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9 L. & Critique 3 (1998)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq9 and id is 1 raw text is: Law and Critique Vo.IX no.1 [1998] A MEDITATION ON WITTGENSTEIN'S LECTURE ON ETHICS by LouIs E. W OLCHER* And once when I mentioned Goering's Recht ist das, was uns gefdllt, Wittgenstein said that even that is a kind of ethics. It is helpful in silencing objections to a certain attitude. And it should be considered along with other ethical judgments and discussions, in the anthropological study of ethical discussions which we may have to conduct. Rush Rhees, Some Developments in Wittgenstein's View of Ethics . This paper is a meditation on the text of a lecture Wittgenstein gave in 1929 to a meeting of the Heretics' Society in Cambridge.2 The typescript of the lecture, written in English and bearing no title, was published posthumously as A Lecture on Ethics.3 It is the only sustained exposition by Wittgenstein of his views on ethics in print, although numerous epigrams and fragments on ethics are scattered throughout his * Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, 1100 N.E. Campus Parkway, Seattle, Washington 98105, USA. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 1996 Critical Legal Conference at the University of East London. 1 Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 17-26, 25. Hermann Goering's epigram can be translated as Right is whatever pleases us. 2 The lecture was probably delivered on November 17, 1929. L. Wittgenstein, A Lecture on Ethics [hereinafter Lecture], in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, ed. J. Klagge and A. Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 36-44, 36 [hereinafter Philosophical Occasions 1. Although Wittgenstein was invited to speak by C.K. Ogden, the first English translator of the Tractatus, the members of the Heretics' Society made up a general audience that had no particular interest or training in philosophy, ibid. Ray Monk asserts that the Heretics were less elitist and more concerned with science than another Cambridge discussion group, the Apostles; he also notes that the Heretics had previously been addressed by such luminaries as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf. R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin), 276. 3 The typescript, first published in Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 3-12, was reprinted in Philosophical Occasions, supra n.2, at 36-44.