Principia Ethica

`Principia Ethica' by the very influential Cambridge philosopher, G. E. Moore may easily be one of the very few philosophical works in English written in the 20th century that is widely known outside circles of professional philosophers. The only other works I suspect can fall into this category are Russell and Whitehead's `Principia Mathematica' and Wittgenstein's `Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' and `Philosophical Investigations'. Oddly enough these last two works were originally written in German; however their influence has been based almost entirely in the English speaking world of intellect. Moore was very fond of high faultin Latin names for books. This volume was not named after Russell and Whitehead's work, which was published around 1918, but after Isaac Newton's `Principia Mathematica'. Talk about hubris! Being a major influence on Wittgenstein in his early days at Cambridge, he was also the one who suggested the English name for Wittgenstein's first major philosophical work. What is so nice about approaching this work is that its primary thesis can be boiled down to a relatively simple statement. Moore is claiming that statements about good and bad cannot be reduced to statements about facts in the physical world. Those philosophers who claim that you can do this are committing `the naturalistic fallacy' The primary object of Moore's argument is the eminent 19th century British philosopher, John Stewart Mill, whose pamphlet, `Utilitarianism' is one of the four or five most important writings on ethical doctrines, along with Kant's `Groundwork...', Thomas Hobbes `Leviathan', and this work by Moore. Mill's doctrine, refining a cruder statement of Utilitarianism by his mentor, Jeremy Bentham, is that all good must be based on observable pleasure. If there is no way that an action can be traced to the pleasure, it cannot be considered `good'. To be sure, Mill, being an exceptionally smart man, put a lot more into his argument than this statement, but you get the idea from this. Before Moore, Mill's biggest difficulty was the classic dilemma in ethics between `the right and the good'. In many ways, this is the ethical analogue of the dual nature of light, where sometimes it exhibits wave properties and sometimes it exhibits particle behavior. Before Mill, the greatest proponent of a theory of right and wrong was Immanual Kant, who outlined his ideas in his `Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals' and laid out the categorical imperative. Looking at Mills' and Kants' basic principles, you would hardly know they were talking about the same thing, as Mill reduces everything to pleasure while Kant reduces everything to the `good will'. Moore's writings bring him down squarely in the camp opposing Mill, however, his reasoning may not be too familiar to Kant and Hobbes. Moore was one of the founding fathers of what was to become the `ordinary language' movement in Anglo-American philosophy, which was ultimately to be inspired primarily by t

George Edward Moore has the unfortunate privilege of having spawned one of the most uninformedly invoked ideas of all time - the naturalistic fallacy. Like Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shift," the naturalistic fallacy is tirelessly invoked by writers to mean any number of things, not many of which agree with the author's original usage. That is perhaps one reason to read G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Another, of course, is that it is a classic of twentieth century ethics! Most of the chapters, of course, deal with Moore's idea about the naturalistic fallacy. Contra those numerous authors that use it to mean simply the fallacy of supposing what is natural to be de facto good (that is one manifestation of it, but not it), the naturalistic fallacy has a much broader meaning. The fallacy, in Moore's view, is to explain what is "The Good" in any way other than to say "it is The Good," - to suppose, that is, that "The Good" is definable in any way. To Moore, "The Good" is simply "The Good" because it is good and that is all we can say. Any attempt to equate "The Good" with something else - pleasure, a metaphysical entity, what is natural, etc. - is a manifestation of the naturalistic fallacy. Moore uses the first chapter to explain why the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy. The answer is similar to Hume's is/ought gap. That is that any attempt to say what "The Good" is - i.e., the Good is what causes pleasure; The Good is what exists in the natural order - is nothing other than a criterion for recognizing things that are good; what explanations of this sort are not are actual definitions of the good. (In other words, saying that things which give pleasure tend to be good is much different than saying that "The Good" is constituted by what gives pleasure and that alone.) Another question that the above definitions can always be met with is WHY pleasure (nature, etc.) are good? In which case, the only real answer - owning to "The Good's" ineffability, is "They just are; it is obvious." The next few chapters (the bulk of the book) is spent trying to prove a negative case - that most ethical theories en vogue suffer from the naturalistic fallacy. Moore spends most of his time on utilitarianism but devotes a good amount also to metaphyiscal theories of the good, also. After the negative cases are made (I found some more convincing than others), he gives a positive case. Here is where Moore is suprising. While he argues that "Good" and "Bad" in regards to ends are factual matters, he is something of a utilitarian in practical ethics - meaning that he sees right conduct as judged by the consequences of the conduct in question. He is also a certain type of relativist who allows that what is right conduct often varies from time to time and situation to situation, as an act performed at one time in one scenario may well have different consequences as the same act performed in a slightly different situation in another time. All in all, I found this book excit

