Everything is what it is

Abstract

Wittgenstein's attitude towards ethics is somewhat paradoxical, for while he undoubtedly considered ethics to be extraordinarily important, it was a topic about which he wrote comparatively little. Why this was so in his early life is clear enough; he thought that to express the ethical was to try to say what cannot be said. But it is not clear why Wittgenstein should have written so little about ethics after coming to think that the Tractatus was fundamentally mistaken. Perhaps he would have written more, had he lived longer. Whatever his reasons, it is plain that they did not include a rejection of ethics as a subject of secondary or trivial significance. Such an attitude would have been deeply uncharacteristic of the man who remarked: 'I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world.'1 Paul Johnston is concerned not so much to provide an interpretation of Wittgenstein's writing on ethics as to develop an approach to moral philosophy in line with certain of Wittgenstein's principal ideas. He also takes moral philosophy to include a number of issues that might more accurately be called questions in the philosophy of action. Thus a major portion of Johnston's excellent book is devoted to a discussion of reasons for action, and to what he maintains are logical distinctions between reasons and causes. Johnston takes as his guide the later Wittgenstein's admonition that the task of philosophy is to describe, not to explain. Wittgenstein thought philosophy should aim not for truth but for clarity, and thus that the purpose of philosophy should not be to demonstrate that propositions are true or false, but rather to cure philosophical confusion. Philosophical problems are generated because we do not command an overview of our language; they have the form, 'I don't know my way around'. Philosophical confusion disappears when we achieve a clear understanding of our concepts