There might be a wrong part of the spectrum, but the terms 'right' and 'wrong' seem too crude to be useful here. And if ethics is not only about judgments and the judge-able, if it covers also what is assessable as more or less good, then, once again, it has a broader scope than might be thought.    
I think two points follow. One is that we cannot identify ethically significant uses of language just by looking at the vocabulary involved. The other is that how we do identify such uses will depend on our own ethics. Are we (merely) judgmental or something more (or something else)? Are we virtue ethicists or do we focus only on actions? Do we recognize a sphere of action that is neither moral nor immoral, or not? And these need not be the only questions worth asking here. If we cannot identify ethically significant uses of language without applying controversial ethical standards, then we cannot philosophize about such uses of language in a way that everyone can be expected to agree on. (See PI 128 for why I think this matters as far as Wittgensteinian philosophy goes: "If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.") Unless we stick to non-controversial examples, that is, examples that are uncontroversially ethically significant. They might be controversial in other ways, e.g. with regard to what to make of them. For instance, it is uncontroversial that abortion is ethically significant, but whether it is ever acceptable is controversial. So perhaps a Wittgensteinian ethicist might elucidate the use of words in a sentence like "Abortion is wrong." This would be meta-ethics, of course. (It is what I meant when I referred, no doubt confusingly and confusedly, in my last post to "the philosophy of ethics" as opposed to ethics itself.)

So for now that's my conclusion. Wittgensteinian philosophy can accommodate meta-ethics but not what I think of as ethics proper. I still have doubts though. Hasn't Paul Johnston done a good job of showing that the distinction between meta-ethics and ethics (or normative theory) breaks down? I need to re-read his work. I ought to have some sort of view on Anscombe at my fingertips, but not teaching what you do research on can be a problem sometimes. I don't remember my own work, let alone other people's. As I recall, though, Anscombe's critique of the concept of moral obligation as meaningless is bound up with her own moral views. My suspicion is that it would not be possible to do work in meta-ethics that was actually useful, that provided clarification where it was needed, without taking some kind of moral stand.

But maybe that is always the case in philosophy. In which case maybe it's only possible in some sense to do Wittgensteinian philosophy with people with whom one agrees. Then the philosopher would have to be a member of a kind of thought community. And that doesn't sound right. I think the Wittgensteinian philosopher is supposed to be more like a therapist, asking questions to guide someone else to clarity, out of the fly-bottle, and not proposing or defending this or that belief, and hence not really speaking for herself. Whether this can be done in meta-ethics seems doubtful, but it would help to look at some examples. That could be food for a future blog post. 

5 comments:

  1. Is Cavell's work on ethics in "The Claim of Reason" Wittgensteinian in spirit or not? Is Cavell's work merely metaethics or it is ethics proper?

    I admit that these are hard questions, but I tend to think that someone like Cavell shows that there can be genuine Wittgensteinian work to do within genuine ethics.

    I am not really sure what you end up saying about Anne-Marie's claims (having met her a couple of times - and generally agreeing with her - I don't mind calling her that). But I take her to be saying something quite straightforward (and correct!): Wittgenstein's philosophical stance excludes systematic theories of ethics, say like Spinoza or Habermasian discourse-ethics, but it doesn't exclude philosophical work on ethics tout court.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Might it be helpful in this connection to think about the nature of ethical disagreement? Could we disagree in judgments and yet agree in the language we use? If we can, there would seem to be room for reflection in moral philosophy which does not depend on the stand we take on particular issues.

    Disagreement on moral issues is often construed as disagreement on basic principles. Presumably there are cases of this, but I submit that disagreement very often takes the form of disagreeing on how a case is to be described (I wasn’t always sure whether Anne-Marie kept these kinds of disagreement apart). To take a somewhat hackneyed example: pro-choicers will represent the issue of abortion as an issue concerning a woman’s right to her bodily integrity, pro-lifers as an issue of killing he innocent – it’s not as if pro-choicers thought killing the innocent was no big deal and pro-lifers thought women had no right to their bodily integrity.

    Yet our disagreeing on how a case is to be described does not mean that we speak different languages; on the contrary, we try to put forward our view of things *in the language we presumably share*. This is possible because ethical discourse isn’t agreement-dependent in the way, say, colour discourse is. The point of colour language seems to depend on our agreeing in its application (which includes agreeing on what cases are borderline). But in ethical discourse the point of our remarks may often depend precisely on our disagreeing on the application of words; what holds our discourse together, on the other hand, is the degree to which, even so, we agree on the *significance* of a given description: *if* this were murder, *then*...

