In TLP 6.421, does Wittgenstein write "Ethics is transcendent" or "Ethics is transcendental"?
What does Wittgenstein mean by "Ethics is transcendental"? (TLP 6.421)
Why are ethics transcendental rather than subjective or objective?
Why is conscience drawn to a transcendent source of ethics? — RussellA
In context, the passage in question is this:
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.
6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.
Propositions cannot express anything higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and æsthetics are one.)
'If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental'. Why is it accidental? Because it is contingent. It happens to be the case. Whereas ethics is a matter of necessity. Ethical maxims express what one ought to do or must do. They are maxims, irrespective of happening or being-so. Ethics is not an object of knowledge in the way physical facts are, but rather, it is something presupposed in our engagement with the world—it is "beyond" the realm of empirical description. Wittgenstein’s use of 'transcendental' is Kantian in this sense.
The final remark—“Ethics and aesthetics are one”— suggests that both ethics and aesthetics concern a way of seeing the world rather than a set of factual claims about it. They both belong to the domain of the transcendental, shaping our perspective but not adding to the sum total of facts. Ethics is not another fact within the world but something beyond 'happening and being-so' —hence why it cannot be stated propositionally. Instead, it is something lived, shown, or experienced.
As to why animals do not have a conscience - I don't want to express it as if it were a lack or a fault. But animals can't envisage that things could be other than what they are. The capacity to grasp what could be, might be, or should be, is what distinguishes humans from other species. It is also the source of our sense of separateness from nature.
P1 Assume that within nature there is an objective judgment of good or evil.
P2 Humans are part of nature.
P3 Each individual's judgment as to what is good or evil is particular to them and is subjective.
C1 As within nature there is an objective judgement of good and evil, yet only subjective judgments of what is good or evil within individual humans, humans are not aware of the objective judgment of good and evil. — RussellA
I'm afraid the attitude that you're describing is very close to that of a psychopathology. There's no reason for any action, other than what makes sense
to me. Nature may have reasons, but there's no way you or I can know what they are.
Evidently Wayfarer has found some sort of objective truth in the world as well as inside of his own brain. — Arcane Sandwich
I question that the only criterion of truth is what can be considered 'objective'. I've written an off-site essay on that question,
Scientific Objectivity and Philosophical Detachment, which is very hard to summarise down to a forum post. But suffice to say that it sees
philosophical detachment as superior to scientific objectivity, because it doesn't pre-suppose the division between knower and known that characterises modern thought. The culmination of philosophical detachment is seeing beyond the ego-logical perspective, an insight outside the domain of self-and-other, subject and object, as understood in the various schools of the perennial philosophies.