Of Dictators and Greengrocers: On the Repressive Grammar of Values-Discourse

The present contribution questions the seemingly self-evident idea that morality is, most basically, about values and valuation. Values are indeed pervasive in moral life, but they are not original phenomena; rather, they are repressive responses to a sense of good and evil beyond values. This 'beyond' relates, I argue, to the encounter between individual human beings, and values function to manage and mask the inescapability and difficulty of this encounter, with its unbearable either-or of openness to, or refusal of, the other; of love or destructiveness. Various manifestations of the inherently problematic character of values-thinking are examined, e.g. its inextricable intertwinement with social pressure, moralism, and egocentric concern. I also discuss the relation of shared 'moral languages' to moral understanding, and the way in which a Wittgensteinian, strictly descriptive ethics can nonetheless challenge not only theories of morality, but our moral life itself.