Briefly: Moore's Principia Ethica

Briefly:

Moore’s Principia Ethica

The SCM Briefly series

Anselm’s Proslogion and Replies

Aquinas’ Summa Theologica Part I

Aquinas’ Summa Theologica Part II

Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics

Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic

Descartes’ Meditation on the First Philosophy

Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion

Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

Mill’s On Liberty

Mill’s Utilitarianism

Moore’s Principia Ethica

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil

Plato’s The Republic

Russell’s The Problem of Philosophy

Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism

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© David Mills Daniel 2007

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work

The author and publisher acknowledge material reproduced from G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, ed. T. Baldwin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, revised edition, 1993, ISBN 0521448484. Reprinted by permission of the Cambridge University Press.

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Contents

Introduction

Context

Who was George Edward Moore?

What is Principia Ethica?

Some Issues to Consider

Suggestions for Further Reading

Detailed Summary of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica

Preface to The First Edition

Chapter I The Subject Matter of Ethics

Chapter II Naturalistic Ethics

Chapter III Hedonism

Chapter IV Metaphysical Ethics

Chapter V Ethics in Relation to Conduct

Chapter VI The Ideal

Overview

Glossary

Introduction

The SCM Briefly series is designed to enable students and general readers to acquire knowledge and understanding of key texts in philosophy, philosophy of religion, theology and ethics. While the series will be especially helpful to those following university and A-level courses in philosophy, ethics and religious studies, it will in fact be of interest to anyone looking for a short guide to the ideas of a particular philosopher or theologian.

Each book in the series takes a piece of work by one philosopher and provides a summary of the original text, which adheres closely to it, and contains direct quotations from it, thus enabling the reader to follow each development in the philosopher’s argument(s). Throughout the summary, there are page references to the original philosophical writing, so that the reader has ready access to the primary text. In the Introduction to each book, you will find details of the edition of the philosophical work referred to.

In Briefly: Moore’s Principia Ethica, we refer to G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, edited by Thomas Baldwin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, revised edition, 1993, ISBN 0521448484.

Each Briefly begins with an Introduction, followed by a chapter on the Context in which the work was written. Who was this writer? Why was this book written? With Some Issues to Consider, and some Suggestions for Further Reading, this Briefly aims to get anyone started in their philosophical investigation. The Detailed Summary of the philosophical work is followed by a concise chapter-by-chapter Overview and an extensive Glossary of terms.

Bold type is used in the Detailed Summary and Overview sections to indicate the first occurrence of words and phrases that appear in the Glossary. The Glossary also contains terms used elsewhere in this Briefly guide and other terms that readers may encounter in their study of Moore’s Principia Ethica.

The text of Principia Ethica is divided into 135 sections. Within these, Moore uses numbers and letters (e.g. (1), (a)) to highlight points and issues. The Detailed Summary below is divided into 135 sections, but the numbers and letters are retained only where they fit in with the summarization.

Context

Who was G. E. Moore?

George Edward Moore was born in London in 1873, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read classics and moral sciences (philosophy). He was elected a prize fellow of Trinity in 1898, and became a lecturer in philosophy, at the University of Cambridge, in 1911. He was a professor of philosophy there from 1925 to 1939 and editor of the philosophical journal, Mind, for over 25 years. Moore was a friend of, and important influence on, the philosophers, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein (who succeeded him as professor), while his philosophical writings, particularly the emphasis, in Principia Ethica, on appreciation of beauty and friendship, were an inspiration to such Bloomsbury Group members as the economist, John Maynard Keynes, the biographer, Lytton Strachey and the novelist, Virginia Woolf.

Along with Russell, Moore rejected absolute idealism (see Glossary), as expressed in the writings of F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart (also a fellow of Trinity), which was the dominant philosophical doctrine at the end of the nineteenth century. His emphasis on an analytical approach to philosophical questions, his defence of common sense, particularly in relation to knowledge of the external world, and his interest in metaethics, as a means of clarifying, and trying to resolve, ethical problems, have had a lasting effect on the direction taken by twentieth-century British philosophy. His books include Principia Ethica (1903), Ethics (1912) and Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953). He died in 1958.

What is Principia Ethica?

Principia Ethica, based on a series of lectures on moral philosophy that Moore had delivered a few years earlier, was published in 1903. The title, reminiscent of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, is indicative of the kind of thorough and systematic study of ethical theory (Moore calls it ‘scientific ethics’) that the book provides.

