Fact and Value – Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics

 

          In this lecture - he hardly ever lectured - Ludwig Wittgenstein assumes  something like “the philosophical doctrine which maintains that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful, or else they are truths of logic or true by definition (tautologies): e.g. bachelors are unmarried men, a triangle has three sides, etc. i.e. giving us no information about reality (our conceptual nets may be thought of as the set of possible logically true statements and their implications).

       When you make an assertion about the world, you must at least in principle if not always practically be able to verify or test it. If you can’t, the utterance is not a proposition. It may have the grammatical form of a proposition, but logically in it meaningless. Propositions (possibly meaningful)

 

·                     My son is finished with supper.

·                     My pants are black.

·                     I have bronchitis.

·                     My mother is not home.

·                     Water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius.

 

Pseudo-propositions (meaningless or indeterminate meaning):

 

·                     God exists.

·                     Angels exist.

·                     The world is good.

·                     The external world is a dream.

·                     The soul is immortal.

·                     God is dead.

 

Philosophy presupposes that logical, rational argument i.e. conclusions that are justified by sound arguments, is the most rational (=most likely to arrive at truth, make contact with reality). Arguments consist of statements or propositions (we have that term before): propositions can either be premises (reasons) or conclusions. Logic presupposes that propositions can be either true or false, but not both. The tradition from which the verification idea of meaning comes is known as ‘Empiricism’ – which is premised on the assumption that all access to reality comes over the senses, must be translatable back into sense experience. So ‘My son is at the playground’ is meaningful, because I can go and see (with my senses, my eyes) whether it is true i.e. whether he is really at the playground i.e. whether the utterance expresses a proposition that is not only logically possible (it is) but actual i.e. corresponds to a real state of affairs in the world. ‘God exists’ or ‘God is dead’ cannot possibly correspond to a state of affairs in the world that could be verified or falsified; therefore, it is not really a logically meaningful, possible assertion despite obeying all the rules of English syntax.

       That being said, there is something else about language here: the conceptual logic of particular concepts can also be meaningful or not. Consider this: 

Now the first thing that strikes one about all these [ethical] expressions is that each of them is actually used in absolute sense on the other [emphasis mine]. If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon [emphasis mine]. In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined standard [emphasis mine]. Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity. And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it's the right road relative to a certain goal. Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or deep problems. But this is not how Ethics uses them. Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said "Well, you play pretty badly" and suppose I answered "I know, I'm playing pretty badly but I don't want to play any better," all the other man could say would be "Ah, then that's all right." But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said, "You're behaving like a beast" and then I were to say "I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any better," could he then say "Ah, then that's all right"? Certainly not; he would say "Well, you ought to want to behave better." Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance was one of relative judgment.

 

In other words, there is an analogical relationship between different relative uses of ‘good’ all unified by a core meaning: “coming up to a certain predetermined standard.” What makes a use of ‘good’ ethical (conceptual remark about ‘ethical’) is that it violates this, being used absolutely. And that makes no sense! You can’t ask ‘What is it good for?’ Many people, for example, see images of animals in a slaughter factory and say things like ‘you can’t do that to other creatures’ or that is horrible, cruel, or that is a desecration, etc. = that is not good? Why not? What predetermined standard is not being met? Well one could say – it causes disease, it makes more economic sense to be kinder, etc. – i.e. it would be good relative to these ends to stop that practice. But that is not what people mean when they use language like I mentioned above. The idea is not only that this absolute use of good is an equivocal use to the relative uses, but that is literally makes no sense at all, comparable to ‘I found a triangle with four sides.’ This a statement like ‘It is absolute wrong to do that to animals’ (whatever people find terrible, horrible, cruel, evil, etc.) is an ethical statement and it is meaningless. There are no ethical propositions. There can be no philosophy or science of ethics. This is different from the idea that only sentences that assert something about the world that can be in principle checked, but has the same result.

      And both make perfect sense if we think of reality as brute, valueless objects in definite factual relations. Indeed, if we conceive the universe as intrinsically without value or meaning, if we think all meaning and value emanates from the human subject and gets projected onto the indifferent screen of the universe; and if language, to be meaningful, must model or picture pure value-free facts, and thus only descriptive, value-free language can be meaningful – “all propositions are of equal value” – then what Wittgenstein is saying here follows – unless you want to deny the reality of ethics altogether? The choice is between a radical, ineffable, other-worldly mysticism or nihilism.

       But if we take our thoughts, feelings, language of ethics to be meaningful, as I do – and not merely as expressions of the subjective-psychological –, then neither the picture of the universe as meaningless and value-free nor the idea that meaning requires reference to states of affairs that can be verified will seem plausible. The price of defending that metaphysical thesis at all costs is a radically other-worldly mysticism or nihilism. There is no independent position from which to decide this definitively. We have to wait for God.