Ethical Diachronicity, Metaethical (Non-)Factualism, and the later Wittgenstein
Abstract
Discussions of moral luck, exceptionalism, and ethical watersheds raise the question of what it would mean for our ethical commitments to exhibit, in an axiologically non-trivial way, a diachronic character. This would render a particular evaluation applicable, by virtue of its content, only at certain times and not others. It would also make whether or not there happen to be cases we can point to at a given time and for a given domain contingent on facts about what antecedently occurred in the world. I explore this first by considering how the issue relates to the metaethical division between factualists and non-factualists, and then by examining Wittgenstein’s distinctive line of thinking, in On Certainty, about how framing commitments and empirico-factual beliefs combine in ways that change over time. I conclude that theorising about ethical diachronicity in such terms leads to a problem of self-referentiality, but argue that while such an approach entails a certain “throwing away of the ladder” of philosophical analysis, this need not leave us with nothing to say. There can be a meaningful consideration of putative cases of ethical diachronicity in other ways, via personal histories and fictional narratives.
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