The Wittgensteinian distinction between ethical value and the world is extremely sharp. First of all, the subject whose will is the bearer of good and evil is powerless with respect to the events of the world. For it the world is simply fate (T, 6.373). Secondly, the events of the world do not have any logical or physical relation to its ethical value. "How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher" (T, 6.432).

Wittgenstein thought that if we wish to speak of ethical value (happiness, meaning of life, right way of living), our sentences cannot be anything but nonsense. In this article I will examine this idea and the reasons we have for accepting it. On the one hand I shall argue that if we understand ethical judgments of value as 'absolute' in Wittgenstein's sense of this word, he was right in claiming that these judgments are nonsensical. On the other hand I want to show that the reason for their nonsensicality is not necessarily the one Wittgenstein himself appears to give in his Notebooks, Tractatus and "Lecture on Ethics" (henceforth L). These judgments should be seen as nonsensical even if we do not accept Wittgenstein's criterion of dividing sentences into those that make sense and those that do not.

I hope that my reflections show why Wittgenstein's effort to develop a transcendental ethic is unsuccessful. The basic difficulty is that he sees ethical value as too independent of the empirical world. This independence is so complete that he is driven to a position where the distinction between positive and negative value loses its relevance and meaning. Wittgenstein obviously had a need to find a view of life that satisfies him, but the one he found could not really be satisfactory.

By "relative value" Wittgenstein means value in relation to some standard. For instance, a work of art can be said to be valuable in the relative sense because it fulfills certain aesthetic principles, and a road can be right in the relative sense because it will take us to a desired destination. Judgments of relative value are in Wittgenstein's view mere statements of fact in disguise. For example, he thinks that the sentence "This is a good runner" simply means that the person in question is able to run a certain number of miles in a certain time. (L, 5-6)

Although Wittgenstein does not explicitly define his concept of absolute value, it is not far-fetched to claim that if relative value is value in relation to some standard, absolute value is not value in relation to any standard. Since absolute judgments of value are not (and cannot be) presented on the basis of any standards, they cannot be rational or irrational, reasonable or unreasonable. Ethical value judgments are essentially arational.

It might now be argued that while Wittgensteinian absolute value is not value in relation to any standard, it is itself a kind of standard in relation to which states of affairs can have value. For example, if happiness is valuable, then certain kinds of actions can perhaps be deemed rational because they are more conducive to achieving this end than some others. This interpretation would make the concept of absolute value similar to G.E. Moore's "good in itself".⁴

The major flaw of this interpretation is that whereas Moorean goodness is dependent on the content of the state of affairs in question, Wittgenstein thinks that states of affairs are absolutely good or absolutely evil independently of their contents. If good and evil are properties of the will of a philosophical subject that is the limit of the world, and if this will is physically and logically independent of the world, then there cannot be any physical or logical connections between the world and the ethical properties either. Absolute value is mystical in the sense that its existence or non-existence does not depend on how the world is but that it is (T, 6.44 and 6.522)⁵. Goods-in-themselves are different in this respect, because something's being good in itself is not completely independent of what it is like: states of affairs are good or bad because of some factual features. Moore thought that values supervene on facts. For example, he would not have said that life is happy or unhappy independently of what that life is like. And if Moore had seen two exactly identical works of art, he would not have admitted that one of them can be sublime while the other is banal. The crucial point is that Moorean goods-in-themselves are relative in the sense in which Wittgenstein uses the word 'relative'. According to Moorean principles we cannot claim that states of affairs are good or bad regardless of what kinds of value standards they fulfill.

