Moral Oughts

[GrandizerII]

No, it's based on the fact that I would care what my loved ones would think ...


I guess, for me, when it comes to the ought question, I don't necessarily see it as a moral question. Ought is the imposition of "shoulds" and "musts", with a moral/practical/personal reason as justification, and that is it.

“
If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon.
In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain pre-determined standard.

Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity.


And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it's the right road relative to a certain goal.

Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or deep problems.

But this is not how Ethics uses them.

Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said "Well, you play pretty badly" and suppose I answered "I know, I'm playing badly but I don't want to play any better," all the other man could say would be "Ah then that's all right."

But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said "You're behaving like a beast" and then I were to say "I know I behave badly, but then I don't want to behave any better," could he then say "Ah, then that's all right"?

Certainly not; he would say "Well, you ought to want to behave better."
Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance was one of a relative judgment.

The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this: Every judgment of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a judgment of value: Instead of saying "This is the right way to Granchester," I could equally well have said, "This is the right way you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time"; "This man is a good runner" simply means that he runs a certain number of miles in a certain number of minutes, etc.

Now what I wish to contend is that, although all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statements of facts, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.

Let me explain this: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment.”

-Wittgenstein

"You ought to play properly because if you lose it'll be your last professional game ever"

"If you want to pirate, go ahead. I have nothing to do with this."

"Donating to the poor is good in that - insert descriptive statement that promotes the moral goodness of it."