Is a Science of Ethics Possible

Extract

“The age-long endeavour to find an intellectual basis for ethics is an enterprise of such importance, and of such difficulty, that any explorer of that country must always be glad to hear the voices of his fellow-travellers. ‘This,’ Wittgenstein once said to me, ‘is a terrible business—just terrible! You can at best stammer when you talk of it.’”

With these words Waddington introduces his symposium Science and Ethics, a “communal, perhaps even co-operative stammering,” as he calls it. Also the present contribution to the “terrible business” cannot be more than a stammering; The business is so terrible today not only because of its inherent difficulties, but because of the tremendous odds which are at stake. When the Renaissance philosophers built the science of material nature they were fired by an enthusiasm of cosmic exploration. Today we are frozen in awe of a cosmic explosion. When Galileo pioneered his new science he knew that he was in the possession of the truth and that his opponents, steeped in error and superstition, would have to give way—eppur si muove! Today, building the science of ethics, we are neither equally sure nor equally confident. Our science is not yet formulated. Our opponents, though not right, may yet conquer before we have had time to develop the new science. We are not sure whether what was true for physics three hundred years ago is true for ethics today.