ABSTRACT
What would a Wittgensteinian moral philosophy look like, if there were one? There are many possible answers. But where there’s a problem concept, the later Wittgenstein sometimes asks, “What are the general facts of nature which underlie our possession of it?” (see PI §142). So a Wittgensteinian moral philosophy would be an investigation of the general facts of nature that underlie our possession of distinctively moral concepts. This chapter lays the groundwork for an investigation of this kind, showing how relating concepts to more primitive concepts and thence to natural facts might work in connection with the concept “virtue”, with particular virtue-concepts, and with “good” and “reason”. If this approach is right, however, it cannot fail to be the case that there are some distinctively moral concepts. So along the way, the chapter tries to meet two challenges to the claim that there are, first, Anscombe’s claim that the distinctively moral “ought” is a kind of philosophical illusion, and second, the claim associated with Diamond and others that we cannot demarcate the subject matter of moral philosophy by identifying certain obviously moral concepts or words.