Absolute judgments of value are similar to logical truths in the sense that their truth or falsity is not conditional. They are true or false (correct or incorrect, valid or invalid) regardless of the worldly facts. Take for instance the sentence "I am absolutely safe", which was for Wittgenstein a description of state of affairs that has absolute value (L, 8). Since to be absolutely safe is to be safe whatever happens, the truth or falsity of this sentence is unconditional, just as tautologies are true independently of what happens to be the case. Similarly to say that one is guilty in the absolute sense of this term is to say that one is guilty regardless of what is the case in the world (or life).⁶ But there is a difference between ethical judgments and tautologies which concerns the fact that the only possible truth value of tautologies is "true". It seems that ethical judgments can be either true or false depending on whether the transcendental subject wills good or evil, is happy or unhappy.⁷

Wittgenstein himself connects ethics with logic when he compares absolute goodness to an absolutely right road that everyone chooses with logical necessity after having become aware of it (L, 7). He qualifies this by saying that if we don't choose absolute goodness, we feel guilty. One might wonder how it is possible to feel guilty for not choosing absolute goodness if choosing it happens with logical necessity. Is it not the case that not choosing absolute goodness and feeling guilty about this excludes choosing it and being happy? So how can choosing absolute goodness happen with logical necessity? How can Wittgenstein compare absolute goodness to a road we choose with logical necessity? These questions bring us to the problematic essence of Wittgenstein's transcendental ethics.

Let us first notice that Wittgenstein uses the word 'guilty' in its absolute and not its psychological sense.⁸ Because quilt is an absolute evil, it is not dependent on contingent worldly facts. Wittgenstein makes an attempt to use both the expression "choosing absolute goodness" and the expression "feeling guilty" in their absolute or transcendental senses. This means that their applicability to real world situations is not at all conditional on what happens: one can choose absolute goodness independently of what one chooses empirically, and one can be guilty independently of what one has done. Absolute goodness and absolute quilt do not therefore exclude each other. Since absolute value judgments are necessarily arational, anything can be called absolutely good and anything can be seen as a cause of quilt. Here is the strangeness of Wittgenstein's way of understanding ethics.

While this interpretation seems to be correct, it leaves curiously unexplained the status of the sentences of logic in Wittgenstein's thought. If absolute judgments of value are nonsensical because of the complete independence of their truth values from worldly facts, then why does Wittgenstein nevertheless regard logical truths as merely devoid of sense and not nonsensical.⁹ Since the fact that a sentence does not have a truth value does not in itself appear to constitute for Wittgenstein a sufficient condition for its nonsensicality, one is left with the impression that he did not achieve full clarity on the reason for the non?existence of meaningful ethical sentences. (Actually Wittgenstein does not explicitly call ethical sentences nonsensical in the Tractatus but only refers to the impossibility of speaking of ethical value. However, in his lecture on ethics and in the conversations during the time he composed it Wittgenstein constantly refers to the nonsensicality of ethical value judgments in addition to saying that we cannot express absolute value judgments.¹⁰ )

2. Apart from saying that ethical value is outside of the world, Wittgenstein also writes quite unambiguously that ethical value is a property of the transcendental subject; and this subject is the limit of the world. (See for instance the remarks he makes on the 2nd of August 1916 in his Notebooks.) I think that the only way of reconciling these two points of view is to claim that if ethical value is at the limit of the world, it is outside of the world in the simple sense that it is not inside of it. It is not fact of any kind.

3. See for instance Rhees 1965, Redpath 1972, Hudson 1975, Canfield 1986, Johnston 1989, Barrett 1991, Linhe 1996, and Jacquette 1997.

4. Paul Johnston (1989, p. 75) interprets Wittgenstein's distinction in this way.

5. In his lecture on ethics Wittgenstein says that the existence of the world can be seen as a "miracle".

6. In T (5.621) Wittgenstein identifies the world with life.

7. In order to clarify the nature of ethical judgments I have to speak at this stage of my exposition as if sentences that do not have a sense at all could be true or false. Wittgenstein himself did so when he called tautologies true regardless of the fact that they are without sense.

8. Wittgenstein (L, 10) sees quilt as a miraculous experience whose description is nonsense.

9. There seem to be two alternative ways of removing this incoherence. First of all, Wittgenstein could have called tautologies nonsensical instead of saying that they merely lack sense. The second option would have been to say that judgments of absolute value are devoid of sense but not nonsensical.

10. The conversations are included in Waismann 1967.