Tension in Wittgenstein's Ethics: A Contextual Perspective

ZEMO httpsdoiorg101007s420480180016x CrossMark DISKUSSION Ethics and morality principles and practice M J B Stokhof The Authors 2018 Abstract The paper addresses the tension in Wittgensteins work between an ab solute and a more contextual approach to values It argues that both are relevant but that from a systematic point of view the contextual perspective has priority The consequent commitment to a form of moral realism is discussed and an analogy with normativity in the domain of language is adduced to provide further support Keywords Wittgenstein Ethics Morality Value 1 Introduction The remarks and observations pertaining to ethics and morality that are scattered across Wittgensteins oeuvre display a tension between absoluteness and an apparent relativism Ethics is often described as dealing with the absolute good at other points Wittgenstein discusses moral questions in contextual terms A similar and apparently concomitant tension can be observed between the individual and the social This prompts first of all an exegetical question Is the tension real and was Wittgenstein really of two minds here Or is the tension only apparent and is there a way of interpreting his various remarks that makes them compatible The exegetical issue is echoed by a systematic concern Ethics seems to need absoluteness in order to escape from a relativism that would make it superfluous But sensitivity to context is an important feature of the way in which we judge each other and ourselves Is there a way in which these two can be balanced M J B Stokhof 24 ILLCDepartment of Philosophy University of Amsterdam Amsterdam The Netherlands EMail MJBStokhofuvanl Department of Philosophy Tsinghua University Beijing China Published online 12 November 2018 coe M J B Stokhof Closely related is a phenotypical consideration which is that humans are not born as fully developed ethical and moral entities but typically need to be educated to become one Human infants get their training from the community they happen to be born in The amount and form of training may vary simple behavioral training by means of punishment and reward learning by being exposed to the lives and deeds of exemplary figures explicit instruction into a set of accepted rules And the relevant size of the community may also be different family tribe state church From this perspective absolutism and contextualism appear in a different light On the one hand there is diversity of methods and results on the other hand there is a shared ability to be susceptible to moral education whatever form it takes1 The aim of the current article is to clarify the relationship between these two features absoluteness and context from an exegetical but also a systematic point of view A note on terminology before we proceed In what follows we will use ethics to refer to the kind of normativity that is absolute ie that is typically formulated in terms of general principles and absolute values and morality to indicate the kind of normativity that starts from concrete actions and decisions and that takes contextual considerations into account The terminology is not standard but then again it is only terminology 2 Wittgenstein on ethics and morality Often when Wittgenstein talks about value it is characterized in absolute terms It applies across the board it is unconditional and it functions for everyone in the same way Here are two examples from his early writings2 If there is any value that does have value it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case For all that happens and is the case is accidental What makes it nonaccidental cannot lie within the world since if it did it would itself be accidental It must lie outside the world Wittgenstein 1960 Tractatus 641 Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life the absolute good the absolute valuable can be no science What it 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 Wittgenstein 1969a A Lecture on Ethics 1 On Wittgenstein and moral education cf McLaughlin 1995 Burbules and Smeyers 2002 Giarelli 2002 indirectly related is Cuypers 1995 Also related is the question whether and if so how and to what extent we are able to transcend our ethical and moral framework and access and appreciate that of others This is a question that is discussed by Bastian Reichardt 2018 in the context of assessing Wittgensteins relevance to political philosophy 2 Many more examples can be provided and the observation as such is widely shared in the literature cf eg the early work of McGuinness 1966 and more recent work of Stokhof 2002 Plant 2004 Arns wald 2009 and other contributions to that volume by Dieter Mersch Liam Huighes Anja Wieberg Jens Kertscher and many others Wittgensteins A Lecture on Ethics Wittgenstein 1969a is a particularly rich source of material K Ethics and morality principles and practice But in his later work too we find Wittgenstein speaking of religious belief which we take to be closely related to ethics in a similar manner he has what you might call an unshakeable belief It will show not by reasoning or by appeal to ordinary grounds for belief but rather by regulating for all in his life Wittgenstein 1978 Lectures on Religious Belief I However Wittgenstein also had a keen eye for the importance of context when it comes to determining the right course of action The evidence here is more indirect and is mainly provided by what we know from conversations Wittgenstein had on these issues with friends and students Here is an example that comes from recollections of Rush Rhees of conversations he had with Wittgenstein in 