Wittgenstein’s Ethical Individualism as a Foundation for Environmental Ethics ()
ABSTRACT
Caring for the environment has most often
taken the form of summits. The idea behind summits is that environmental
affairs are global, calling for collective responsibility as well as for
collective action. In this connection, responsibilities have generally been
shared among the various member countries. This is in a bid to reduce the level
of pollution and save our mother earth. In this work, we propose an alternative
way of acting, which is an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s ethical views which
rely mostly on transforming our view of who we are and how we relate to the
world. Our view runs against what we could call the “collective action
paradigm” which usually ends in tu quoque suspicion among the different
stakeholders. When the “save the world task” is shared among
countries, they become suspicious of each other, in such a way that a small
violation of the agreement by one country is considered as a good reason for
others to do the same. In this suspicion game, that sometimes takes other
forms, the real battle, saving the world, is completely forgotten. The ethical
views of Wittgenstein that we reconstruct here have two central elements, the
rejection of psychological subjectivity and the rejection of pragmatism in
ethical affairs that both consider nature as an instrument. Our final aim is
to show that if we consider the most important question of life—what is the
meaning of life?—and give an appropriate answer to it, then we can put an end
to “the darkness of our time1”, which consists in thinking that everything,
including nature, can be subjected to our domination.
Share and Cite:
Takov, P. and Djia, V. (2020) Wittgenstein’s Ethical Individualism as a Foundation for Environmental Ethics.
Open Journal of Philosophy,
10, 427-442. doi:
10.4236/ojpp.2020.104030.