![handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq9 and id is 1 raw text is: Law and Critique Vo.IX no.1 [1998]
A MEDITATION ON WITTGENSTEIN'S LECTURE ON ETHICS
by
LouIs E. W OLCHER*
And once when I mentioned Goering's Recht ist das, was uns gefdllt,
Wittgenstein said that even that is a kind of ethics. It is helpful in silencing
objections to a certain attitude. And it should be considered along with other
ethical judgments and discussions, in the anthropological study of ethical
discussions which we may have to conduct.
Rush Rhees, Some Developments in Wittgenstein's View of Ethics .
This paper is a meditation on the text of a lecture Wittgenstein gave
in 1929 to a meeting of the Heretics' Society in Cambridge.2 The
typescript of the lecture, written in English and bearing no title, was
published posthumously as A Lecture on Ethics.3 It is the only sustained
exposition by Wittgenstein of his views on ethics in print, although
numerous epigrams and fragments on ethics are scattered throughout his
* Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, 1100 N.E. Campus
Parkway, Seattle, Washington 98105, USA. An earlier version of this paper
was presented to the 1996 Critical Legal Conference at the University of East
London.
1 Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 17-26, 25. Hermann Goering's epigram can be
translated as Right is whatever pleases us.
2 The lecture was probably delivered on November 17, 1929. L. Wittgenstein, A
Lecture on Ethics [hereinafter Lecture], in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical
Occasions 1912-1951, ed. J. Klagge and A. Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1993), 36-44, 36 [hereinafter Philosophical Occasions 1. Although Wittgenstein
was invited to speak by C.K. Ogden, the first English translator of the
Tractatus, the members of the Heretics' Society made up a general audience
that had no particular interest or training in philosophy, ibid. Ray Monk
asserts that the Heretics were less elitist and more concerned with science
than another Cambridge discussion group, the Apostles; he also notes that the
Heretics had previously been addressed by such luminaries as H.G. Wells,
Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf. R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The
Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin), 276.
3 The typescript, first published in Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 3-12, was
reprinted in Philosophical Occasions, supra n.2, at 36-44.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/lwcrtq9&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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