1942 When I ie Rhees suggested the question whether Brutus stabbing Caesar was a noble action as Plutarch thought or a particularly evil one as Dante thought Wittgenstein said this was not even something you could discuss You would not know for your life what went on in his mind before he decided to kill Caesar What would he have had to feel in order that you should say that killing his friend was noble Rhees 1965 Note that normally Wittgenstein would dismiss considerations about eg inten tion as not ethically relevant This is actually one of the points that Rhees wants to make in his paper However here he does acknowledge their importance for the moral judgement in question Interestingly as the next quote shows this does not mean that Wittgenstein discards the conception of ethics as absolute If he has say the Christian ethics then he may say it is absolutely clear he has got to stick to her come what may And then his problem is different It is how to make the best of this situation what he should do in order to be a de cent husband in these greatly altered circumstances and so forth The question Should I leave her or not is not a problem here ibid This seems to view Christian ethics as absolute in the sense that the details of the situation do not matter The demand to stick with ones spouse applies irrespective of the circumstances But note that there still remains a moral problem What does it mean to be a decent husband And here the context is explicitly mentioned in these greatly altered circumstances Apparently the absoluteness of the ethical system does not preclude considerations concerning contextually shaped moral problems that do not have obvious and absolute solutions3 So the task is to find a coherent account in which both absolute ethics and contextual morality can play a role 3 In the secondary literature this aspect is less prominent but cf eg Biletzki 2009 for an analysis of the later Wittgensteins views on religion that is similar in spirit K M J B Stokhof 3 Wittgenstein on the priority of ethics In our search for an account that gives both ethics and morality their proper due it would seem ethics has the upper hand in Wittgensteins views Morality typically is concerned with others but ethics Wittgenstein claims is not Can there be any ethics if there is no living being but myself If ethics is sup posed to be something fundamental there can If I am right then it is not suf ficient for the ethical judgment that a world is given Then the world in itself is neither good nor evil For it must be all one as far as concerns the existence of ethics whether there is living matter in the world or not And it is clear that a world in which there is only dead matter is in itself neither good nor evil so even the world of living things can in itself be neither good nor evil Good and evil only enter through the subject And the subject is not part of the world but a boundary of the world Wittgenstein 1979 Notebooks 02081916 This seems to suggest that othersfamily communityhave no role to play that ethics is concerned only with the isolated individual But even this isolated individ ual as a contingent human subject drops out of consideration For the absoluteness of ethics can have nothing to do with anything contingent anything worldly be this physical or human The concept of the subject that Wittgenstein refers to is that of the transcendental subject not an ordinary contingent human subject Hence the insistence on absoluteness seems to rule out any moral concerns from the sphere of the ethical Other passages such as the following quote from the conversations Wittgenstein had with Waismann seem to lend this further support Schlick says that there are two conceptions of the essence of the good in theo logical ethics according to the more superficial view the good is good because God wills it according to the more profound view God wills the good because it is good I believe that the first conception is the more profound good is what God commands Waismann 1979 The ineffability of God then extends to the good There is nothing further to say than the good is absolute and cannot be identified with any contingent feature of the world All this suggests strongly that for Wittgenstein ethics has conceptual priority and that in his view ethics and morality are related accordingly Ethics is absolute moral ity is contextdependent The relation between them is instrumental It is by being moral that we realize the ethical ideal And that relation is asymmetric Morality is the result of application of ethics in context and moral judgments depend on ethical judgements4 The main point that we need to investigate is the asymmetry and the specific directionality of the ethicsmorality relation Does this lead to a coherent picture But before we enter into that discussion let us first point out some of the things this view seems to take care of 4 For a more detailed account of this interpretation cf Stokhof 2002 Chap 4 K Ethics and morality principles and practice First of all there is the absence of rational justification For Wittgenstein this is a design characteristic Ethics needs to be ineffable and hence lack the kind of rational justification that applies to an empirical theory It is essentially via contin gency considerations that the absoluteness that is attributed to ethics takes care of this5 And there is the idea of the constitutive nature of ethics Our attitude toward someone who does not adhere to ethical principles being as absolute as Wittgenstein takes them to be is not to judge himher as insane eccentric or as engaged in a different game6 For any of these three judgments would