Mistakes and Mental Disturbances: Pleasants, Wittgenstein, and Basic Moral Certainty

Philosophia 41 (2):477-487 (2013)
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Abstract

In his article, “Wittgenstein and Basic Moral Certainty,” Nigel Pleasants argues that killing an innocent, non-threatening person is wrong. It is, he argues, “a basic moral certainty.” He believes our basic moral certainties play the “same kind of foundational role as [our] basic empirical certaint[ies] do.” I believe this is mistaken. There is not “simply one kind of foundational role” that certainty plays. While I think Pleasants is right to affiliate his proposition with a Wittgensteinian form of certainty, he exposes himself to a tension that exists in On Certainty regarding how we acquire it: is certainty natural, is it social? In this paper, I present two ways in which we come to possess certainty: a bottom-up approach, where certainty is part of our instinctual predisposition, and a top-down approach, where certainty is acquired through positive reinforcement by family and culture

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Robert Greenleaf Brice
Northern Kentucky University

References found in this work

Philosophical Investigations.Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1953 - New York, NY, USA: Wiley-Blackwell. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe.
On Certainty (ed. Anscombe and von Wright).Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1969 - San Francisco: Harper Torchbooks. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright & Mel Bochner.
On Human Nature.Edward O. Wilson - 1978 - Harvard University Press.
Culture and value.Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1977 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by G. H. von Wright & Heikki Nyman.
The expanding circle: ethics and sociobiology.Peter Singer - 1981 - Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press.

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