WHAT IS ETHICS?
[1] and https://cominsitu.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/ludwig-wittgenstein-lecture-on-ethics.pdf
One possible answer would be to give you the so-called popular science lecture, i.e. a lecture whose aim is to make you feel, that you understand something that you don’t really understand. And to satisfy what I consider to be one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely a superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science.
Therefore, I will suppress this desire and try to give some examples instead. As it were, photographs of faces, so that together we can get a picture of the typical features they all had in common. And we’ll see if that’s possible and what comes of it.
So when we say that this person is a good pianist, we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of skill. And similarly, if we say it’s important to us not to catch a cold, we mean that catching a cold causes certain describable problems in our life.
Okay, but what could we mean by „an absolutely good pianist?“ Or „absolute sickness?“
We all understand what it means to say that we are amazed at the size of a dog that is bigger than any dog we have ever seen. So we marvel at something that we can imagine is different than before.
But that doesn’t mean that we cannot ever see an even bigger dog, and therefore it doesn’t make sense to say that we see an absolutely big dog.
To say so would be nonsensical.
This nonsense would not be nonsensical because we haven’t found the right term yet, but nonsensicality would be its essence.
So if we need to say it, we want to go beyond the boundaries of meaningful language.
This tendency, that is, the tendency of all people who have ever tried to write or speak about ethics, has been nonsensical overstepping the limits of language.
This tendency of the human mind, which I deeply respect is the most important interruption to our usual activity. Therefore it is nonsensical to ridicule her.
