Weltbilder

In "'What Matters to Us?' Wittgenstein's Weltbild, Rock and Sand, Men and Women," Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen connects the certainty that "a human baby cannot look after itself" (p. 151, quoting an example from Danièle Moyal-Sharrock) to the fact that, "if we found an abandoned baby, we would take care of it until we were sure that it was in safe hands. Moreover, we would regard it as an ethical duty to care for it in this way" (p. 152). I'll come back to this below. First, though, a little more from this part of her paper:

I know that I should try to help others in need, but I do not really know anything I could refer to in order to justify this belief; at least not anything that would be more certain . This of course does not mean that I always help others in need, but my acknowledgement of this belief shows in the fact that in cases where I do not manage to or actively refrain from doing so, I feel guilty, try to provide excuses for my negligence etc. (pp. 152-153)

Comparing this with the idea of a Weltbild (roughly, all the things we take for granted, but more importantly, certainties that are not subject to testing and confirmation, and that need to be in place for investigation of knowledge claims to occur), Christensen goes on to suggest that, "the belief that we should help others in need is not an ethical judgement (at least not in most cases), but a prerequisite for such judgements..." (p. 153).

There is a lot here, and I want to try to unpack it and think it through. Or some of it, anyway. In particular I'm thinking of connections with Aristotle and with Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics. This, for instance:

Now let us see what we could possibly mean by the expression, "the absolutely right road." I think it would be the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going. And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs, would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about.

Christensen doesn't mention necessity, and she is talking about her own knowledge that she should try to help others, not claiming that everyone shares this knowledge, but there's a striking similarity, it seems to me, between what she's saying and what Wittgenstein is talking about in his lecture. Wittgenstein says that there is no absolute good in this sense, but that's precisely because of the necessity and universality that he includes and that Christensen excludes. There is, though, a kind of necessity in Christensen's example, because it involves a certainty that is beyond, or prior to, testing or confirmation. It might not be necessarily true, but it is treated as something like that. It goes without saying (at least in most cases). And this also gives it something like a kind of universality. What goes without saying for me is likely to go for a great many other people too. I don't mean this as a matter of logic. Indeed Christensen gives the example that she is a woman, and this obviously isn't true of everyone. I think Wittgenstein gives the example that his name is Ludwig Wittgenstein, and this is very far from being universal. But part of the reason why it's certain that I have two hands is that everyone (with exceptions, of course) has two hands. Similarly, what I know is not so much that I should try to help others but that one should try to help others (ceteris paribus). So it seems to me there's a connection between Christensen's On Certainty-inspired thoughts here and the Lecture on Ethics. Unfortunately, I'm not yet sure what, if anything, to make of this connection.

The other connection that occurs to me is with Aristotle. Let's go back to the abandoned baby example. Christensen is right, I think, about what we would do if we found an abandoned baby. But not everyone would respond the same way. Some would take sadistic pleasure in neglecting it. Some would neglect it out of mere thoughtlessness. Some would take care of it because they wanted to do so (in a sort of "Hey, free baby!" spirit). Some would be self-conscious about their ethical duty to help the baby, perhaps resisting a temptation to ignore it. And then others would care for it because of course that's the (only) thing to do: a baby can't look after itself. We might think of this last attitude as the result of having internalized the norms of the self-consciously ethical person. Or we might think of it as part of what it means to understand, or to know, what a baby is. Each of these different possible reactions to the situation can be thought of as revealing a different state of the character of the person involved (vicious, incontinent, etc.). I'm not sure what to do with this idea, either.

Maybe this. Each person's (ethical) river-bed is, potentially, different. For some, it goes without saying that you care for an abandoned baby if you find one. For others, it doesn't. And people for whom it does go without saying might vary with regard to the extent to which it goes without saying. The hardness of the ethical 'must', so to speak, might vary. This would affect the way that temptations might affect someone's actions, for instance. Let's say that it goes without saying for me that I would care for any baby I found until I was sure it was in safe hands. Even so, if someone kept offering me more and more money to neglect the baby, then at some point I might start to be tempted to leave it, even if I didn't give in to the temptation. Or, if I'm better than that, I could be tempted by competing ethical demands: look after the baby or rescue that drowning cat, or three cats, or a child in a burning building, or six children in a burning building, and so on. Some people might just not leave the baby, no matter what. Others, presumably, would.          

'Abandoned baby', 'drowning cat', and '$1000 to just walk away now, no questions asked' mean different things to different (kinds of) people. In one case, thing to care for, thing to care for unless there's something more urgent, and disgusting attempted bribe. In another, wailing irrelevance, miaowing irrelevance, and offer too good to refuse. Depending on one's Weltbild, the world will contain different things. This might be one way to understand Wittgenstein's claim that the world of the happy is different from that of the unhappy. It also suggests a (very promising, unless someone's already done it) non-empirical way to think about character and its place in ethics.