A Lecture on Ethics

Wittgenstein gave it to a Cambridge society, generally dated to late 1929 or the following year, in the period after his return to philosophy. It was not published in his lifetime. A text based on his notes appeared in The Philosophical Review in 1965, which is why it is often treated as a posthumous publication, and it has since been reprinted in collections of his work. Because the lecture was addressed to a general audience and its exact date and occasion are matters of some uncertainty, readers should treat details of its delivery cautiously and consult the editorial notes accompanying the printed versions.

Wittgenstein argues that judgments of relative value, such as calling a knife good or a road the right one, can be restated as plain statements of fact about a goal that is presupposed. Ethical and aesthetic judgments, by contrast, seem to claim an absolute value that is not relative to any purpose. He holds that no statement of fact could ever have the character of such a judgment, because facts are all on one level, so absolute value cannot be a fact. This is the core of the lecture, and it is the point at which later discussion of ethical non-cognitivism often begins.

He describes a sense of wonder at the existence of the world, a feeling of being absolutely safe, and a feeling of guilt before God. He contends that when we try to express them we use phrases that are, taken literally, nonsense, since they treat a unique experience as though it were a fact. He nevertheless says he would not ridicule the tendency to do so. Interpreters differ about how seriously to take the examples as evidence for a distinct domain of value, as against a diagnosis of a confusion about language.

It continues the Tractatus view that ethics is transcendental and cannot be put into words, and that what is higher lies outside the world of facts. The lecture also reflects a gradual shift: Wittgenstein discusses language in terms of the sense of expressions and their use in a way that anticipates his later method. Scholars debate whether the lecture simply restates the Tractatus or modifies it. Readers interested in the connection should read it with the Tractatus and with the remarks on ethics in Wittgenstein's wartime notebooks, which share its tone.

Logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap read similar claims as showing that ethical sentences are meaningless, while Wittgenstein insisted that the failure to say what one wants to say is the point, not a reason for dismissal. Moral philosophers have asked whether his claim that there are no ethical facts is itself a substantive position. Others, among them Cora Diamond, have read the lecture as part of a continuing effort to understand how ethical thinking is possible without a theory of ethical facts, and the interpretive debate continues.

A common misreading takes it as a dismissal of ethics as nonsense or as an endorsement of emotivism, in the manner of the positivists. Wittgenstein says the opposite of dismissal: he declares that the tendency to run against the boundaries of language is something he personally respects and would not ridicule for anything. Another misreading treats it as a general theory of ethics. It is a short, exploratory talk, and its significance lies in how it shows the limits of what can be said instead of settling questions in moral philosophy.