exculpate such a person But in fact we do at least in principle hold people responsible for breaking the rules and we only accept an insanity plea or an appeal to moral relativism in a limited set of welldefined circumstances and But I am eccentric will never fly However there are also a number of questions that absoluteness raises One question concerns the constitutive nature of ethics If I question a moral rule that prevails in a community am I then ipso facto no longer part of that community Could a community be characterized not just by its rules but also by its practices for questioning those rules7 The main issue concerns the internal stability of the position in particular in view of the asymmetry between ethics and morality The question is how we maintain absoluteness of ethics and account for moralitys dependence on context without ending up in skepticism or dogmatism Someone might feel that he needs to follow a rule in an absolute way while acknowledging that this may not apply to everyone Then the rule functions as an absolute without being taken as an absolute That means that the justification of how the rule applies to oneself needs to be independent of how one thinks it applies to others There is no logical tension here but there is definitely a psychological one8 And then there is the problem of the relevance of others The kind of absolutism that we see exemplified in Wittgensteins views and in many others focusses on a selfcentered onesided form of unconditional commitment in which there is no systematic role for considerations regarding others That seems to fly in the 5 Note that it does not rule out the kind of justification we would normally associate with mathemat ics given Wittgensteins specific views on logic and mathematics that is also excluded but for different reasons 6 As would be the case if we would regard ethical principles as a kind of certainty as suggested by eg Kober 1997 2007 and Pleasants 2008 and accept that by doing so we lack any grounds for arguing with or criticizing those who hold themselves to different moral standards than we do 7 Think of the legal system and the way in which rules of that system can be questioned changed or upheld A community is characterized also by the procedures it has for this 8 One may speculate that this psychological difficulty is one of the sources of religious and political intol erance Note that relativists face an analogous problem Someone might acknowledge a certain relativism in how a moral rule functions because he or she thinks that the demand the rule makes might differ with circumstances who is subject to the demand time place and so on Psychologically this is the road from acknowledging a role for circumstance to the kind of skepticism that discards normativity and replaces it by habit and custom K M J B Stokhof face of what real problems look like9 And it ignores the problem of the source of ethics and the role of moral education We need an account of how ethics arise and evolve both at the phylogenetic as well as the ontogenetic level In the moral sphere education and evolution depend on one another the sources from which they spring viz community and human nature are codependent In Wittgensteins writings there are indications suggesting that this was a concern for him as well Compare the following passages from Notebooks Psychophysical parallelism then really exists between my spirit ie spirit and the world Only remember that the spirit of the snake of the lion is your spirit For it is only from yourself that you are acquainted with spirit at all Is this the solution of the puzzle why men have always believed that there was one spirit common to the whole world And in that case it would of course also be common to lifeless things too Wittgenstein 1979 Notebooks 15101916 And in this sense I can also speak of a will that is common to the whole world But this will is in a higher sense my will As my idea is the world in the same way my will is the worldwill Wittgenstein 1979 Notebooks 17101916 Through the transcendental subject the self and the other are intrinsically related Of course that is still far removed from an account of the actual role of actual others However it is important to note that although all this sounds very Schopenhauerian and indirectly Kantian there is a crucial difference between Wittgensteins and Schopenhauers conception of the subject The latters approach is epistemological and ontological but Wittgensteins approach is logical and conceptual The tran scendentality of the ethical subject in Wittgensteins analysis is with respect to the world as it appears to the discursive subject not the world as such There are two notions of world in the Tractatus one discursive one ethical and they represent two ways of dealing with one and the same reality The world of the discursive subject is the world as everything that is the case Tractatus 1 atomistic that of the ethical subject is the world as a limited whole Tractatus 645 holistic From that perspective the separatedness and the unity of subjects of self and others are not necessarily in opposition10 Be that as it may in the moral sphere we have to deal with others and it appears that in these passages Wittgenstein acknowledges this So we find ourselves in the following situation Ethics is absolute and focused on the self whereas morality is contextual and involves both the self and the other In both there is something we need to steer clear from When we disregard the contextuality of morality we may end up with a dogmatic form of ethics which dismisses every individual or contextual consideration as irrelevant But if we