Wittgenstein and Mid-20Th Century Political Philosophy: Naturalist Paths from Facts to Values

chapter 7 Wittgenstein and Mid-20th Century Political Philosophy: Naturalist Paths from Facts to Values

Andrius Gališanka

The mid-20th century witnessed a transformation of analytic political philosophy. By the 1960s, meta-ethical discussions about the nature of the good and the meaning of ethical utterances were replaced by discussions about the nature of justice, liberty, and other substantive political values. This change drew on a variety of intellectual sources and was inspired by a variety of events.1 In this paper, I explore Ludwig Wittgenstein’s role in this intellectual transformation, focusing on his influence on political philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s. While Wittgenstein wrote little directly on political philosophy or ethics, his philosophical approach inspired, among others, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philip- pa Foot, Stephen Toulmin, and John Rawls.2 The nature of this influence is still largely unexplored. Analyzing it will help us to better understand the patterns of political thinking that emerged in mid-century. I argue that Wittgenstein’s influence in the 1950s and 1960s was twofold. Primarily, his thought helped to argue that there is such a thing as normative reasoning, or reasoning about values and ways of life in which values are embedded. Wittgensteinians argued that the rules of this reasoning, including inferences from facts to values, were embedded in the conventions of normative practices or “language games.” Assuming that these rules have fixed meanings, they concluded that the fact-value gap did not exist. These arguments in effect

1 For latest studies, see Mark Bevir and Andrius Gališanka, “John Rawls in Historical Context,” History of Political Thought 33 (2012): 701–725; Naomi Choi, “The post-analytic Roots of Hu- manist Liberalism,” History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 280–292; Katrina Forrester, “Citizen- ship, War, and the Origins of International Ethics in American Political Philosophy, 1960– 1975,” The Historical Journal 57 (2014): 773–801; Daniele Botti, “John Rawls, Peirce’s Notion of Truth, and White’s Holistic Pragmatism,” History of Political Thought 35 (2014): 345–377. 2 In his later philosophical period, Wittgenstein discussed the nature of normative inquiry in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: the University of Chi- cago Press, 1980). For Wittgenstein’s earlier views on ethics, see in particular Ludwig Wittgen- stein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” The Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 3–12. The essay was originally delivered in Cambridge between September 1929 and 1930. For Wittgenstein’s influence on Rawls, see Bevir and Gališanka, “Rawls in Historical Context,” and David Reidy, “Rawls’s Reli- gion and Justice as Fairness,” History of Political Thought 31 (2010): 309–343.

Wittgenstein and Mid-20th Century Political Philosophy 153 ended debates with emotivism and prescriptivism and shifted analytic philosophers’ attention to substantive political thought. Second, Wittgenstein’s ideas helped spark a resurgence in naturalism, or attempts to draw normative conclusions from claims about human beings and their goals in the world. To explain why language games were governed by some rules and not others, Witt- gensteinians appealed to facts about human beings. Making these arguments, they concluded that the fixed rules are general and do not lead to particular ethical or political positions. For this reason, Wittgenstein did not inspire political traditions or particular political views. We can discern Wittgensteinian approaches to normative inquiry, but not Wittgensteinian political thought. I make this argument in five steps. I begin by outlining the emotivist and prescriptivist arguments that gripped analytic philosophers from the 1930s to the 1950s. Represented in this paper by Charles Stevenson and R.M. Hare, these traditions held that there is no such thing as normative reasoning be- cause factual statements do not stand in logical relations to normative conclusions. The two kinds of utterances are separated by an unbridgeable gap. In the second part of the paper, I outline Wittgensteinian debates about the fact- value gap and especially Hare’s The Language of Morals (1952). These were in many ways intra-family debates, as Hare too was influenced by the later Witt- genstein. I will focus on philosophers who built bridges from facts to values and will refer only to them as “Wittgensteinians,” without implying that Hare was not a Wittgensteinian in at least some respects.3 These Wittgensteinians argued that normative reasoning is broader than emotivists and prescriptiv- ists allow. Logical relations include not only entailments, but also “evaluative” inferences in which factual statements count as relevant or “good” reasons for normative conclusions. In the third part of the paper, I show how Wittgensteinians such as Ans- combe and Foot appealed to conventions to explain why certain facts are relevant to normative conclusions. Logical connections between facts and values existed, although they were not necessarily deductive. In this broader concep- tion of normative reasoning, factual statements lead to normative conclusions given an appropriate context. For example, it is in the context of the practice of

3 I make this decision on pragmatic grounds. My goal is to reveal interesting Wittgensteinian paths from facts to values, not to argue that Hare was not a Wittgensteinian. I do, however, exclude Stevenson from the group of Wittgensteinians, even though he studied with Witt- genstein at Cambridge in the early 1930s and thought himself to be influenced by Wittgen- stein. I focus on philosophers influenced by the later Wittgenstein, and Stevenson’s position is too far from Wittgenstein’s later views, however liberally these might be understood. This exclusion of Stevenson is also a pragmatic move, not an attempt to define the label “Wittgen- steinian.” I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me clarify this point.