Cora Diamond

In “The Human Prejudice”, Bernard Williams discusses our treating human beings differently in our moral thinking from the ways we treat other creatures. He criticises the idea that this expresses a prejudice, speciesism, analogous to racism and sexism. His essay has been misunderstood by some of its critics, including Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan. My essay sets out several questions one may have about Williams's essay, and explains how they can be answered. I make clear the connections between “The Human Prejudice” and some main elements in Williams's thinking about ethics, including his criticisms of moral theory.

Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On To Ethics is a collection of seven essays, divided into three parts. The essays bring out connections between Wittgenstein's thinking and questions of continuing interest in the philosophy of language, logic, and ethics. A dialogue with Anscombe runs through the essays, which take up questions about how we should respond to thinking that has miscarried or gone off the rails. The main issues discussed in this book concern how we are to understand thoughts, forms of words, and uses of language that seem crucially important to our understanding or self-understanding, but cannot fit in the template we instinctively bring to bear on questions about how language and thought are related to reality. The book presents Wittgenstein as a responsive philosopher, and it does this through a continuing dialogue with Anscombe.

David Wiggins argued that there are ethical questions that admit of answers that are substantially true. He considers the case of slavery, and argues that, in response to the question about its moral legitimacy, there is nothing else to think but that it is unjust and insupportable. His view was criticized by Bernard Williams. I examine their disagreement, and consider the views of those who defended slavery, since it is central to Wiggins′ argument that discrepancies in belief about a case of this sort need to be accounted for.

There is a famous quip of F.P. Ramsey's, which is my second epigraph. According to a widespread legend, the quip is a criticism of Wittgenstein's treatment in the Tractatus of what cannot be said. The remark is indeed Ramsey's, but he didn't mean what he is taken to mean in the legend. His quip, looked at in context, means something quite different. The legend is sometimes taken to provide support for a reading of the Tractatus according to which the nonsensical propositions of the book were intended to convey what cannot be said. But, since the legend has no basis in reality, it provides no evidence in favor of any such reading of the Tractatus. The quip has great interest if it is read in the context of Ramsey's discussion of generality; it is closely related to issues of importance in the development of Wittgenstein's thought.

This essay is concerned with the question whether there is anything left of the Tractatus criticisms of Frege and Russell, if the principles on which those criticisms are apparently based are “thrown away.” I consider two examples of Tractarian arguments that criticize Russell, both of which may appear to rest on the context principle. I discuss only briefly Wittgenstein’s argument against Russell on the theory of types, but I look in detail at his criticism of Russell on generality. I show how that criticism can be understood independently of any supposed Tractarian principles. I also consider the importance of ideas in Russell’s Principles of Mathematics for the development of Wittgenstein’s thought, including the distinction between saying and showing.

Wittgensteinian ethics, it may be thought, is committed to detailed examination of realistically described cases, and hence to eschewing the abstract hypothetical cases, many of them quite bizarre, found in much contemporary moral theorizing. I argue that bizarre cases may be helpful in thinking about ethics, and that there is nothing in Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy that would go against this. I examine the case of the ring of Gyges from the Republic; and I consider also some contemporary arguments about thought-experiments in philosophy.

I want to argue for the importance of the notion human being in ethics. Part I of the paper presents two different sorts of argument against treating that notion as important in ethics. A. Here is an example of the first sort of argument. What makes us human beings is that we have certain properties, but these properties, making us members of a certain biological species, have no moral relevance. If, on the other hand, we define being human in terms which are not tied to biological classification, if we treat as the properties which make us human the capacities for reasoning or for self-consciousness, then indeed those capacities may be morally relevant, but if they are morally significant at all, they are significant whether they are the properties of a being who is a member of our species or not. And so it would be better to use a word like ‘person’ to mean a being that has these properties, to bring out the fact that not all human beings have them and that non-human beings conceivably might have them.