Even today, quite a few still believe that questions of morality are primarily a matter for theology. Yet it is part of modernity's self-image that religion is something private and cannot be used to justify morality—at least in theory. This gives rise to contradictions that are currently ignited by issues such as abortion, surrogate motherhood, cloning, neuroethics, transhumanism, and voluntary euthanasia.
The politicization of Islam has contributed to further social uncertainty, whereby it is often forgotten that the idea of an areligious justification of morality has a long tradition in Europe. Aristotle wrote the Nicomachean Ethics centuries before the New Testament.
But let's take a leap into the modern age: the crisis of modern moral theory is a direct consequence of the triumph of modern anti-metaphysical currents, which appeared at the beginning of the 20th century in the form of various schools of thought and dominated Western philosophy from then on.
The crisis of modern moral theory is thus a crisis of its justification. I would like to illustrate the problem of the justification of modern moral theory by outlining two different solutions. They are personified by two philosophical antipodes. On the one hand, there is the most influential anti-metaphysical philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who rejected a normative moral theory and possessed inclinations towards mysticism. On the other hand, there is one of the most underestimated theorists of the 20th century, the anti-metaphysical Viennese philosopher of science Victor Kraft (1880-1975), who is nowadays only known to a few specialists. Despite maintaining the modern empiricist perspective, Kraft outlined a normative moral theory and thus became the forerunner of currently influential cognitive schools.
The Scientific Foundation of Philosophy: The Vienna Circle
In the 1920s, a large circle of philosophers and scientists formed in Vienna around the physicist and philosopher Moritz Schlick (1882-1936). Victor Kraft was a member of this circle, which later became world-famous under the name “Vienna Circle”. The best-known thinkers of the Vienna Circle today, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994), did not in fact “officially” belong to the circle, but are often included for simplicity’s sake, a simplification which Popper vehemently opposed on several occasions. Victor Kraft was also to be found on the fringes of the circle rather than at its center, which was formed by men such as Schlick, Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and Otto Neurath (1882-1945). The philosophers of the Vienna Circle did not agree on many individual issues, but they were nevertheless united by a common basic position on the theory of science: the rejection of “metaphysics”.
What is metaphysics? Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that tries to answer the most basic questions about reality. It asks things like: How can I know that I have knowledge of something? Do we have free will? What is a truly moral behavior? What’s the essence of being human? Or, in Kant’s words: “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for? What is man?” In simple terms, metaphysics is about understanding the deep structure of the world—beyond what science can directly observe. And this—asking questions beyond those addressed by hard sciences like physics—is what irked Wittgenstein and his fellow philosophers associated with the Vienna circle.
In contrast to other schools of philosophy, the Vienna Circle saw its role model exclusively in the natural sciences. Only in the natural sciences, they claimed, was there precise knowledge. The so-called physicalism of the Vienna Circle stated that all scientific statements must be traced back to what its members saw as the language of physics, i.e. to a uniform scientific language that recorded empirically verifiable observations. Metaphysics and unverifiable speculations were rejected as “conceptual poetry”. But since our only means of making falsifiable/verifiable statements is our language, the analysis of language and the verification/falsification of statements through observation came to the fore. Concepts that could not be expressed in terms of the physical or observable were considered philosophically irrelevant. Rudolf Carnap's programmatic paper “The Logical Structure of the World: Pseudoproblems in Philosophy” (1928) sought to expose traditional problems of metaphysics, including such time-honored subjects as the reality of the external world, the substance of the soul and freedom of will, as, indeed, pseudo-problems created by the improper use of language.
In order to be credible as a science, philosophy should henceforth be practiced like a natural science—an attitude that was no small provocation for many contemporaries. Influential Catholic institutions in Austria, in particular, vehemently opposed the Vienna Circle. For them, metaphysics, founded by Aristotle, was not only regarded as the basic discipline of philosophy, but also as the basic science of theology. Without metaphysics, theology could no longer claim to be scientific. The central thinker of the Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas, who was canonized in 1323, was an Aristotelian and metaphysician. In 1879, in the encyclical Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo XIII elevated Thomism to the status of the preferred philosophical method of Catholic theology. The fact that many thinkers of the Vienna Circle advocated a reform of sexual criminal law and some leaned towards the social democracy of “red Vienna” was an additional scandal. Then there was the fact that most members of the circle were Jews.
