Abstract

In this paper, I consider the debate between moral individualists and those whose moral philosophy is influenced by Wittgenstein, and in particular the extent to which its participants appear to be talking past one another. In the hope of illuminating, and perhaps alleviating, this mutual incomprehensibility, I demonstrate the pervasive reliance of these Wittgensteinian opponents of moral individualism upon the moral testimony of others, and the ways in which that reliance reflects a central element of the commitment to which that testimony testifies—the moral significance of being human. I argue that this internal relation between the form and the content of these anti-individualist texts is what makes it so difficult for their opponents to grasp their significance, and at the same time renders them vulnerable to the charge of moralism.