Abstract

Wittgenstein thought that ethical value judgments are absolute in the sense that their correctness — if they could be saidto be correct — does not depend at all on how things are in the world. My purpose is to elucidate how this conceptionof ethical judgments is in itself a sufficient reason for regarding them as nonsense. Wittgenstein’s thesis that ethicalsentences are nonsensical does not need to be supported by the claim that only truth-valuable sentences can have asense. This leads us to a reappraisal of the relevance of the Tractarian project of showing that ethical sentences cannotmake sense