The only members of the Vienna Circle who had remained in Vienna and had not fled from the Nazis, Victor Kraft and his student Béla Juhos, still clearly felt the effects of anti-positivist resentment—resentment against “scientific” philosophy—in the 1950s. The Austrian Minister of Education at the time, Heinrich Drimmel, was a fanatic. He publicly declared that for him positivism and communism were one and the same. By his own admission, he also considered neo-positivism to be just as “corrosive” as National Socialism. Notwithstanding Drimmel's anti-fascist commitments, former National Socialists, such as the notorious Viennese historian Taras von Borodajkewycz (1902-1984), who had good contacts with the Church, the Nazi regime and later the ÖVP (The Austrian People’s Party), returned to academic positions under Drimmel's patronage.
The Vienna Circle’s radical orientation towards the natural sciences was unusual in Germany and Austria (although there had been precursor movements). Competing contemporary schools of philosophy saw no role model in the natural sciences and their methods. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) wrote the infamous curse: “Science does not think”. The question of which model of rationality philosophical thought should follow—the scientific-logical or the humanistic-hermeneutic—is still a point of contention among philosophical currents that bitterly ignore each other.
If, as the logical positivists claim, only two types of scientific propositions exist, namely statements of fact and logical-mathematical propositions, all other propositions must be labeled as unscientific. Many sciences, however, cannot by their nature consist only of the above two types of propositions, which is especially true of all kinds of cultural sciences. Cultural sciences are sciences that do not study nature, but what has been created by humans, i.e. culture, e.g. the arts, history or law. The physicalist demand of the logical positivists amounts to the destruction, or at least the devaluation, of those sciences (the fact that a discipline such as German philology cannot be pursued with a natural-scientific methodology had been discussed long before the Vienna Circle).
The required physicalism would be most dramatic for ethics, i.e. for moral philosophy: since moral philosophy would have to refrain from making any judgmental statements, its only remaining task would be the precise description and explication of the different moral systems of different peoples. It would descend to mere moral history. A reasonable discussion about the justification of abortion—to name just one example—would no longer be possible, as this would necessarily have to include evaluative statements, statements which, according to logical positivism, are unscientific as they cannot be verified/falsified.
A reasonable discussion about the justification of abortion—to name just one example—would no longer be possible, as this would necessarily have to include evaluative statements, which are unscientific as they cannot be verified/falsified.
Consequently, statements of right and wrong are not capable of truth: they require moral judgement, which cannot be legitimized by the verification of facts. Only private approval or disapproval is possible. Wittgenstein was aware of the dramatic consequences of his position. His most famous sentence is “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, a postulate that has long sounded harmless and trivial due to its inflationary use in feuilletonism, which hardly betrays anything of its original irreconcilable radicalism.
Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” has become trivial due to its inflationary use in feuilletonism, which hardly betrays anything of its original irreconcilable radicalism.
Wittgenstein did not invent radical moral skepticism; there were already radical value skeptics and moral relativists in antiquity (Protagoras, Gorgias, Pyrrhon, Diogenes). Later Nietzsche's groundbreaking ideas provided powerful impulses and anticipated many things. However, Nietzsche responded to the nihilism he diagnosed with a positive vision, i.e. with his morality of nobility. A no-go for the Viennese. Nevertheless the Viennese circle treated the creator of Zarathustra conspicuously leniently. Hardly a word about Nietzsche has come down to us from Wittgenstein. What they both have in common is that—without having taken academic classes in philosophy—they mark a profound turning point in the history of thought.
Politically, modern empiricism found itself in an absurd situation due to its value skepticism: as the political situation in Austria became increasingly precarious and the agitation of the Nazi press intensified, going so far as to justify the murder of Moritz Schlick in 1938, the “scientific world view” was attacked from all sides, for removing the scientific basis for any political criticism and reducing it to the status of private pronouncements. With a few exceptions, all members of the Vienna Circle fled the country before the National Socialist seizure of power, primarily to the Anglo-American cultural area. This contributed to neo-empiricism and its subsequent schools becoming the leading academic philosophy worldwide.
