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This excerpt is drawn from the book "The Idea of Justice" by Amartya Sen. It will be found in Chapter 1 "Reason and Objectivity" in Part 1 "The Demands of Justice".
"Ludwig Wittgenstein, one the great philosophers of our time, wrote in the Preface to his first major book on philosophy, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921: 'What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.' Wittgenstein would re-examine his views on speech and clarity in his later work, but it is a relief that, even as he was writing Tractatus, the great philosopher did not always follow his own exacting commandment. In a letter to Paul Engelmann, written in 1917, Wittgenstein made the wonderfully enigmatic remark: 'I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.' Really? One and the same thing --- being a smarter human being and a better person? (emphasis added)
I am of course aware of that modern transatlantic usage has drowned the distinction between 'being good' as a moral quality and 'being well' as a comment on person's health (no aches and pain, fine blood pressure, and so on), and I have long ceased worrying about the manifest immodesty of my friends, who, when asked how they are, reply with apparent self-praise, 'I am very good.' But Wittgenstein was not an American, and 1917 was well before the conquest of the world by vibrant American usage. When Wittgenstein said that being 'better' and being 'smarter' were 'one and the same thing', he must have been making a substantial assertion.
Underlying the point may be the recognition, in some form, that many acts of nastiness are committed by people who are deluded, in one way or another, about the subject. Lack of smartness can certainly be one source of the moral failing in good behaviour. Reflecting on what would really be smart thing to do can sometimes help one act better towards another. That this easily can be the case has been brought out very clearly by modern game theory. Among the prudential reasons for good behaviour may well be one's own gain from such behaviour. Indeed, there could be great gain for all members of a group by following rules of good behaviour which can help everyone. It is not particularly smart for a group of people to act in a way that ruins them all.
But maybe that is not what Wittgenstein meant. Being smarter can also give us the ability to think more clearly about our goals, objectives, and values. If self-interest is, ultimately, a primitive thought (despite the complexities just mentioned), clarity about the more sophisticated priorities and obligations that we would want to cherish and pursue would tend to depend on our power of reasoning. A person may have well-thought-out reasons other than promotion of personal gain for acting in a socially decent way.
Being smarter may help the understanding of not only of one's self-interest but also how the lives of others can be strongly affected by one's actions (emphasis added). Proponents of so-called 'Rational Choice Theory' (first proposed in economics and then enthusiastically adopted by a number of political and legal thinkers) have tried hard to make us accept the peculiar understanding that rational choice consists only in clever promotions of self-interest (which is how, oddly enough, 'rational choice' is defined by the proponents of brand-named 'rational choice theory'). Nevertheless, our heads have not all been colonized by that remarkably alienating belief. There is considerable resistance to the idea that it must be patently irrational--and stupid--to try to do anything for others except to the extent that doing good to others would enhance one's own well-being.
'What we owe to each other' is an important subject for intelligent reflection. That reflection can take us beyond the pursuit of very narrow view of self-interest, and we can even find that our own well-reflected goals demand that we cross the narrow boundaries of exclusive self-seeking altogether. There can also be cases in which we have reason to restrain the exclusive pursuit of our own goals (whether or not these goals are exclusively self-interested), because of following rules of decent behaviour that allow room for the pursuit of goals (whether or not self-interest) by other people who share the world with us.
Since there were precursors to brand-named 'rational choice theory' even in Wittgenstein's days, perhaps his point was that being smarter helps us think more clearly about our social concerns and responsibilities. It has been argued that some children carry out acts of brutality on other children, or animals, precisely because of their inability to appreciate adequately the nature and intensity of pains of others, and that this appreciation generally accompanies the intellectual development of maturity.
We cannot, of course, really be sure about what Wittgenstein meant. But there is certainly much evidence that he himself devoted a great deal of his time and intellect to thinking about his own responsibilities and commitments (emphasis added). The result was not invariably very intelligent or wise. Wittgenstein was absolutely determined to go to Vienna in 1938, just as Hitler was holding his triumphant procession through the city, despite his own Jewishness and his inability to be silent and diplomatic; he had to be restrained from going there by his colleagues in his Cambridge days. There is, however, much evidence from what we know from Wittgenstein's conversations that he did think that his intellectual capacity should definitely be used to make the world a better place (emphasis added). [This commitment relates to what his biographer Ray Monk calls 'the duty of genius' (Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, London:Vintage, 1991]
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