focus only on the contextuality of morality we run the risk of value skepticism for then it is unclear how a contexttranscendent ethics can be justified or even constructed What is key is how we view the relationship between ethics and morality If one is taken as conceptually prior to the other we run the risk of not taking the other seriously enough In what follows we will indicate two views on the relation 9 Ask Isaac how he felt about his father 10 For a more detailed analysis cf Stokhof 2002 Chap 4 K Ethics and morality principles and practice between ethics and morality and briefly discuss their pros and cons We will argue that the nonstandard view is to be preferred for systematic reasons but also that some support for it can be derived from other parts of Wittgensteins oeuvre 4 Ethics and morality principles first The standard view can be formulated in the following slogan Ethics engenders morality In this view ethics is applied via ratiocination about what it requires in combination with what the situation is like11 A moral question is usually something of the form What am I to do in this situation An ethical principle can be of a strictly general form One should do love ones neighbor or it can be a general statement that contains parameterized arguments One should love ones neighbor in situations of type Y In either case the ethical principle is not about me and not about the particulars of the situation I am in But the moral problem is so what is needed is instantiation and particularization so as to fit the principle to the situation in question That is typically conceived as a rational discursive process Context determines instantiations of general terms and supplies relevant values for parameters That is done via observation What is the situation like and ratiocination What principle is valid here And what does its instantiation look like The outcome is a strict derivation of the decision that the rule requires in the situation at hand The standard view thus nicely fits a generally accepted view on decisionmaking and action Its appeal is obvious With its emphasis on general principles and strict rules for applying them in concrete situations it holds the promise of objectivity of rationality of universality But there are problems First of all people do not always act rationally and justify their actions rationally they often act intuitively and spontaneously But when they act that way we would still want to qualify their behavior normatively However if the standard view is right in such cases there are no ethical considerations that have determined the action which makes normative judgment problematic Also people can intentionally go against the grain After all ethical principles are not compelling we are dealing with normative not with causal necessity Secondly people are not moral in and of themselves Morality is a matter of being trained and educated and much of that training is by means of force socialization example and authority The training may aim implicitly or explicitly at bringing about a state that satisfies the standard view but what is crucial is that the steps that are needed to get there are as imbued with normativity as the envisaged end state Finally ethics develops over time It changes for example in the scope of ap plication of ethical principles think of transcending family and group limitations And it also changes in terms of content excluding behavior that was once ethically 11 This view is shared by a variety of ethical theories which differ in many other respects Interesting as these differences are we can neglect them for the present purposes K M J B Stokhof permissible or condoning actions that were considered unacceptable The history of human thought about ethical issues clearly testifies to such changes12 5 Ethics and morality practice first An alternative view starts from practice rather than principles and considers con crete moral decisions actions and judgments made in context as its base It too can be formulated in a slogan Morality engenders ethics There are a number of reasons that one could adduce to support such an approach First of all we need to be educated and like any education moral education starts in the midst of things with concrete decisions actions and judgments not with general rules The link with actual practice is built right into the alternative view Second by giving practice such a central place the connection between individual and other between individual and community is guaranteed All practice involves community education necessarily so In this way the alternative view follows a typ ically Wittgensteinian move if you want to know what something is means it is a good idea to look at how you have learnt it how it is taught But the alternative view meets challenges of its own A key issue concerns the bootstrapping problem It needs to give an account of what must be assumed in order to make the process of moralityengendering ethics work ie it needs to specify initial conditions that make morality possible And it needs to face the challenge of avoiding skepticism How we can transcend the situationboundedness of morality and formulate ethics If we cannot account for that then it seems that relativism is unavoidable And finally there is individualism We need an account that avoids the trap of locating everything in the individual but we also need an account of how and why individuals can make choices that go beyond their moral education13 In order to account for bootstrapping we need to make two significant assump tions that there is such a thing as moral induction that serves as a basis for learning and