ABSTRACT
In ethics, Wittgenstein, early and late, emphasized changes of attitude over questions about how to act. He once told Rhees: “One of my sister’s characteristics is that whenever she hears of something awful that has happened, her impulse is to ask what one can do about it, what she can do to help or remedy. This is a tendency in her of which I disapprove”. Instead, he says elsewhere: “If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important & effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us […]”. Such attitudinal changes involve a kind of clarity of thought for Wittgenstein, which the chapter explains partly by reference to Wittgenstein’s later discussion about aspect-perception: Moral problems can disappear in something like the way the rabbit-aspect of disappears when the duck-aspect dawns. The chapter compares moral clarification to logical-philosophical clarification. Both typically involve propositions that say nothing, but rather shed light on what other propositions say—tautologies, grammatical remarks and philosophical elucidations, on the one hand, clarificatory moral remarks like ‘Think of her as someone’s daughter’ or ‘We are flesh and blood’, on the other. This both gives a practical edge to Wittgenstein’s moral thought and suggests that his conception of ethics is distant from the entire debate about the truth-value of moral propositions, and from an entire range of views in moral philosophy that include realism, quasi-realism, fictionalism and error-theory. shed light on what other propositions say—tautologies, grammatical remarks and philosophical elucidations on the one hand, clarificatory moral remarks like ‘Think of her as someone’s daughter’ or ‘We are flesh and blood’ on the other. I argue that this gives a practical edge to Wittgenstein’s moral thought, a tool with which to think through moral difficulties.
