Moral Oughts

[Belacqua]

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

And if I say I’m okay with it being my last game professionally, than we would say okay.

We can see the goal here is relative.

But when most people make an equivalent moral statements, they’re appealing to some standard they see as absolute, as Wittgenstein points out.

If someone said “they’re okay with behaving badly, and they don’t want to behave any better”, that wouldn’t be seen as okay, something is not right about that, you ought to want to behave better.

Now maybe you and others here have developed your own particular moral language and meaning, but this is disconnected from the common moral language and it’s assumptions of most people, as highlighted by Wittgenstein.

This is an interesting argument. I've never thought of this before. 

Would it be right for me to say here that Wittgenstein isn't talking about morality as being part of metaphysics or something intrinsic in the world. But rather that language reveals how people actually think about morals. And if we know how people really think about morals, then we know what morals people have. 

So he's saying there are two kinds of good: good for a particular goal, and good because it's good. 

And a good which is only aimed at a particular goal may be accepted or discarded if the goal changes. So if your goal is to let the other guy win, then playing "badly" is good. Or if your goal is to delay your passenger from arriving at his destination because you know he's planning a crime, then taking the "wrong" road is the right thing. 

But the other kind -- good because it's good -- is a case where the variability of the goal will be denied. So if you're a bus driver and you're driving your passengers recklessly along the edge of a cliff, it wouldn't be acceptable to say, "well, it was my goal to drive recklessly today." People would, very rightly, say, "it is bad of you to choose this goal. Whether you happen to desire this end or not, it's bad." 

I wonder if this is revealing about a difference between Wittgenstein and modern Americans. I would say that Wittgenstein here is closer to my own moral views, but I have found that many people posting here disagree with me about such things. It may well be that the dominant view of morality in America is a strictly outcome-based, practical view. "If I might get punished it's bad. But if I'll be OK it's OK." With no absolute component to it. Others have thought that America was a land of expediency.