II

A seemingly natural conclusion from this is that perhaps there is no single foundation to ethics. This is the view taken by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as well as by the logical positivists who built on this work. In fact, according to Wittgenstein, ethics is a field of nonsense, that is, its propositions are not verifiable by comparison to facts in the world; not only is there no foundation on which to build morality, but the entire inquiry is outside the sphere of facts and therefore yields no knowledge about the world.

On Wittgenstein’s view, the world is exactly those propositions which have sense. The so-called propositions of ethics, moral judgments of right and wrong, are nonsense, however, since there is no way to verify them in the world. How would we verify the truth of a statement such as “Murder is wrong”? The obvious approach is do it by finding “wrongness” somewhere and comparing the act of murder to it; and this is what moral realists attempted to do. As mentioned, this approach yielded no definite solution to the problem of finding a foundation for ethics.

The problem, as Wittgenstein identifies it in his “Lecture on Ethics,” is that this sort of judgment implies an absolute in some way or another. Yet where is this absolute? We cannot point it out, for there is no such thing in the world. Rightness and wrongness are not empirical. Everything we can say about the world is contingent, for in Wittgenstein’s view tautologies on the one hand and contradictions on the other are the outer limits of facts. A proposition’s being contingent implies that the fact it states could be other than it is, and if this is the case, nothing in the world holds any necessity. The existence of an absolute such as rightness or wrongness, however, implies some sort of non-logical necessity; but since there can be no necessity in the world, there cannot be an absolute either. Ethics, therefore, since it seems to depend on an absolute, cannot not be expressible in the world. Nothing can sensible be said about ethics.

Wittgenstein ends the Tractatus with the pronouncement that “[w]hat we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” It sounds almost like a death knell for ethics. Indeed, earlier he states, “[A] question [can exist] only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.” Thus no ethical questions can sensibly be asked, and “this itself is the answer.”

III

The concerns mentioned above are also present in Wittgenstein’s lecture. His discussion of the second, the question of how it is possible for there to be value in a world of facts, begins with the observation that “no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.” There is, he notes, another sense in which statements of fact appear to be ethical judgments. To use his examples, ‘This is the right way to Granchester’ is not an ethical judgment about “right” as such, but could be equivalent to ‘This is the right way you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time.’ Similarly, ‘This is a good chair’ means that it fulfills the purposes we define for chairs. Truly ethical judgments, however, refer to an absolute not contained in these examples (and therefore cannot be facts). Wittgenstein illustrates this with the hypothetical situation of an omniscient person who records every possible detail of humans’ actions and descriptions of all objects and their relations in the world. “If... in this world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition.” The description may enrage or cause pain in us, but those emotions are not contained in the description. Even the description of the murderer’s or victim’s states of mind during the event are merely recorded, and are “in no ethical sense good or bad.” “Is” does not imply “ought.” The point, as John Kelly notes, is “not that empirical facts are irrelevant to our concerns, which is absurd, but that their relevance is not to be explained by the facts themselves.” The relevance is in what we choose to do with the facts we are given. That the feelings of pain and suffering evoked in a murder cause us to react negatively to murder has to do with us and our attitudes, which as Wittgenstein asserts in the Tractatus, are outside the world and are thus not recordable by facts. Value is possible in that it is added to the facts by observers.

Since the world is comprised of facts, the psychological will of “metaphysical subjects” such as humans lies outside it, for as Hume showed, there are no facts to speak of when dealing with mental functions. Yet as Kelly states, “Wittgenstein’s position is that the existence of ethical meaning and value is... the result of the constituting activity of the metaphysical subject.” It is this psychological will which answers the first of Wittgenstein’s “concerns” mentioned above, the question of what gives life meaning and purpose. The metaphysical subject gives supernatural value to natural facts. “If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts... In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole.” It is a person’s choice of how to interpret the unchangeable facts which changes the world, something like the chicken-egg question or the famous silhouette-or-candlestick illusion, so that “[t]he world of the happy man is a different world from that of the unhappy man.” The happy man, for instance, may see in everyone he meets an opportunity to form a friendship and add to his sanguine existence, whereas an unhappy man may enter every new acquaintance with the view that this is yet another person who may do him harm. The worlds of these two men are profoundly different because of it; one is bursting with delightful opportunity and the other brimming with sorrow. Kelly observes that Wittgenstein is led to this conclusion “by his commitment to the doctrine that all the facts in the world are contingent. ...Were the will capable of producing effects in the realm of facts, then those effects would be necessitated by the will, and some facts would therefore not be contingent, which is impossible.”

Experiences such as witnessing the murder in the above example are constituted entirely and simply of facts, as the world-book illustration demonstrates. “It is nonsense,” therefore, “to say that [such experiences] have absolute value.” Wittgenstein goes further and points out that it is paradoxical that a factual experience can seem to have a supernatural value. How does the murder, and event which took place in the world and is recorded in every minute detail in a succession of facts, acquire its moral significance? Again, the answer is in the point of view of the witness; as Wittgenstein aptly phrases it, “The scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle.”

