Wittgenstein and the Challenge of Global Ethics

Wittgenstein took ethics extremely seriously. In fact, he took it so seriously that he gave away the bulk of his inherited family fortune to needy artists including the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl, who he thought might make better use of it than himself as a salaried professor (Monk, 1990, p. 108). Paradoxically, however, he was highly critical of the academization of philosophy in general and of ethics in particular. He therefore did precious little work in ethics, traditionally conceived as an attempt to define the good and/or apply it to specific real- world contexts such as business. This is because for Wittgenstein, ethics is bound up with our natural history. It compels us by being the very lens through which we see the world (Wittgenstein, 1921, § 1, 1.1, 2.04). Hence, “man is the microcosm”(Wittgenstein, 1961, p. 84). As such, philosophy cannot itself discover and lead people to what is good (Wittgenstein, 1980, p. 3e). For we cannot, for Wittgenstein, get by means of language behind the very foundations of common sense.