    So there might be clarificatory work to be done concerning the significance of the expressions we use in reflecting on human attitudes and actions, even if we (sometimes) disagree on their application.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks, Presskorn and Lars. I'd like to mull this all over some more, but I don't want to put off replying forever.

    Presskorn: what you say sounds right. I don't want to deny that Cavell and others (including me, after all) have done work on or in ethics that is genuinely Wittgensteinian (mine might not be, but I hope it is Wittgenstein-ish, at least). And yet I find it much easier to get a sense of what Wittgenstein (seemingly) rules out than to see what work in ethics he might regard as genuinely philosophical. I should look at Cavell's work again.

    Lars: Thanks, this is very helpful. The nature of ethical disagreement is difficult to characterize or get in full, clear view, but I agree that disagreement very often concerns how a case is to be described. I also agree that there might be clarificatory work to be done concerning the significance of the expressions we use in reflecting on human attitudes and actions. This sounds like a kind of meta-ethics, but it also sounds more personal (or ethical?) than standard meta-ethics. Not that that's necessarily a problem.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Some more scattered thoughts:

    I don't think I've ever claimed that it's not possible to think or talk about ethics, or that Wittgenstein thought this, but he doesn't seem to have counted such thinking as philosophy. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. What we do is bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. I take the idea to be that philosophy deals with metaphysics. Perhaps I'm reading this particular sentence too narrowly, or putting too much weight on it. Metaphysics might include meta-ethics, as I've said, but it's tricky because I'm not sure there's a clear division between ethics and meta-ethics.

    Part of my problem here is the question of how one can be a Wittgensteinian philosopher. Everybody seems to do it slightly differently, which is probably a good thing. People are influenced by Wittgenstein in different ways, and are likely to be Wittgensteinian in one way or another (or several), and to varying degrees. So Cavell, Anscombe, and Diamond, for instance, are all Wittgensteinian philosophers who have done important work in ethics. But they aren't the same, and the kinds of contributions to ethics they have made are different. Whose contribution is most Wittgensteinian? That question hardly makes sense to me. Working in ethics seems itself to be rather un-Wittgensteinian, if only in the crude sense that he (the later he, that is) didn't do that kind of thing (except in conversation, as far as I know). And I don't think this was just because he never got around to it.

    Lars's suggestion that we think about the nature of ethical disagreement is helpful, as I said before. Disagreement about what is right and uncertainty about what to do tend to bring out different ways of describing or conceiving of a certain course of action. Am I killing a man or righting a wrong? Am I helping a woman live her life or murdering a baby? Am I telling a lie or comforting a friend? And so on. Perhaps this is metaphysics: what is the true nature of what I am proposing to do? What is the reality here? I know I'm doing that other thing, I know that there is a sense in which both horns of the dilemma are true (maybe a very attenuated sense in some cases), but what am I really doing? That might be one way to think of these cases. But one thing at issue is what value or values to bring to bear on the case. In the light of which value should I see this problem? Life or justice? Equality or freedom? And so on. (I don't mean to imply that we only have a few values and that at most only two ever clash.) Of course the answer might be both, but if I have to make a decision then seemingly one must win out in each case. Describing what I am doing in executing a murderer or performing an abortion or leaving my mother to fight for the Resistance involves evaluation. Perhaps all description does, but it is especially prominent in cases like these. The very idea of description seems problematic. Or at least the distinction between facts and ethics that Wittgenstein makes in the Lecture on Ethics seems hard to maintain.

    (continued below)

    ReplyDelete
  5. And then there's the fact that ethics is not only a matter of making such difficult decisions. My values might be especially clear when they clash, but they are still there during the rest of my life. There are things I do and believe, and things it would never occur to me to do or to believe. The world appears to me a certain way because of my values (I don't like this way of putting it, but I hope it makes sense): some things are foregrounded, others go unnoticed, some seem terrible, others sad, and so on. This is the kind of thing I have in mind when I say that ethics seems too big to be a branch of philosophy. My ethics seem to be indistinguishable from my whole life, and even from things I don't do or think. But I have said that already.

    What I should probably do is re-read Cavell and the others and then ask myself how Wittgensteinian it all is. I suspect the answer would be some combination of "in these ways it is, in these ways it perhaps isn't" and "who cares?" I can't see why it should matter, except in terms of understanding Wittgenstein. But that is something I would like to do.

    For instance, why was there only one lecture on ethics? Why no Remarks on the Foundations of Morals? It seems to me that there are reasons, it isn't simply that other things happened to interest Wittgenstein or that he ran out of time. And I think the reasons would be part ethical (or aesthetic, but I'm not sure there is much of a distinction to make here) and part methodological. And I'm not sure the ethical could be distinguished from the methodological. But I suppose I would have to articulate this much more to even begin to make a case.

    ReplyDelete