Abstract
In this paper, I consider the debate between moral individualists and those whose moral philosophy is influenced by Wittgenstein, and in particular the extent to which its participants appear to be talking past one another. In the hope of illuminating, and perhaps alleviating, this mutual incomprehensibility, I demonstrate the pervasive reliance of these Wittgensteinian opponents of moral individualism upon the moral testimony of others, and the ways in which that reliance reflects a central element of the commitment to which that testimony testifies—the moral significance of being human. I argue that this internal relation between the form and the content of these anti-individualist texts is what makes it so difficult for their opponents to grasp their significance, and at the same time renders them vulnerable to the charge of moralism.
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Notes
- 1.
Durham: Acumen, 2012.
- 2.
James Rachels, Created from Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 73.
- 3.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016—hereafter IE.
- 4.
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966.
- 5.
‘Equality, Dignity and Disability’, in Lyons and Waldron (eds), Perspectives on Equality (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2005), 93–119.
- 6.
‘The Personal is Philosophical is Political’, in Metaphilosophy 40/3-4, July 2009, 606–27—hereafter ‘PPP’.
- 7.
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 29 (1991)—hereafter ‘CHB’.
- 8.
London: Routledge, 2000—hereafter ‘CH’.
- 9.
In Alanen, Heinämaa and Wallgren (eds) Commonality and Particularity in Ethics (Macmillan: London, 1997).
- 10.
See his Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse, D.Z. Phillips (ed); Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- 11.
‘“We are Perpetually Moralists”: Iris Murdoch, Fact and Value’, in Antonaccio and Schweiker (eds), Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
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Mulhall, S. (2021). Moralism, Moral Individualism and Testimony. In: Balaska, M. (eds) Cora Diamond on Ethics. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59219-6_9
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