Is relativism the limit of my world?

Abstract

In his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein put ethics among the things that our language cannot grasp. Later, in the Philosophical Investigations he extended the possibilities of meaning, which resulted in some speculations about an alternative way to grasp or to express ethical judgements. If this is possible, then some questions arise: Does this imply a Metaethical Cognitivism? If the conditions of expression in the language have been relativized, does this imply an ethical relativism or, even, a type of subjectivism? In this article, I will try to argue first against those who defend an ethical relativism using Wittgenstein´s later philosophy and, after this, I will defend that the opponents of ethical relativism that use the Philosophical Investigations as a weapon in their arguments, are also wrong. My suggestion is that there is no prove in that book that shows that Wittgenstein opened the possibility for language to express the “Superior” [Höheres], and that the application of the concepts he introduced will not let us defend an ethical relativism, but some sort of epistemic relativism that could be amplified or used by Metaethics.