The “way to look at it as a miracle” is provided by the person outside the world, viewing the world as “a limited whole.” “[V]iewing the world as a totality… constitutes the ‘ethical space’ in which value and meaning can enter into life. For without a unifying perspective on life and the world there are only ethically neutral contingent facts.” Each person’s interpretation of and, derivatively, attitude toward the facts of the world are dependent on that person. Suppose, for instance, that two people read in the “world-book” the description of the murder, as mentioned above. One witness may view the murder as cold-blooded and terrible, an unforgivable offense, simply because of the nature of the act: ending a person’s life is never right. Another may see it as unfortunate, but as an act of self-defense, for which the perpetrator may be justified, or at least forgiven. These two views are different not because they witnessed the act differently, for they both read exactly the same description down to the minutest detail, but because they come to the situation with different attitudes and values; their worlds have different limits. To take a well-used example, what happens when the Nazis come to the door and Anne Frank is hiding in the attic? When they ask whether any Jews are hidden on the premises, a person has two choices: either tell the truth or lie. He will reveal her presence or not according to the importance he places on lying as opposed to protecting another person. This illustrates another point Kelly brings up, which is that although there is one “logical space” which is the same for all subjects, there are multiple “ethical spaces,” because ethics is a function of the subject.

We have seen that since the metaphysical subject which makes ethics possible is outside the world, ethics itself must be as well. This is true also because we cannot express in any factual fashion the wonder, outrage, disgust or rapture inspired by a situation or experience. That we have the experience of wonder or outrage is a fact, but the feeling itself is not, for an attempt to make it so is an attempt to use language to go beyond the world. And this is impossible, for language, on Wittgenstein’s view, is the world. Like logic, ethics is transcendental. What ethics would say cannot be said, but only shown, as Wittgenstein would say.

IV

Recall that in his “Lecture on Ethics” Wittgenstein points out that there are two senses in which statements of value are meant: one in the absolute sense, which we have seen leads nowhere, but also one in a “trivial” or “relative” sense. This second sense defines “good” in terms of a certain goal or predetermined purpose (i.e. “frame of reference”): the “right” way to Granchester depends on whether you wish to get there as quickly as possible or if you prefer the scenic route; a “good” musical instrument is determined by the performer’s preferences regarding tone quality, durability, craftsmanship, and so on. A woman wears a silk gown to a ball, but jeans and a coffee-stained sweatshirt to work in the garden. What is considered good in any situation depends upon what the people involved have as their intended purposes. This can be thought of as analogous to mathematics: in this field, consistent systems very different from each other can be obtained by changing the axioms on which the system is built (for example, Euclidean geometry differs from hyperbolic only in one postulate). Perhaps an analogous idea can be found in ethics: if we change our ethical “axioms,” our moral reference frame, another equally legitimate system is obtained and the answer to the same question is entirely different (for Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry, for instance, the angle sum in a triangle is different). These axioms are the values, goals and intentions we have in any situation, and also the conditions we impose on the moral “laws” we create. In the situation of Nazis at the door and Anne Frank in the attic, the axioms involved could be 1) lying is unacceptable, 2) killing people purely on the basis of their religion or ethnicity is unacceptable (these two represent the values involved), and 3) the value of human life is greater than the need to speak the truth in all situations (this is a mitigating condition). The person who holds these axioms will lie rather than let Ms. Frank be sent to a concentration camp. Another person who places greater value on truth telling will do the opposite. Since situations are specific and involve particular persons, axioms are fundamentally personal, although they become societal when many people come together with a shared purpose; such are the codified laws of a country, state or city.

Can an entire ethical system be built on this “Wittgenstinian relativity” principle? At first glance it seems plausible, for once the standard, goal or purpose (that is, the set of “axioms”) is set, determining proper action is given, for it is once again a matter of facts. Once a traveler has decided to go to Granchester, a certain set of actions which will get her there are given. To choose the “right” one, she specifies her goal further: she wishes to arrive in town in as short a time as possible. Then of the several routes she could take, one will serve her purposes better than any other. That route A is faster than route B can be determined with certainty by measuring the time it takes to get to Granchester taking either of the two routes. “Rightness” is arrived at through factual investigation; we no longer make a leap from “is” to “ought” in reference to an abstract absolute, but rather a concrete set of goals. Ethical statements are no longer of the form “One must do x because it is right,” but “If one’s goals are y, one should do x.”

Are there other plausible views of relative morality? Again, ethics might take a cue from science. In quantum theory, a particle’s behavior is unpredictable in any precise fashion, but the probability of its behavior can be known and measured. At the quantum level, what humans can know is only patterns of particle behavior. Ethics might be based on such a scheme as well: we can determine what sorts of general behavior patterns we wish to condone or discourage on the whole, but no hard and fast rules will ever be applicable. Killing other human beings is generally frowned upon, but at times will be justified, as in self-defense, for example; likewise a universal pattern of lying would be self-defeating, but the occasional exception to the rule “Thou shalt not lie” will at times be a proper action, as (for most people) in the case of hiding Anne Frank. And so on. Acknowledging that ethics does not have an absolute basis need not lead us into a chaos of unbridled relativism; we can still have a general framework on which to base moral decisions.

V