youtu.be/TDwMQqLfdjg
Hereās what I think. Wās non-cognitivist approach actually re-grounded ethics into an ordinary-language based philosophy, thereby saving ethics from the monolithic tyranny of systems like kantianism and Christianity.
Technically his concern was with logical consistency and meaningfulness, so his dispute is with cognitive objectivists who claim that ethical statements are ātruth-aptāā¦ so that one might say that the statement āhe is a bad personā is a statement of fact just like āthe earth orbits the sunā.
What he did, (ludwig) wittingly or not, was demolish all prior moral systems from virtue-ethics to deontology to consequentialism, which, incidentally, are anachronisms of ancient ruling-class philosophy all the way back to Aristotle.
W was an ethical revolutionary who with comrade Rosa Lichtenstein, redefined morality and put it back into the environment of everyday, ordinary communal language, free of the metaphysical nonsense put together by traditional philosophers and theologians. Right. For Plato and Aristotle the āgood manā was the man who recognized the objectivity of āvirtueāā¦ but the idea of āvirtueā was already laden with preconceived notions of what it meant for different people; virtue for the aristocrat was to ruleā¦ for a citizen, the modest role of obedience to the state and an acceptance of oneās ālotā in society. You see where this is going. With Kant, something similar; a priori āimperativesā that must be followed for one to be moral.
The first thing the working classes need to be freed from are these institutions and ways of thinking about morality, so that the tyranny of the system can be defeated. Really, the whole vein from Plato to modern protestantism is laden with such restrictions.
In a word, W gave us courage to NOT behave ourselves, and to NOT be afraid of defying the hegemonic authority of the ruling-classes.
I donāt think he knew he did this, tho. He didnāt think of himself as a revolutionary, although his work absolutely strengthened the revolutionary cause, if only by accident.
Theā¦ uh, moral of the story, is that it is up to the working classes to change and redefine their way of life so that they may once again ground morality in ordinary-language and collective activity free of the class based antagonisms that traditional philosophy had created - beginning with those idiots in ancient Greece who thought they were hot shit and could order everybody around.