Anna Wierzbicka, English; Meaning and Culture
Oxford University Press, 2006
Chapter Three "The Story of RIGHT and WRONG and Its Cultural Implications"
(revised but still incomplete)
caveat: I probably won't be able to go into detail today and supply full references.
I hope to return to this entry.
Wierzbicka wants to criticize English-language philosophers for an English-language bias.
The odd thing is that one source of evidence for an English language bias is a quotation from the Oxford Companion to Philosophy
saying that there's a debate about the relative importance of the good as opposed to the right.
Part of this opposition can be framed as the difference between the perspective of Plato and Aristole (who would have thought in terms of happiness and doing what is good) and Kant (who would have thought primarily in terms of what is right).
That's the way English-speaking philosophers think about it. When I used to teach ethics (whether as a separate course or as part of an Introduction to PHilosophy course) I used to assign readings from Kant and Mill because Kant emphasizes what's right (and thinks happiness is not part of morality) and Mill emphasizes happiness. (I might have assigned students to read Aristotle or Plato; but in any case, I would have been teaching a difference in two approaches to ethics.)
Now, happiness isn't exactly the same thing as "doing the good" thing, but this is the sort of contrast the Oxford writer is getting at.
So, the odd thing is that Kant wrote in German, Plato and Aristotle in (ancient) Greek, so the source is not at all originally in English.
Put differently: the traditional view is that the strongest defender of the "right" as opposed to the "good" is actually a philosopher who wrote in German. Wierzbicka thinks, however, that "right" is uniquely prominent in English.
Doesn't it matter whether we think about the theories behind the words and not just the words?
I am actually intrigued by her suggestion that talk of good and bad is more basic than talk of right and wrong. However, that is another topic.
Later in the chapter she discusses the ethics of the Christian Gospels. Interestingly, she claims that it is not an ethics of "right and wrong". Rather, it is about doing the good thing--because that's what God wants.
This is interesting, first of all, because Kant is often said to represent the articulation of a Christian ethic. Secondly, when you actually read what Wierzbicka thinks the ethics of the Christian Gospels is it turns out to be a version of "divine command" theory. (Roughly, moral truths are the expressions of the will of God--His commands.)
That theory is widely thought to fall to an objection first noted by Plato in the "Euthyphro".
I should do X because God said so. He wants me to. Of course, that means, God thinks it will be good, and make me happy.
The problem is: why does God want that? According to Wierzbicka, Gospel Ethics says "end of story"; it's not a matter for reason.
Perhaps Wierzbicka finds that adequate. However, presumably God doesn't just label things right and wrong for no reason. And, it is, to say the least, incurious not to wonder about his reasons. If your only reason for doing something is "God told me to do it", it looks as though you don't really know what you are doing. Now, Wierzbicka could say: God told me to do it because it is good. But, that still doesn't answer the question: What makes this (and not that) good?
If we shut down the attempt to find reasons, the what we are actually doing is making discussions about how to live a region of obscurity.
[aside: Wierzbicka actually has more to say about what she thinks Anglo ethics is (where "Anglo" is her terminus technicus for the view embedded or implied somehow in the English language). She does have something interesting to say about "procedural" ethics. She clams that an ethic emphasizing "right" tends to be procedural, and she presents some more or less sociological evidence. I won't discuss that part of her thought except to say it is reminiscent of a variety of trends within analytical (or so-called English-language) philosophy, such as an interest in "moral particularism", and a reading of Aristotle which makes intuition key to doing the right thing, as well as a feminist critique of Kantian ethics more or less on the grounds that it is (what Wierzbicka terms) procedural.]
Arguably, that is, in fact, what philosophers have achieved by their talk of "normativity". They've introduced an essential obscurity into their theorizing. Wouldn't it be funny if Wierzbicka were right that something about English gives a kick to "right", and I am correct in what I've just said. In other words, English-bias toward "right" produces an obscure ethic precisely of the sort Wierzbicka finds in the Christian Gospels.
I cannot resist quoting Terry Penner here, a Plato scholar who thinks we should not use "right" and "wrong" (as opposed say to "good" and "bad") in translating Plato:
In ethics, all means and ends are judged against the human good of maximum available real happiness. All questions here are purely questions of fact--however deeply hidden the answers... For Socratic ethics, too, then, there are no further non-factual, non-natural, evaluative, normative, moral, or conventional elements, no further Kantian principles, and no further "intrinsic goods". It is, I think, the one morality-free theory of objective good available to us that contains no elements of conventions of the sort that Socrates or Plato would have regarded as unacceptable. ... it may be virtually alone among non-conventionalist theories compatible with the Descent of Man from the higher primates....
pp. 290-291, "Socratic Ethics and the Socratic Psychology of Action", in Donald R. Morrison, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Socrates, Cambridge UP. 2011
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