generalization and that there are such things as moral facts that moral induction operates on These are controversial assumptions and it is not at all obvious that they can be defended as such14 But they do seem to be needed if one wants to make bootstrapping work Lets take a closer look 12 And we mark some of them as not just change but actual progress 13 This is in many ways the same challenge as Reichardt 2018 identifies in his analysis of how Wittgen stein can be relevant for political philosophy Criticising forms of life assumes the ability to transcends the boundaries of ones individual history and education cf also below 14 Although moral realism has noteworthy defenders such as GE Moore McDowell Parfit Foot and others is not a mainstream view especially not outside moral philosophy as such at odds as it appears to be with prevalent forms of reductionism and materialism Werhane 1992 discusses the relation between Wittgenstein and moral realism that takes on board early work by Lovibond and Blackburn more recent is De Mesel 2015 For reasons of space we have to leave a comparison between these analyses and the one presented here to another occasion K Ethics and morality principles and practice 6 Moral induction According to Wittgensteins view on it that is outlined in On Certainty Wittgenstein 1969b induction is not a law or a reasoning principle or a rule of inference but a natural ability The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well And no more do we need a law of induction to justify our actions or our predictions Wittgenstein 1969b On Certainty p 287 I might also put it like this the law of induction can no more be grounded than certain particular propositions concerning the material of experience Wittgen stein 1969b On Certainty p 499 Induction is the ability that enables us to transcend a given situation with respect to features of situations that matter to us Physical features such as the rhythm of day and night the changing of the seasons their effects on other animals and plant life and hence on opportunities that await us and the threats that we face are typically features of situations that we depend on for our survival and for which we have developed a natural ability to observe and recognize15 There seems to be no principled reason why this ability or set of abilities if one prefers would be limited to just observable physical features of situations and could not extend to include features that involve social and cultural traits Moral induction would then be the ability to observe and act upon moral features of situations and to do so across situations 7 Moral facts Moral induction assumes that morally relevant features do indeed exist viz that there are such things as moral facts16 These would be features that are tied to human existence and that evolve with it over time Human existence cannot be reduced to human nature in a purely physiological sense it is what is to be human and as such intrinsically tied to how we humans conceive ourselves17 That makes them not completely manmade yet also not completely written in stone ie biologically determined So moral facts are objective yet not absolute in the sense of being completely contextindependent 15 Wittgensteins view here has affinities with accounts of embodied cognition that center around the concept of affordance as explored in work by among others Chemero Rietveld Kiverstein Bruineberg cf eg Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014 There the starting point is that animals including humans are attuned to specific action possibilities that their environment niche provides and this extends beyond physical features and extends to the social environment 16 The use of fact might strike the wrong chord for some what matters is that these features are objective perhaps in a speciesrelevant way and actionguiding and cannot be reduced to purely physical features of the environment 17 This is one reason why imagination of what we are and in particular imagination of what we could be as for example literature provides is also of moral importance K M J B Stokhof Examples would be selfconsciousness and the idea of personal duties and rights acknowledgment of humanness of others and the extension of the moral sphere so as to include them the embodied nature of human existence and the right to bodily integrity and the duty to respect the integrity of others In each case we have a natural fact that at the same time constitutes a morally relevant feature to which we are attuned or that we can be made to be attuned to Over time these may change eg when the conception of who is human to begin with changes or when changes appear in what being human means in the sense of duties and rights Thus moral facts are closely connected with the notorious Wittgensteinian concept of a form of life At this point there is a concrete link between the current discussion of ethics and morality and the analysis of Wittgensteins relevance for political philosophy of Bastian Reichardt that was already referred to above Reichardt formulates it thus In the light of Wittgensteins later work the task of political philosophy can be regarded as finding possibilities to resolve those contradictions between forms of life which impede our coexistence while at the same time accepting the fact that there is a fundamental difference between forms of life Reichardt 2018 In order for this to be possible Reichardt argues the concept of a form of life has to be construed as having both individual and communal traits and as being temporally and socioculturally contingent This provides further support for the analysis proposed here