Abstract
An attempt is made to characterize a counter-current in present-day moral philosophy which is largely inspired by the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and some of the main proponents of which have had connections with the philosophy department at Swansea. Many standard positions in moral philosophy define themselves on the basis of how they conceive of the relation between moral uses of language and the reality which they invoke. Moral realists assume the existence of a specific moral reality which gives moral judgments their force. Another group of moral philosophers argue that moral judgments are grounded in non-moral facts about human and animal life, whereas non-cognitivists hold that moral judgments are not based on any reality, hence do not possess objective force. The moral philosophers belonging to the counter-current reject the notion of an independent reality giving moral judgments their force. Rather, their force is constituted by their use, which is expressive of our moral responsiveness, as shaped in our shared life.
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Notes
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The conception formulated by Immanuel Kant in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, as well as the tradition known as virtue ethics, does not fit into this scheme.
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Popular ideas about what ethics is, rather than simply popular attitudes on specific ethical issues, might be an interesting area of research in social psychology. I am not aware of any such research being carried out.
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However, even in a historical context someone who sympathised with Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth, might reject calling the action murder, insisting instead that it was the execution of a tyrant.
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Anscombe’s account of “stopping modals” provides an illuminating description of how one might think about the learning of language with moral force (Anscombe 1978).
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This aspect of language learning may be missed because of the focus on labelling building stones in the introductory part of the Philosophical Investigations. In the builders’ game the distinctions between the different building blocks have no immediate grounding in the participants’ expressive behaviour.
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Compare the discussion of Igor’s dilemma in Martin Gustafsson’s essay “‘I don’t know’: Agency, self-understanding and new beginnings in three films by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne” in this volume.
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Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the conference Alternative Contemporary Ethics, Rome, 14 September 2017, and at the philosophy research seminar at Åbo Akademi, January 2018. I am grateful to the participants at those occasions for their comments. My special thanks are due to Salla Aldrin Salskov, David Cockburn and Merete Mazzarella who read the paper and made substantial suggestions for improvements.
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Hertzberg, L. (2022). Absolutely Personal: A Countercurrent in Moral Philosophy. In: Aldrin Salskov, S., Beran, O., Hämäläinen, N. (eds) Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_7
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