G(eorge) E(dward) Moore

Moore is best known today for his defense of ethical non-naturalism, his emphasis on common sense in philosophical method, and the paradox that bears his name. Moore's essays are known for his clear, circumspect writing style, and for his methodical and patient approach to philosophical problems. Moore thought Thales' reasoning was one of the few historical examples of philosophical inquiry resulting in practical advances. Moore died on October 24, 1958 and was interred in the Burial Ground of Parish of the Ascension, Cambridge, England. The poet Nicholas Moore and the composer Timothy Moore were his sons. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (1979).

Ethics

Moore is also well-known for the so-called "open question argument," which is contained in his (also greatly influential) Principia Ethica. The Principia is one of the main inspirations of the movement against ethical naturalism (see ethical non-naturalism) and is partly responsible for the twentieth-century concern with meta-ethics.

The naturalistic fallacy

Moore charged that most other philosophers who worked in ethics had made a mistake he called the "Naturalistic fallacy". The business of ethics, Moore agreed, is to discover the qualities that make things good. With this project Moore has no quarrel. Moore regards this as a serious confusion. But this does not mean, Moore wants to insist, that we can define value in terms of pleasure.

Open question argument

Moore's argument for the indefinability of “good” (and thus for the fallaciousness of the “naturalistic fallacy”) is often called the Open Question Argument; According to Moore, these questions are open and these statements are significant; Moore concludes from this that any analysis of value is bound to fail. Critics of Moore's arguments sometimes claim that he is appealing to general puzzles concerning analysis (cf. Other responses appeal to the Fregean distinction between sense and reference, allowing that value concepts are special and sui generis, but insisting that value properties are nothing but natural properties (this strategy is similar to that taken by non-reductive materialists in philosophy of mind).

Good as indefinable

Moore contended that goodness cannot be analyzed in terms of any other property.

Good as a non-natural property

In addition to categorizing "good" as indefinable, Moore also emphasized that it is a non-natural property.

Moral knowledge

Moore argued that once arguments based on the naturalistic fallacy had been discarded, questions of intrinsic goodness could only be settled by appeal to what he (following Sidgwick) called "moral intuitions:" self-evident propositions which recommend themselves to moral reflection, but which are not susceptible to either direct proof or disproof (PE § 45). Moore, however, wished to distinguish his view from the views usually described as "Intuitionist" when Principia Ethica was written:

In order to express the fact that ethical propositions of my first class [propositions about what is good as an end in itself] are incapable of proof or disproof, I have sometimes followed Sidgwick's usage in calling them ‘Intuitions.’ But I beg that it may be noticed that I am not an ‘Intuitionist,’ in the ordinary sense of the term. Moore, Principia Ethica, Preface ¶ 5

Moore distinguished his view from the view of deontological intuitionists, who held that "intuitions" could determine questions about what actions are right or required by duty. Moore, as a consequentialist, argued that "duties" and moral rules could be determined by investigating the effects of particular actions or kinds of actions (PE § 89), and so were matters for empirical investigation rather than direct objects of intuition (PE § 90). On Moore's view, "intuitions" revealed not the rightness or wrongness of specific actions, but only what things were good in themselves, as ends to be pursued.

Proof of an external world

One of the most important parts of Moore's philosophical development was his break from the idealism that dominated British philosophy (as represented in the works of his former teachers F. In his 1925 essay "A Defence of Common Sense" he argued against idealism and skepticism toward the external world on the grounds that they could not give reasons to accept their metaphysical premises that were more plausible than the reasons we have to accept the common sense claims about our knowledge of the world that skeptics and idealists must deny. He famously put the point into dramatic relief with his 1939 essay "Proof of an External World", in which he gave a common sense argument against skepticism by raising his right hand and saying "Here is one hand," and then raising his left and saying "And here is another," then concluding that there are at least two external objects in the world, and therefore that he knows (by this argument) that an external world exists. Not surprisingly, not everyone inclined to skeptical doubts found Moore's method of argument entirely convincing; Moore, however, defends his argument on the grounds that skeptical arguments seem invariably to require an appeal to "philosophical intuitions" that we have considerably less reason to accept than we have for the common sense claims that they supposedly refute. (In addition to fueling Moore's own work, the "Here is one hand" argument also deeply influenced Wittgenstein, who spent his last weeks working out a new approach to Moore's argument in the remarks that were published posthumously as On Certainty.)

Language

Moore is also remembered for drawing attention to the peculiar inconsistency involved in uttering a sentence such as "It will rain but I don't believe that it will"--a puzzle which is now commonly called "Moore's paradox". (Indeed, it is not unusual for such conjunctions to be true — for example, whenever I am wrong about the weather forecast.)

In addition to Moore's own work on the paradox, the puzzle also inspired a great deal of work by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who described the paradox as the most impressive philosophical insight that Moore had ever introduced. nonetheless, it is a principle that seems to have generally escaped ethical philosophers before his time:

According to Moore, a moral actor cannot survey the “goodness” inherent in the various parts of a situation, assign a value to each of them, and then generate a sum in order to get an idea of its total value. A moral scenario is a complex assembly of parts, and its total value is often created by the relations between those parts, and not by their individual value.

To understand the application of the organic principle to questions of value, it is perhaps best to consider Moore’s primary example, that of a consciousness experiencing a beautiful object. They might have some value, but when we consider the total value of a consciousness experiencing a beautiful object, it seems to exceed the simple sum of these values (Principia 18:2). Moore, "The Nature of Judgment" (1899) G. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903) G. Moore, Review of Franz Brentano's The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong (1903) G. Moore, The Refutation of Idealism (1903) G. Moore, Ethics (1912)

Books