Note that we still call these features moral facts and not ethical facts Although they are not strictly tied to one situation they are situational in that they may change over time may differ from one community to another and so on Note also that it is the correspondence with natural facts eg characteristic biological traits of humans that allows us to track them across situations this is part of why moral induction works This can be viewed as a kind of nonreductive naturalism Moral facts are facts of nature but of our nature and their existence and their content is intrinsically tied to what we are The right to bodily integrity is the ethical analogue of our bodily way of existence the duty to secure this right for others that of the insight that this is a form of life that we have in common This leaves much undecided It certainly does not allow for a strict inference to all the rules and regulations that we actually have since there is a lot of leeway for accidental ie historically and culturally set parameters Nor does it follow that ethical facts apply to humans only One might well argue that ethics pertains to all sentient beings ie cooccurs with consciousness as such not just human consciousness Where there is a body and some form of selfawareness there is the possibility of suffering and along with that a body of moral facts pertaining to it K Ethics and morality principles and practice 8 Challenges Of course the alternative view has its own challenges One obvious concern is that to hold that morality engenders ethics might imply skepticism The contextualism that is at stake reflects the human condition Humans have to reason and decide which action to perform with only limited resources ie partial knowledge of relevant circumstances limited powers of reasoning This makes the outcomes of actions unpredictable And then there are of course genuine conflicts of interest However it is the same limitations of the human condition that make context relevant even unavoidable in the first place It also constrains moral induction Obviously there is a good side to this Awareness of these limitations counteracts dogmatism and a bad sideit is a potential source of differences At this point the idea of absolute value which is not the same as absolute value as a reality enters From the current perspective absolute value cannot be conceived as a general rule a maxim or a universal principle Rather it has to be construed as a stance as an attitude with which we try to confront the various contextually specific decision problems that we face It embodies what we take various situations to have in common and thus functions as a guideline as a means to overcome the limitations of context This general stance affects how we deal with a contextually specific situation but it does not determine how we should deal with it In Wittgensteins writings the general stance is reflected in the ethical experiences that he refers to in A lecture on ethics Wittgenstein 1969a These experiences are not even in their formulation rulelike they instead describe with what kind of mindset we enter into the messy business of dealing with a moral issue From this perspective the ethics that is engendered by morality has a regulative status Although generally formulated principles might play a role the driving force is rather a transformative attitude that aims at their realization without losing sight of the need to always take context into account Now the formulation of this ethical stance might also look selfcentered inasmuch as it appears only to guides one in ones actions as an individual However what it guides me in is decisionmaking and acting in concrete situations that almost always involve others That is the stance as such comes from the contexts not the other way around and there is no strictly individualbased account of morality that would support a selfcentered ethical stance 9 Normativity in other domains meaning To illustrate that the kind of questions and considerations that have been treated above are not limited to the case of ethics and morality we take a very brief look at one other debate in which similar issues arise viz the debate around meaning normativity K M J B Stokhof The leading question in that debate is whether meaning has a normative dimen sion ie whether conditions for correct use of linguistic expressions are part of their meaning and if so how to account for that Most authors agree that there is norma tivity linked to meaning but they disagree about the nature of the relationship18 In the debate there is agreement on two features of meaning normativity that limit possible answers The first is that it is actionguiding it steers action in certain ways but not actiondetermining there is always a possibility of going against The second is that it allows for intersubjective normative judgments19 These are global and fairly intuitive constraints on the explanation of most forms of normativity The first one distinguishes normative from nomologicalcausal con nections and here accounts for the possibility of intentional deviations metaphor irony etc and for fact that unintentional deviations mistakes do not automati cally lead to incomprehensibility The second constraint places normativity in the context of interactions This means normativity is not an individual but a social phenomenon language users judge each others utterances and by and large accept those judgments The issues are complex also because in some approaches meaning normativity is intrinsically related to epistemological and cognitive issues and various solutions have been proposed What position one takes is not just a