As Moore observes, near the beginning of the book, whenever we describe a person or thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or say that a particular course of action is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, we are making a moral or ethical judgement. Philosophers have always taken a keen interest in this very common human activity, proposing, investigating and evaluating moral principles and issues, to try to identify what is good and right. However, in the Preface to Principia Ethica, Moore makes the point that all this intellectual effort by moral philosophers has not accomplished a great deal, because they have made the mistake of trying to answer ethical questions, without being clear what the questions are. Further, as becomes evident in Chapter I, a lot of moral philosophy has also been characterized by meta-ethical errors: mistakes about the meaning and use of such moral terms as ‘good’ and ‘right’.

So, what are the questions ethics needs to address and answer? According to Moore, there are only two: What sort of things are intrinsically good or good in themselves, that is, have intrinsic value? and What sort of actions ought we to perform, that is, what sort of actions are right? In relation to the first question, Moore holds that ethical propositions about what things are intrinsically good are intuitions: they are directly apprehended, or perceived, and are incapable of proof. Ethical propositions of the second kind, however, are capable of proof, at least in theory. To decide what we ought to do, we first need to know, through intuition, what sort of things are intrinsically good, and then examine the sort of consequences our actions have. This will enable us to choose the course of action that will produce the greatest quantity of things that are intrinsically good.

Thus, as far as goodness is concerned, Moore is an ethical non-naturalist and an intuitionist: he believes that goodness is a non-natural property that a particular thing, or state of affairs, has, which can only be identified by intuition. However, in relation to doing what is right, he is a consequentialist: we need to decide, on the basis of observation and experience, which action will lead to the best possible outcome. He is not a deontological intuitionist: one who holds that what is right can also be known through intuition.

So where have other moral philosophers made their mistakes? Many of them have been wrong about what Moore calls ethics’ ‘most fundamental question’: How is ‘good’ to be defined? They have been guilty of ethical naturalism, of trying to define or analyse ‘good’ in terms of a natural property, such as pleasure, or what people desire, holding that ‘good’ simply means such a natural property. Moore calls defining ‘good’ as, or confusing it with, a natural property the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. Good cannot be defined, because it is a simple, unanalysable, indefinable, non-natural property or quality of things, which is intuited. To say something is ‘good’ is to say it has this simple, unanalysable quality or property. Complex things (he uses the example of a horse) can be analysed or broken down into their simple or most basic constituent parts, but these will all be objects of thought (Moore gives the example of yellow) that cannot be defined, because they are ultimate terms of reference. Good is one of these.

Even if Moore’s definition of ‘good’ seems rather odd (and agreeing with him about the naturalistic fallacy does not mean having to accept his ethical non-naturalism), this is an extremely important point. Many philosophers, instead of regarding ‘good’ as indefinable, do define it as a natural property, such as pleasure, or what is desired, and hold that it simply means such a natural property. This clearly is a fallacy because, if good is just defined as a particular property, no other definition can be proved wrong, because what is good is so by definition. Further, unless good and, for example, pleasure are different, saying pleasure is good would be pointless, as it would just be uttering a tautology: pleasure is pleasure. However, stating a tautology is not what people who say pleasure is good believe they are doing: so ‘good’ cannot just mean pleasure. Moore hammers the point home in another way. However ‘good’ is defined, it can always be meaningfully asked, of the object in terms of which it is defined, whether it is good. But, if ‘good’ just means (to stay with the same example) ‘pleasure’, the question ‘Is pleasure good?’ would not be intelligible. This is the ‘open question’ argument: whatever people claim to be good, it is always an open question (one that can be asked meaningfully) whether it is.

Committing the naturalistic fallacy, and failing to appreciate that it is always an open question whether a particular thing is good, are not the only errors moral philosophers have made. Ethical terms, such as ‘good’, are used in two ways: to say that something is good in itself, or that it is good as means to something that is good in itself. But these two uses are not always distinguished, as they must be, while it is hard to establish that a thing or action definitely is good as a means, because we would need to know (which we hardly ever do) that a certain kind of action would always have a particular effect. Again, many things that are good in themselves are not single things, but complex wholes, and it must not be assumed that the value of a whole is the same as the sum of the values of its parts. Moore