ABSTRACT
In regent times ethical problems have been widely construed philosophically as problems about the language of ethics, an analysis of the language used in moral statements and judgments. It has been popularly called a "second-order" business—the business of linguistic analysis or meta-ethics. Still there have been some "hold-outs" who want to say that an ethical theory needs to be offered, argued, and demonstrated, although theologians, geneticists, urban planners, ecologists, etc. have pretty well taken on the burden of making concrete ethical recommendations in Western culture or society over the last decade or two. What this means is that philosophers have generally tried to plumb the depths of epistemological and linguistic quagmire with language about ethics and morality (not fruitlessly but over-scrupulously), while others have sallied about in the quagmire itself of social crises, a new morality, and a permissive society to find new moral directives (not timidly but overamorphously) and to find a new moral talk above the old. What may have emerged in our time is a conflict of language and moral action, or at least a disparity between what it is to talk and what it is to do. What has been overlooked, I believe, is the question of morality, even if inverted morality, in language where action (including moral action) and speaking are bound together more tightly than we might at first suspect. Put in the venacular, my concern in this essay is to argue on the one hand that "Talk is not cheap," and, on the other hand, that "To talk is to do something valuatively which has moral consequences even if it is moral inversion." 1 Georges Gusdorf, in Speaking [La Parole], has put the suggestion forward this way: "Speech is worth no more than the man who uses it."
