Wittgenstein’s Ethical Individualism as a Foundation for Environmental Ethics

Caring for the environment has most often taken the form of summits. The idea behind summits is that environmental affairs are global, calling for collective responsibility as well as for collective action. In this connection, responsibilities have generally been shared among the various member countries. This is in a bid to reduce the level of pollution and save our mother earth. In this work, we propose an alternative way of acting, which is an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s ethical views which rely mostly on transforming our view of who we are and how we relate to the world. Our view runs against what we could call the “collective action paradigm” which usually ends in tu quoque suspicion among the different stakeholders. When the “save the world task” is shared among countries, they become suspicious of each other, in such a way that a small violation of the agreement by one country is considered as a good reason for others to do the same. In this suspicion game, that sometimes takes other forms, the real battle, saving the world, is completely forgotten. The ethical views of Wittgenstein that we reconstruct here have two central elements, the rejection of psychological subjectivity and the rejection of pragmatism in ethical affairs that both consider nature as an instrument. Our final aim is to show that if we consider the most important question of life—what is the meaning of life?—and give an appropriate answer to it, then we can put an end to “the darkness of our time1”, which consists in thinking that everything, including nature, can be subjected to our domination.