Charles Taylor’s Belief Of Language Constituting Ethics

Due to the rapid development of modern science,western analytic philosophy has risen up and become powerful,which makes naturalism prevailing.A far-reaching thinking pattern,therefore,comes into being.Influenced by it,philosophy of language focuses on linguistic analysis based on modern mathematical logic,while moral philosophy attempts to create a scientific ethics rooted in naturalism.Arguing against the tide,Taylor criticizes the inadequacy of empirical science in clarifying the nature of language,moral motivation and behavior,and turns to history for inspiration to understand the nature of language and explore the origin of ethics.Thus,Taylor reconstructs the “Designative and Constitutive View” of language put forward by philosophers in the Romantic period,and emphasizes the ability of language to generate and construct ethics——the most significant part of human meaning.The main purpose of this thesis is to explore and understand Taylor’s belief of “language constituting ethics”.The dissertation is structured by three questions ——“Why can language constitute ethics?”,“How can language constitute ethics?” and “What kind of ethics can language constitute?” To answer these questions,this thesis,following a “cause-process-effect” logic,adopts a cross-disciplinary approach which straddles “Philosophy of language”,“Ethics”,and“Ontology”.By restating Taylor’s description of how language constructs “human meaning” and gets an ontological positon,this paper explores the belief that language constitutes ethics from a moral and philosophical perspective.In the debate with ethical naturalism,Taylor aims at eliminating naturalistic influence on ethics by challenging the ontological deficiency of naturalism from a phenomenological perspective,which concerns daily moral behavior.However,Taylor’s moral ontology is stuck in clarifying what daily moral behavior is committed to ontologically.Because of this,Taylor turns to language ontology in an attempt to gain new support.Language runs through Taylor’s moral philosophy.First,Taylor gives language an ontological stance and then confirms it to be “loose” ontologically.Language ontology,therefore,has no need to provide a metaphysical base for moral phenomena.Taylor in turn tries to reconcile the description of moral phenomena with the explanation of “Strong Evaluation”.Under this condition,language can bridge the gap between moral ontology and moral phenomenology,and become what Taylor calls “a richer ontology”.Meanwhile,Taylor argues that “Self” relies on language to find the position of “Super-good” in order to determine its own sense of direction in moral space.These two aspects together answer the question “Why can language constitute ethics”.Secondly,Taylor uses “Call-response” structure to outline how the three evolution stages“Ritual-Myth-Theory” of language bring us the new ethical feelings and meaning,which demonstrates semantically Taylor’s belief of “language constituting ethics”.Besides,because of the fact that the concept “Footing” has strong similarities with “Ethical relation”,Taylor expounds the ability of language to create interpersonal relationship in the private space from the prospect of“how to do things with words”.For the public space,Taylor analyses the historic process during which “Ritual”,as a special form of language,reconstructs and repairs the relationship between human beings,society and Universe and thus answers the question of how language constructs ethics in a pragmatic dimension.Thirdly,Taylor’s ontology is centered by the whole language,which determines his holistic stance on ethical issues.Taylor argues that moral sense of human beings(such as rightness and wrongness of actions)usually co-exists,so ethical concepts have interwoven to set up ethical holism on the plane frame,and then Taylor claims that normal things in reality may rise up to human moral sense by means of metaphor,which forms ethical holism on the space frame.According to Taylor,it is the language as a whole that constructs ethical holism.From the view of holism,Taylor’s ethics focuses on “Harmony” and is characterized by weakening differences and avoiding realistic conflicts,which leads to a gap between“Knowing”(ethical views)and “Doing”(ethical conduct).Taylor’s belief of “language constituting ethics” reveals the irrationality of the scientific naturalistic approach in interpreting the nature of language and moral life,and shows that language is of great importance to generate and construct ethical meaning and relations for human beings.On the one hand,Taylor’s belief helps ethics shake off the influence of naturalism,on the other hand,it opens up a new research paradigm combining linguistic philosophy with the analysis of moral phenomena,and at the same time,it contributes a new perspective for the study of Taylor.