Abstract
This chapter discusses Edward Harcourt’s recent criticism of Cora Diamond’s account of Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, and the view she associates with Wittgenstein that ethics has no specific subject matter. I argue that Harcourt has misconstrued Diamond’s account, and that his own proposal for what a Wittgensteinian moral philosophy would be like is not consistent with what Wittgenstein says about morality. In particular, Wittgenstein’s suggestion in his later philosophy that goodness is not a quality or property of actions in addition to their other properties lends further support to Diamond’s account of ethics as devoid of subject matter that could be identified in terms of distinctively moral concepts. Through my discussion of this issue I hope to clarify and reinforce the challenge that Diamond’s account poses for traditional moral philosophy which sees as its goal the development of an abstract theory of moral goodness the purpose of which is to account for all instances of goodness in an ethical sense.
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Notes
- 1.
Lovibond discusses Diamond’s critique of her 1983 account in Lovibond (2002, 34ff.).
- 2.
See Kuusela 2018, 41–51 for discussion and justification of this interpretation.
- 3.
Edited notes were published by G.E. Moore (1954, 1955) and Alice Ambrose (1979). More recently Moore’s complete notes were published by Stern, Rogers, and Citron eds. (2016). Although the style of Ambrose’s and Moore’s notes is rather different, with Moore’s including more detail, they seem to give a reliable account of what Wittgenstein said on the issue of goodness in that both mention the same examples and employ the same terms. (For discussion of the different set of lecture notes, see ‘Editorial Introduction’ in Stern et al. 2016).
- 4.
Colour words do have specialized uses that depend on the object. For instance, a blue face and red wine are not blue or red in quite the usual sense. However, it seems that these uses can be treated as what they seem to be, specialized. They are used as names for special cases rather than as descriptions. If so, such cases do not indicate that colour concepts function like goodness does according to Wittgenstein.
- 5.
I would like to thank Maria Balaska, Lars Hertzberg, and Sofia Meléndez Gutiérrez for comments on a draft version of this essay.
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Kuusela, O. (2021). Defending Diamond Against Harcourt: Wittgensteinian Moral Philosophy and the Subject Matter of Ethics. In: Balaska, M. (eds) Cora Diamond on Ethics. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59219-6_5
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