Moore's Principia Ethica is a central text in twentieth-century meta-ethics. According to the familiar history of the subject, the story of much of twentieth-century meta-ethics can be understood as a series of reactions to this book. In this book Moore argues for non-naturalistic intuitionism. He argues that moral properties are an irreducible part of reality, and that they are sui generis. And he argues that we can acquire knowledge of these sui generis moral properties only through intuition.The first chapter includes Moore's famous Open Question Argument, his argument that intrinsic goodness is a simple, unanalyzable, non-natural property. There appear to be two strands of the OQA; both of them appeal to our linguistic intuitions. The first focuses on our intuitions about whether certain claims about intrinsic goodness are tautological. Borrowing Moore's own example, suppose someone tries to define 'good' as 'what is pleasant'. All competent users of the language can see that this definition must fail. How? They simply need to ask themselves if "the good is what is pleasant" has the same meaning as "the pleasant is what is pleasant," for these two sentences would be synonymous if 'good' could be correctly defined 'what is pleasant.' And, Moore claims, these sentences clearly aren't synonymous: the claim that "the good is what is pleasant" is not a tautology like "the pleasant is pleasant." This shows that 'good' and 'what is pleasant' have different meanings. Furthermore, Moore argues that thinking about other examples will show that, in principle, we could develop that a structurally similar argument against any other attempted definition of 'good'.The second strand of the argument draws on our intuitions about what is and is not an open question. If 'what is pleasant' is a correct definition of 'good', then the following should not be an open question: Is what is pleasant good? For, if the proposed definition is correct, then it is true by definition that this what is pleasant is good. But, Moore asserts, competent users of the language don't think it's true by definition that what is pleasant is good; they do, and should, regard this question as an open one. It might be true that what is pleasant is good--but, importantly, it is not true by definition. Again, Moore argues that a similar argument will show that any other attempted definition of 'good' fails.The conclusions Moore draws from the OQA are that the term 'good' is indefinable, and that goodness is a simple and unanalyzable property. It is somewhat unclear how Moore thinks he can draw any metaphysical conclusion from this argument, but he seems to have reasoned in the following way. If goodness were identical to some natural or metaphysical property, it would be definable in terms of some natural or metaphysical predicate. The OQA shows that it is not definable in this way, and so it shows that goodness is not identical to a property of either of these types

This edition of Moore's classic book is handsome. It has a nice navy colour with the title written in bold roman font. And when you carry it, there's a good feeling of weight. You know this book is long enough to be important, but at the same time short enough to be read.This edition comes with a wonderful introduction from Thomas Baldwin, quite a scholar himself. If you haven't read Moore before, read this one. His writing is so utterly clear and eloquent that you will be wondering why can't all philosophers write like this. When it was written, some people thought it was better than Plato.If you have read this book before, read this one. But you will not find answers to the open-question argument. Sadly enough, Moore passed away before he could respond to the objections to this book. This is a beautifully bound book with the text and thought of a philosophical genius.

G. E. Moore offers a great evaluation of all the ethical philosophies, from the psychologist propositions (John Stuart Mill), to the naturalist, evolutionary ethics, utilitarianism, hedonism, etc. You see how they all fall into the "naturalistic fallacy", that the "good" is somehow related to some physical, psychological, emotional or evolutionary aspect. Bright refutation of all of these positions. Very good for those who want to start knowing about ethics, specially analytical ethics.