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Ethics — the values a language game holds
Reality is disclosed in language. A subject’s values are not a separate faculty laid over that disclosure but the shape it takes when the subject is read in relation to the other: how an actor — a subject, or a whole community — labels, structures and acts is already a stance toward what it shares its world with. Ethics reads that stance off the language game. It does not measure the values against a standard set outside the game, because there is no seat outside from which such a standard could be issued; it reads what the actor’s values are, enacted in the game the actor plays.
This is the outward turn of belonging. The subject always already belongs — never a blank slate, never alone — and ethics is what that belonging looks like turned toward the other: the subject’s relation with, and attitude toward, those it shares its world with. Where epistemology reads the convergence by which we come to know in common, ethics reads the values by which we stand in relation. It is one operation — reading the values a game holds — run at two scales: the actor’s own game, and the wider game a community of actors co-inhabits. Where each of these turns up across philosophy, and where SPLectrum carries it, is read across the field in close affinity.
Reading the values
Ethics is descriptive first. Give an actor and the language game it plays, and the values can be read off: not as rules the actor ought to follow, but as the stance its game already enacts toward the other. The actor may be a single subject or a whole community — wherever there is an actor and a language game, there are values to read. Read this way, the same configuration of values stands differently depending on the frame. From the inside, within the actor’s own game, the values may be wholly coherent — they are what the game is built to hold. From outside, within another’s game, the very same configuration may not hold at all. Neither reading is the true one over the other’s head; there is no view from nowhere here any more than anywhere else. The values are what they are for a game, and the frame is part of what is read.
A reading is always made from somewhere — from a language context, never from nowhere — and that does not make it arbitrary, because it has a reference point. The reference is the common understanding between the reading context and the game being read: the shared base that makes the reading possible at all. It is not the reader’s own game taken whole — to read another’s values against the full measure of one’s own is to mistake one game for the standard — and it is not a view from nowhere, because there is none. So a reading is sound where it stays anchored in what is genuinely common between the two games, and unsound where it imports the reader’s non-shared content as though it were shared. The frame is part of what is read; the common frame is what the reading is judged against.
The same reading, at the scale of the common
Because we always already belong, the lone actor read in isolation is the limiting case, not the ordinary one. The ordinary case is members of a common community — actors who share enough language to co-inhabit a wider game — and the same reading runs there too. The shared community game holds its own values, read off it exactly as the single actor’s are read off theirs. Nothing new is added; it is the one operation at a wider scale.
What that scale brings out is what normative names. Read off the common game, the values are not optional for those who play it: they are mandatory for members. And the bindingness is nothing imported — no force laid on the description from outside. It is internal, the same shape as word-meaning: one is not a speaker of a language without converging on its words, and one is not a member of a community without holding the values its game is built on. Membership is constituted by holding them. So the values bind for members and are simply absent for non-members — real bindingness, with no view from nowhere behind it, normative in the only sense the framework has: description at the scale of the common, not description with force added.
Multi-membership is the ordinary condition. A member is rarely caught in a single game — one belongs to a religion and a country at once, to a family and a profession — and the games can hold values that collide. Where they do, an override relation runs between the wider game and the narrower, and a member lives inside that relation. That collisions arise, and that they fall to be settled between the games a member co-inhabits, is squarely within ethics’ concern — it is part of what reading the values at the common scale surfaces. How a given collision resolves — which game holds where, on what footing one overrides another — is worked inside the field, not fixed here; this page bounds the territory rather than surveying it.
Surfacing the collisions is as far as ethics reaches. Managing them — the standing arrangement that settles which game holds where, across the many members at once — is no longer a reading of values but the coexistence of communities, which is the work of the next pillar. Ethics reads the values and marks where the games a member is caught in pull against each other; it does not build the apparatus that would settle the pull from above.
See also: The core values and the metaphysics they disclose · Politics — the dynamic of coexistence — where the surfaced collisions are lived out · Epistemology — learning and knowing · Aesthetics — the dynamics of meaning · Ethics (close affinity) — where this account is read across the field