Moore, George Edward [addendum]
G. E. Moore's ethical writings, especially Principia Ethica of 1903, have long been regarded as philosophically revolutionary. In fact, Moore shared his main ethical views—nonnaturalism in metaethics and ideal consequentialism in normative ethics—with such late-nineteenth-century writers as Henry Sidgwick and Hastings Rashdall. But Moore defended these views with unusual vigor and so had a disproportionate influence on later moral philosophy.
Moore's nonnaturalism comprised two main theses. One was the realist thesis that moral judgments are objectively true or false; the other was the autonomy-of-ethics thesis that moral judgments are sui generis, neither reducible to nor derivable from nonmoral judgments such as scientific or metaphysical ones. Our knowledge of them must therefore derive from intuitive judgments of self-evidence.
Moore did not argue extensively for realism. Like others of his era, he took it largely for granted. But his argument for the autonomy of ethics has come to be known as the "open-question argument." If goodness were identical to pleasure, the claim that pleasure is good would be equivalent to the empty statement that pleasure is pleasure, which it plainly is not. Rather, whether pleasure is good is always an open question. Since this argument generalizes to all nonmoral properties, goodness cannot be identical to any such property. Some later philosophers challenged this argument against the "naturalistic fallacy"; others took it to support antirealist conclusions quite different from Moore's. But it remains a central argument for the irreducibility of moral claims.
Though these main theses were familiar, Moore did introduce two innovations. One was his view that the central irreducible moral property is good rather than ought or right; the other was that the intrinsic goodness can depend only on its intrinsic properties, apart from any relations to other states. It follows that to judge whether a given state is good, we must imagine a world containing only that state and ask whether such a world is good.
Moore's ideal consequentialism likewise comprised two theses. One was that right acts always produce the most good. The other was that there is a plurality of goods, all ideal in the sense that their being good does not depend on people's attitudes to them. (Moore thought that the naturalistic fallacy led philosophers to identify goodness with some one natural property and so to miss this plurality.) In Principia Ethica he held that one intrinsic good is beauty apart from any consciousness of it; another is vicious people's deserved pain. But the chief goods in this work were the admiring contemplation of beauty and personal love, which for Moore involved the admiring contemplation of others' good qualities. In characterizing both goods, he used his "principle of organic unities," according to which the value of a whole need not equal the sum of the values of its parts. Beauty on its own has little value, and the contemplation of merely imagined beauty just moderate value, but the contemplation of real beauty has great value, more than the sum of the values of those components.
Principia Ethica was written with a self-confidence bordering on arrogance. Moore thought most previous moral philosophers had made crude conceptual errors, and that once those were exposed, the moral truth would be self-evident to all. This tone helped make his presentation of nonnaturalism the canonical one. As a result, twentieth-century metaethics can be seen as a sequence of reactions to his views. His substantive views about the good received less attention, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, interest has revived in his claims about, for example, appropriate attitudes and organic unities. His moral philosophy is again alive as a whole.
Ethics, History Of; Good, The; Intrinsic Value; Intuitionism, Ethical.
Bibliography
Works by Moore
Principia Ethica. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1903.
"The Conception of Intrinsic Value." In his Philosophical Studies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1912.
The Elements of Ethics, edited by Tom Regan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
Works on Moore
Baldwin, Thomas. G. E. Moore. London: Routledge, 1990. See especially chaps. 3–4.
Frankena, William K. "The Naturalistic Fallacy." Mind 48 (1939): 464–477.
Hurka, Thomas. "Moore in the Middle." Ethics 113 (2003): 599–628.
Hutchinson, Brian. G. E. Moore's Ethical Theory: Resistance and Reconciliation. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Regan, Donald H. "How to Be a Moorean." Ethics 113 (2003): 651–677.
Regan, Tom. Bloomsbury's Prophet: G. E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.
Shaver, Robert. "Principia Then and Now." Utilitas 15 (2003): 261–278.
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