Lecture on Ethics

Lecture on Ethics was written by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1929. Philosophy is not ethics. For one, philosophy is not always used for ethical means. Everything of ethics is important, but not everything of philosophy is important. However, a lot of what is written about ethics is bullshit, while we have reason to believe this work about ethics is not bullshit precisely because it calls attention to the bullshit.

Ethics are descriptions of the natural world that seem to have an absolute or supernatural essense. Wittgenstein rejects scientific resolution of the paradox because it erases miracles or the very feeling of ethics. Instead of using scientific analysis, he uses language analysis, wherein he explains the supernatural away as the miracle of the world and language’s existences. The miracles are inexpressable in language but we try anyways, and they are nonsense because we cannot imagine the absence of the subject of the miracle. This is in contrast to wonders with relativity, whose absence is imaginable. Like, “wow, he is so good at chess!” We can imagine him being not so great at chess.

No miracle makes sense on deeper analysis, and therefore, ethics don’t make sense. In addition, other ethical statements appear like similes. The terms good, valuable, etc. in absolute senses are related to but not exactly the same as their relative senses. It is clear what I mean when I say “this gold is valuable” vis-a-vis “this person’s life is valuable”. But all similes, when they make sense, can be transformed to facts. Like, “the gold is valuable means the value of this gold is worth seven weeks of wages in the mines”. However, religious and ethical similes cannot be transformed to facts. For example, “I feel absolutely safe under God” cannot be transformed. Therefore, they’re nonsense. To explain them is to misunderstand them. In addition, to scientifically explain away ethics would be to take personal responsibility away. It’d erase our freedom.

While ethics are nonsense because they can’t be expressed in language, Wittgenstein nevertheless respects our tendencies to spout nonsense, because it is what gives us our meaning of the world. It is what relates a person to the timeless future and past. No person can be more experienced or be more authoritative on the subject than another in ethics. Despite the universal shoulds in ethics, it is impossible to enforce standards on everyone else. However, language is deeply personal, so might the expansion of it also change what’s possible about ethics? While it’s possible, ordinarily changes in understandings of language do not change perspectives on ethics.

Wittgenstein redefined the axioms of ethics to not be distinctions between good and evil or what a worthy life is as well as a myriad of other related but different definitions, but rather that a worthy life is atemporal, sub specie aeternitatis, that it is always worthy irrespective of the time, and that someone’s worth is tied to their purity of resolve, that their worth is not clouded by self-serving interests like cowardice, greed, power, etc. The reward for a worthy life can be totally experienced in an instance. Yet, a worthy life can be lived to its totality without an actual reward. To think of the reward as eternal for such a life would clash with the typical temporality of reward. Therefore, rewards are also thought of as atemporal, not eternal nor instantaneous. This atemporalness does not escape the state of life felt not worth living, or hopelessness, as hopelessness feels atemporal in its temporality.