theoretical issue Different views construct the relationship between semantics and pragmatics differently so they have different consequences for linguistic theory and linguistic methodology and potentially lead to different empirical predictions However this is not the place to go into the details nor do we need to What is relevant here is that the debate has some interesting similarities to what we are concerned with in this article One of these is that we can isolate two basic perspectives that are quite similar to the ones we have discussed above as the standard and the alternative view The first is that meaning engenders normativity ie that it is the meaning of expressions that is the source of the normative constraints on their use The second constructs the relation the other way around Normativity engenders meaning ie meaning arises from normatively constrained use of language The socalled interaction model of Inès Crespo 2009 in which meaning nor mativity arises from the need to justify use in communicative situations objectively ie to a hypothetical outside arbiter This model regards linguistic interaction as the source of meaning normativity and thus gives a central role to the community to learning and training and assumes some form of normative naturalism It balances contextual considerations and contexttranscendent ones It does not construe actual useincontext as somehow derived from or constrained by independently existing normative conditions And it accounts for intersubjectivity and contexttranscen dence and hence avoids meaning skepticism by means of an appeal to fundamental 18 The debate originated in Kripkes essay on Wittgensteins rulefollowing considerations Kripke 1982 and then developed into a debate in semantics proper Boghossian 1989 is often acknowledged as one of the primary sources some key contributions are Hattiangadi 2006 Whiting 2007 Glüer and Wikforss 2010 Gibbard 2012 and Glüer and Wikforss 2015 19 Note that similar features inform the discussion about ethics and morality K Ethics and morality principles and practice characteristics of language users ie their natural ability to observe and be guided by normative aspects of their environment20 As was already noted the debate around meaning normativity originated in ex egetical work on Wittgensteins rulefollowing considerations And these contain key elements that also play a role in the current discussion the concept of norma tive naturalism the role of training and education the interdependence of individual and community This has consequences for the exegesis of Wittgensteins work The emphasis on the individual that seems to characterize his views of ethics has struck people as in odd opposition to the central role of the community when it comes to language and meaning ethical individualism versus language as a social art If normativity in language and in ethics works in similar ways that becomes less of an opposition and more a matter of continuity and thus makes for a more coherent overall view21 10 Conclusion We have identified two ways in which relationship between ethics and absolute value and morality and contextual dependence can be construed The view that ethics engenders morality has been found to be unstable and unsatisfactory as an explanatory factor The alternative view that morality engenders ethics is more stable It is explanatory only given substantial assumptions but seems sufficiently grounded in Wittgensteins remarks to be exegetically possible The core assumptions are definitely at odds with commonly accepted views They oppose methodological individualism standard rationality assumptions in action explanation and reductive forms of naturalism But similar phenomena in other domains such as meaning normativity can be argued to require similar moves against these views The resulting view has the advantage of putting Wittgensteins view on ethics and morality more in line with other themes in his work in particular the rule following considerations thus supporting a more coherent overall reading It also seems promising from a systematic point of view but that obviously needs further work Acknowledgments This material has been presented at the Wittgensteinian Approaches to Moral Philos ophy conference at KU Leuven and at Beijing Normal University I would like to thank the audiences for their feedback I owe a special thanks to Bastian Reichardt for his suggestion that we publish our papers backtoback and for his insightful comments Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 40 Interna tional License httpcreativecommonsorglicensesby40 which permits unrestricted use distribution 20 It is worth noting that Crespo developed her approach to semantic normativity on the basis of a study of models of normativity in ethical theory 21 By itself that is not a convincing argument after all why would a coherent interpretation be closer to the truth than an incoherent one But it does remove the need for explanations that appeal to more than just the work itself such as Louis Sasss analysis in terms of Wittgensteins alleged schizoid personality Sass 2001 K M J B Stokhof and reproduction in any medium provided you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made References Arnswald Ulrich 2009 The paradox of ethicsIt leaves everything as it is In In Search of Meaning Ludwig Wittgenstein on Ethics Mysticism and Religion Ed Ulrich Arnswald Karlsruhe Univer sitätsverlag Karlsruhe 124 Biletzki Anat 2009 Detranscendentalizing religion In Wittgensteins Enduring Arguments Eds Edoardo Zamuner and D K Levy Oxford Routledge 245261 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