The Murder of Professor Schlick by David Edmonds

Author:David Edmonds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

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Protocol sentences, verification, probability—these were staples of Circle debate. But then there was ethics.

Ethics was a tricky one. Wittgenstein had proclaimed in the final line of the Tractatus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” encapsulating his verdict that ethics lay beyond language. This did not prevent people from straining to state ethical truths. But attempting to do so was like hunting phantoms, failure was inevitable. Ethics was ineffable, ethical statements were nonsensical.

It took the Circle a long time to recognize that they had misunderstood Wittgenstein’s central message. Wittgenstein thought that the aim of founding ethics in rationality was doomed. The obvious—and yet incorrect conclusion—was that Wittgenstein regarded ethics as trivial. The opposite was the case. Ethical statements cannot be compared to the world and found to be true or false. So ethics cannot be said. But it can be shown.

In November 1929, Wittgenstein delivered a Cambridge lecture in which he expressed sympathy with those drawn to talk and write about ethics. “What [ethics] says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.”18 Trying to explain the Tractatus, he wrote on another occasion, “My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.”19

The Wittgensteinian notion that ethics was ineffable was one that even his loyal supporter Schlick contested. People clearly did make ethical claims, such as Lying is wrong: such claims are understood by philosophers and ordinary people alike. For the Circle, ethics was not meaningless in the sense that it was gibberish. But ethical claims were outside the net of things that were verifiable—you could not verify the claim It is wrong to lie. It was just that ethical statements did not have scientific meaning. This claim is sometimes called noncognitivism. Ultimately philosophy or science could not prove one value judgment superior to any other. The difference between the Circle on the one hand and Wittgenstein on the other can be put in this way. Most Circle members more or less agreed that when it came to ethics, there was a sense in which what was called for was silence. But for Wittgenstein, that silence was pregnant with mystical (Carnap and Neurath would say metaphysical) undertones.

Since ethics could not be verified, the Circle largely ignored it. But there were some attempts by Circle figures to analyze ethics from a logical positivist perspective. Perhaps the best-known attempt came from A. J. Ayer. He proposed that we understand ethical statements as being not commands but more like expressions. To say “Lying is wrong” is merely to express a disapproval of lying. This became known as the hurrah/boo theory. “Lying is wrong” is like mentioning lying and then wagging a finger; it is like saying “Lying, boo,” just as to

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