ABSTRACT
In a 2013 paper titled “Beyond the ‘New’ Wittgenstein”, Hans Sluga complains that “resolute” readers of Wittgenstein have proffered an interpretation of his work that makes it hard to see any robust relationship between his philosophy and ethics. In this paper, I first give a brief elaboration of the general nature of Sluga’s complaint about the purported ethico-political quietism of resolute approaches to Wittgenstein. Next, I show how some of the work of Cora Diamond demonstrates how one can write compellingly about ethical questions from within such a framework. Sluga mentions three issues in particular that he takes to be the major ethical-political challenges of our day: overpopulation, environmental destruction, and out of control technological growth. He suggests that these are our problems and that they were not “burning” for Wittgenstein’s generation. He further implies that the weight placed by resolute readers on such personal issues such as clarity, integrity, and authenticity make it especially implausible that Wittgenstein (and his generation) have anything relevant to say about them. In the last part of the paper, I will contest this claim as well.
In a 2013 paper titled “Beyond the ‘New’ Wittgenstein”, Hans Sluga claims that so-called resolute readers have proffered an interpretation of Wittgenstein that makes it hard to see any robust relationship between his philosophy and ethics understood in a broader social and political sense. He suggests this may be a result of “resolutists’ ” infatuation with Wittgenstein exegesis, with getting the master right as it were, and that this is interpretatively and philosophically unwarranted. This chapter responds to these claims by clarifying how what Wittgenstein called “ethics” was internally connected to his critique of metaphysics. It is shown that such a critique, while casting suspicion on the traditional hunt for a foundational ethical theory, in no way rules out intelligent discussion of pressing political and ethical questions of the day. To demonstrate this point, the chapter discusses Cora Diamond’s paper “Eating Meat and Eating People”, a work addressing the ethics of vegetarianism. Diamond’s paper takes up what is undeniably a public ethical issue fully in the spirit of the “New” Wittgenstein. The chapter thus shows not only that a resolute reading of Wittgenstein in no way disallows a sort of ethico-political engagement, exemplified in Diamond’s paper on vegetarianism, but also that Wittgenstein’s critique of metaphysics may itself be important if a genuine environmental ethics is to be anything other than a technocratic fix.
