3 - Semantic Normativity and Moral Obligation

Summary

As explained in Chapter 1, the normativity of linguistic meaning – whether expressed in rules of grammar or implicit in our language use – is at the core of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. Over the last decades, however, that idea has been persistently attacked. In this chapter, I shall consider the semantic anti-normativist challenge to Wittgenstein's account of language.

Types of obligations

It is useful to distinguish three types of obligations:

• 1. Moral obligations

• 2. Socially enforced obligations

• 3. Freely adopted obligations

The concept of a moral obligation is logically very different from that of a legal obligation in that it has freed itself from its socially enforced origin. For example, as children, we first accept an obligation not to steal because we understand that it will be enforced – that theft is severely sanctioned. But then most of us internalise this socially enforced obligation and also accept it as a moral obligation. That is to say, we take the step from:

(a) I shouldn't steal because I get into trouble if I do.

to

(b) I shouldn't steal because it's morally wrong.

Thus, moral obligations typically grow out of socially enforced obligations but free themselves (at least logically) from their grounding in social sanctions. In both directions:

• (i) Something can be socially enforced without being morally correct.

• (ii) Something can be morally correct without being socially enforced.

Obviously, the most important moral obligations tend to also be socially enforced by law. In that case, we are obliged in two different senses, roughly speaking: by the police and by our conscience.

Note that if I accept a moral obligation that is not socially enforced, it is not, for that matter, (what I call) a freely adopted obligation [3.] either, because I don't freely choose to find something morally right or wrong. It is, as it were, dictated to me by my conscience (which, if you are a moral realist, you may believe to track some metaphysical facts).

What, then, would be an example of a freely adopted obligation [3.]? For example, when solving a crossword puzzle, I put myself under an obligation to follow the rules. I would not get into trouble if I entered some nonsense words instead, nor would it be morally wrong to do so.