Contemporary linguistic philosophy and the nature of ethics

Abstract

Philosophy had always to deal with the relation of the expression to the expressed, a relation which was explored by analysing our language. In this sense, one can contend that philosophical analysis has always been some form or other of linguistic analysis. What makes Contemporary linguistic analysis radically different from previous philosophy is that besides its greater emphasis on linguistics as the only philosophical method, it has reduced itself to a second-order activity. Unlike first-order activities, it does not deal with the actual making of statements of facts or statements of value. Statements of facts, not facts, statements of values, not values, are the object of this second-order activity. This reduction in the scope of philosophy in general, when applied to ethics, has had some far-reaching consequences: for the first time in the history of philosophy, moral judgments were declared meaningless by logicians, epistemologists and semanticists. The only moral philosophy still permitted was one which would make no value statements whatsoever. Interpreted in ethical language, this injunction meant that advocacy for any system of morality, an advocacy which has always been included in the works of the great moral philosophers, had to be banned from ethics. A new name was coined for this altogether new moral philosophy: Meta-ethics. In spite of the reduction of its scope, in spite of the injunction dictated by logical positivist, logicians and epitemologists, this new, second-order activity - metaethics - could not avoid reverting to the classical approach of ethics: analysis and some form of preaching. In the following study I shall try to show, by examining three contributions of Urmson, Hare and Toulmin, that meta-ethics or ethics as a second order activity is an ideal which it is very difficult to attain; and if attainable at all it would mean the end of ethics as a branch of philosophy. Part of my argument will be devoted to show,- that the rationality of ethics is conveniently included in the logical description of moral language instead of prescribing it as a moral virtue. Thus, in spite of their theory, there is moral preaching in the writings even of modern linguistic analysts, and its function is to prove that ethical discourse is, or should be, a rational activity.