Reply to David Wong

Abstract

David Wong's response to my review of his book can be appreciated only in relation to a number of complex issues, both in ethical theory and in the philosophy of language. At this point an interested reader would do well to turn to the book itself. I will reply to only two points. First, there is the matter of the usefulness for ethics of recent work in the philosophy of language. My comments on Wong's use of the work of philosophers such as Quine, Davidson, and Kripke were certainly not intended as a criticism. Indeed it would be peculiar not to make use of the best available philosophical work relevant to problems of meaning. On the other hand, it should be noted that Moore's Principia Ethica would be seen by many today to have been seriously flawed because Moore depended so closely on contemporary views of meaning, which led him to postulate that ethical statements were about nonnatural qualities. These views were (we now know) inadequate, but their defects in relation to ethical language were more glaring than their defects elsewhere. The moral may be that someone who applies recent work in the philosophy of language to ethics should also pay particular attention to the peculiarities of ethical language, and also to the internal structures of ethical discourse.