[lbo-talk] Re: Rise of anti-democratic liberalism

C. G. Estabrook galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
Fri Jun 18 22:32:44 PDT 2004


I'm suggesting that deciding what's ethical is something like deciding what's grammatical: for all the regional variations, it's a matter of descrying a common structure.

To continue the analogy, I'm speaking for a Chomskyan universal grammar of ethics, rather than a set of Wittgensteinian family resemblances among moral systems. Moral systems would then be like individual languages: Chomsky suggests that an extra-terrestrial visitor would think that all humans spoke the same language, even if it differed a bit from place to place; similarly s/he/it would think that all humans had the same moral code, even if it differed a bit from place to place. (Chomsky obviously thinks the e-t would be right.)

The analogy probably breaks down however in regard to Wittgenstein's own view of ethics: at least at one time he seems to have thought that ethics had to be a condition of of the world, like logic -- the position I'm calling Chomskyan. --CGE

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Miles Jackson wrote:


>
> This is an apt analogy, but not quite in the way you mean. Just as
> there is no way to decide which language system is "superior" to
> another in any universal sense, there is no universally agreed
> upon hierarchy of morals. Language is used in specific ways, and
> so that language becomes a part of a way of life; and just so
> with moral beliefs.
>



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