Ethics and the Problem of Value in the Vienna Circle

Abstract

It is known that problems of ethics and the philosophy of value (understood as theoretical problems) played a small or peripheral role in the Vienna Circle: according to participants like Viktor Kraft and Heinrich Neider, they did not constitute topics in the discussions proper (cf. Kraft 1973, Haller and Rutte 1977). On the other hand, something has been rediscovered which had been repressed for a while in the post-war empiricist, analytical philosophy, or had simply not been talked about, and which, probably due to the ‘positivism-dispute’ of the mid-’60’s, the younger generation did not even notice¹—namely that, to different degrees and according to their individual temperament, most members of the Vienna Circle were politically engaged for social reform, even zealously so, and that all of them felt themselves to be free-thinkers and advocates of the enlightenment who intended to educate the broader population (as was recently documented in great detail by Friedrich Stadler (1982b)). So there seems to be a correspondence of sorts (perhaps even of a compensatory nature) between the strict rejection of objective values and the objective justification of values, shared by all thinkers of this group, and their forceful declamatory moral and political will, their urge to promote the liberation and increased happiness of humanity. Just this mixture of destruction and engagement would appear to have been particularly explosive for outsiders and opponents of the group.

Notes

First published as ‘Ethik und Werturteilsproblematik im Wiener Kreis’ in Von Bolzano zu Wittgenstein. Zur Tradition der österreichischen Philosophie, Hrsg. J. C. Nyiri, Schriftenreihe der Wittgenstein-Gesellschaft Bd. 12, Teil 2, © 1986, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, Wien, pp. 162–172. Translated with kind permission of Verlag Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky and the author by T. E. Uebel.