Producing a Justification: Waismann on Ethics and Science

Abstract

Constantine Sandis takes on a very first evaluation of Waismann’s essay and shows that Waismann’s discussion of the scientific constrains on ethics is very much not anti-scientistic. Unlike Wittgenstein, Waismann does not dismiss morality as nonsense. Sandis associates Waismann’s view with expressivism, similar to the emotivism defended by his contemporary C.L. Stevenson, and points out a shared motivation with Derek Parfit’s more recent On What Matters. In an existentialist fashion Waismann invokes one’s freedom and responsibility in opting for different ethical systems, once one stops asking for moral truth and starts to choose and decide. In a detailed criticism of Waismann’s essay Sandis asks what our choosing and deciding could be based on if not in turn a normative discourse based on reasons.

Epilogue

Waismann comes close to allowing individual claims to have some sort of truth value when, having compared moral rules to rules of chess, he claims that while one ‘cannot ask whether the rules of chess should be as they are’ one can ask ‘whether a move in chess is correct’ (49). The problem, however, is that he takes this to show that all we can ask is whether a certain moral judgement would be correct within Nietzschean, Kantian, or utilitarian ethics etc. The implication is that each of these systems is much like a game, albeit one we take very seriously and could refuse to play.

Yet it is only within them that we can ask questions about the rightness and wrongness of individual acts. This makes it look as if one if free to choose the moral system one abides to, perhaps by checking out whether the rules are to one’s liking (50). While this is arguably true of philosophical systems such as the ones that Waismann talks about, and (albeit less plausibly) also of theological systems we are often born and educated into, it is not true of moral language as a whole. The very existence of moral language and its norms is nothing like a game that one may decide to play. Refusing to abide by the grammatical norms of any word, include moral ones, is refusing to make sense.

Waismann concludes his lecture by making it clear that his view is not that ‘ethics is basically arbitrary, just like the rules of a game’. Rather, he takes the existentialist line that the freedom to choose between different ethics gives us responsibility and that professing a morality is a ‘deep process’ (51).

We are told that the person ‘whose consciousness has been set free by knowledge […] stops asking for the truth of morality and starts choosing and deciding’ (51). But how can we be responsible for our choices unless they can be justified or unjustified backed by reasons and considerations? Reasons are the bread and butter of normative discourse. Whether or not they add up to evidence in the moral case, as they do in the empirical, is a moot point.³¹