What is the Point? Ethics, Truth and the Tractatus

 

In this paper, my major concern is to place the ethical remarks of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus within a wider discussion in moral philosophy. In the first part of the paper, I sketch a reading of the Tractatus that brings out a particular feature of ethics, namely the fact that ethical discourse is shaped by both subjective and objective concerns. Moving on, I unfold the subjective side of ethics by drawing on Stanley Cavell's notion of the point of an utterance, while the objective side will be presented via Diamond's writing on the importance of truth in ethics. My goal is to argue for the possibility of an understanding of ethics that does not force a choice between the subjective and the objective, between realism and projectionism in moral philosophy, but allows for the possibility that both elements play a vital role in ethics.