Chapter 9 - Truth in Ethics and Intercultural Understanding: Cora Diamond on a Dispute between Bernard Williams and David Wiggins

Summary

One of the main objectives of this chapter is to make explicit Cora Diamond’s approach to ethics, as it is developed in Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics (Diamond 2019). I suggest that this approach could work as a guide to questions of intercultural understanding. One central idea is that the Wittgensteinian philosopher, here embodied by Diamond, is not, contrary to what is often assumed, an ethical and cultural relativist. In Diamond’s view, the pluralism of language games presented in the Philosophical Investigations does not imply a view of incommensurable language games, moral language games in particular, in human cultures.

Neither Williams’ Nietzschean Pluralism nor Wiggins’ Cognitivism: A Framework and an Example

In Chapter 7 of her book Truth in Ethics: Williams and Wiggins, Diamond closely examines a debate on truth and objectivity in ethics between Bernard Williams and David Wiggins. The debate occurred in the mid-1990s in the journal Ratio. Diamond’s own view on ethics, influenced by Wittgenstein and Anscombe, leads her to be critical of both Wiggins’ moral cognitivism and Williams’ Nietzschean pluralism. She has no doubts, though, that she is closer to Wiggins’ position than to Williams’. She devotes significant attention to one particular example used in the Williams–Wiggins dispute: slavery, or the thought that ‘slavery is unjust and insupportable’ as it was suggested in the nineteenth-century debate on slavery in the United States. The example illustrates an idea of Wiggins which Diamond herself wants to adopt: the idea that in some cases, given the reasons available to think that p, there is nothing else to think but that p:

I began […] with David Wiggins’ remark that there is an aspect in which elementary arithmetic and first-order morality may be compared: in both there are judgements about which we can say ‘There is nothing else to think but that so and so’; among his examples were ‘7+5=12’ and ‘Slavery is wrong’. The comparison is central in Wiggins’ view of the kind of objectivity that moral judgements […] do have. (Diamond 2019, 268) I have two remarks about this example. First: as part of her analysis of the Wiggins–Williams debate, Diamond eventually considers both the abolitionist and the pro-slavery sides of the debate in nineteenth-century America.