Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics”

1 Broad concept of Ethics:
Including “what is good”, “what is valuable”, “the meaning of life”, the area of aesthetics etc. (Note: this is not the common understanding of what ethics is.)
2 Distinction between the relative (trivial) and absolute (ethical) sense of a word:
Relative: “good”, “right” etc. for a certain purpose (good tennis player, right road)
Absolute: “good person” (e.g. “but you should behave better”)
a) Relative sense of a word is a description of a certain state of affairs, absolute sense of a word is something else: it is a normative judgment or a prescription. We try to say something that goes “beyond the world”: These propositions have therefore no meaning, according to Wittgenstein.
b) Another way of understanding: relative sense of the word is conditional (this is the right road if you want to go to Manila in the shortest time), absolute sense of the word is unconditional (you ought to behave better). The distinction can be compared to the Kant’s distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperative.
3 The “World-Book”:
Another way suggested by Wittgenstein to get aware of the difference (between “relative” and “absolute”) is his thought experience of a world book: Imagine an omniscient person who knows all the movement of all bodies, all state of minds, all facts. He would write everything in a book; “this book would contain the whole description of the world [but] nothing that we would call an ethical judgment.” (p. 3) Even the description of a murder, with all its details, but we would still not find an ethical proposition.
4 Even though that there can be no ethical statement, we make such experiences:
Three examples: a) “I wonder at the existence of the world”, b) “I feel absolutely safe”, c) the concept of “miracle”. In all three examples, it is a misuse of language: a) “wonder” is always about something that might not be the case (an unusually big dog, a house that was there and now has been demolished etc.), b) safe is always relative (e.g. in my room, I’m safe, because no truck can run over me) and c) the word “miracle” does not belong to (scientific) language.
5 Ethical and religious expression just similes?
The use of good, right, valuable etc. in the absolute sense, seem just to be meant as similes. But then, it should be possible to drop the similes, and describe the state of affair on the basis of facts – but there are no such facts. (p. 6)
6 Ethics as a need of human beings
“My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. (...) But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.”