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WD_156/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 2 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0156 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Moore's Moral Philosophy:
G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica of 1903 is often considered a revolutionary work that set a new agenda for 20th-century ethics. This historical view is hard to sustain, however. In metaethics Moore's non-naturalist position was close to that defended by Henry Sidgwick and other late 19th-century philosophers such as Hastings Rashdall, Franz Brentano, and J.M.E. McTaggart; in normative ethics his ideal consequentialism likewise echoed views of Rashdall, Brentano, and McTaggart. But Principia Ethica presented its views with unusual vigor and force. In particular, it made much more of the alleged errors of metaethical naturalism than Sidgwick or Rashdall had, saying they vitiated most previous moral philosophy. For this reason, Moore's work had a disproportionate influence on 20th-century moral philosophy and remains the best-known expression of a general approach to ethics also shared with later writers such as H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross, and C.D. Broad.
Non-naturalism and the Open-Question Argument:
Moore's non-naturalism comprised two main theses. One was the realist thesis that moral and more generally normative judgements – like many of his contemporaries, Moore did not distinguish the two — are objectively true or false. The other was the autonomy-of-ethics thesis that moral judgements are sui generis, neither reducible to nor derivable from non-moral, that is, scientific or metaphysical judgements. It follows that our knowledge of moral truths is intuitive, in the sense that it is not arrived at by inference from non-moral truths but rests on our recognizing certain moral propositions as self-evident.
Moore expressed the realist side of his non-naturalism by saying that fundamental moral judgements ascribe the property of goodness to states of affairs. Like others of his time, he seems to have taken this realism for granted; he certainly did not defend it extensively against anti-realist alternatives. In this he was doubtless influenced by the grammar of moral judgements, which have a standard subject-predicate form. But it may also be relevant that, at least early on, the only subjectivist view he seems to have been aware of was the naturalist one according to which to say “x is good” is to report the psychological fact that one approves of x. In his 1912 book Ethics he showed that this view does not allow for moral disagreements, since my report that I approve of x and your report that you disapprove of it can both be true (Ethics 58-61). Late in life he encountered the non-cognitivist emotivism of C.L. Stevenson, which says that moral judgements express rather than report feelings and therefore can conflict. He initially conceded that this anti-realist view had as good a claim as his own to be true (“A Reply to My Critics” 544-45), but shortly after reverted to his earlier non-naturalism, saying he could not imagine what had induced him to consider abandoning it (Ewing, “G.E. Moore” 251).
Especially in Principia Ethica, Moore spent much more time defending his other non-naturalist thesis, of the autonomy of ethics, which he expressed by saying the property of goodness is simple and unanalyzable, and in particular is unanalyzable in non-moral terms. This meant the property is “non-natural,” which means that it is distinct from any of the natural properties studied by science. Views that denied this committed what he dubbed “the naturalistic fallacy,” which he found in hedonists such as Jeremy Bentham, evolutionary ethicists such as Herbert Spencer, and metaphysical ethicists such as T.H. Green. Moore's main argument against their view was what has come to be known as the “open-question argument.” Consider a particular naturalist claim, such as that “x is good” is equivalent to “x is pleasure.” If this claim were true, Moore said, the judgement “Pleasure is good” would be equivalent to “Pleasure is pleasure,” yet surely someone who asserts the former means to express more than that uninformative tautology. The same argument can be mounted against any other naturalist proposal: even if we have determined that something is what we desire to desire or is more evolved, the question whether it is good remains “open,” in the sense that it is not settled by the meaning of the word “good.” We can ask whether what we desire to desire is good, and likewise for what is more evolved, more unified, or whatever (Principia Ethica 62-69). Sidgwick had used the same argument against Bentham and Spencer, but only in passing; Moore made it central to his metaethics.
The open-question argument was much discussed in the 20th century and met with many objections. One said the argument's persuasiveness depends on the “paradox of analysis”: that any definition of a concept will, if successful, appear uninformative. If an analysis does capture all its target concept's content, the sentence linking the two will be a tautology; but this is hardly a reason to reject all analyses. Moore could respond that in other cases accepting a definition leads us to see that the sentence affirming it, while seeming informative, in fact is not. But this does not happen in the case of “good” Even if we agree that only pleasure is good, no amount of reflection will make us think “Pleasure is good” equivalent to “Pleasure is pleasure.” Another objection, made later in the century, said the argument cannot support Moore's conclusions about the distinctness of goodness as a property. Science, the objection runs, uncovers many non-analytic property identities; for example, water is identical to H2O even though the terms “water” and “H2O” are not synonymous. By analogy, the property of goodness could be identical to that of pleasure even if “good” and “pleasure” have different meanings. Again, however, Moore could respond. The property of being water is that of having the underlying structure, whatever that is, of the stuff found in lakes, rivers, and so on; when this structure turns out to be H2O, the latter property “fills a gap” in the former and makes the two identical. But this explanation does not extend to the case of goodness, which is not a higher-level property with any gap needing filling: to be good is not to have whatever other property plays some functional role. If goodness is analytically distinct from all natural properties, it is metaphysically distinct as well. It is worth noting, however, that Moore did not explain the open-question argument in the way later non-cognitivists would. Following Hume, they said that moral judgements are intrinsically motivating, so sincerely accepting “x is good” requires a commitment or at least some motivation to pursue x if that is possible. But then no definition of “good” in purely natural terms can ever succeed, since it cannot capture the term's action-guiding force; nor can an evaluative conclusion be validly inferred from premises none of which have such force. Whatever the merits of this Humean explanation, Moore did not give it. On the contrary, the question whether moral judgements are intrinsically motivating is not one on which he expressed clear views or apparently thought very important.
Influence:
Despite not containing many large new ideas, Moore's ethical writings, and especially Principia Ethica, were extremely influential, both outside and within philosophy. Outside philosophy their main influence was through the literary and artistic figures in the Bloomsbury Group, such as Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, several of whom had come under Moore's influence while members with him of the Apostles society at Cambridge. They were most impressed by the last chapter of Principia Ethica, whose identification of aesthetic appreciation and personal love as the highest goods very much fit their predilections. Many of them sexualized Moore's account of love, with the gay men in particular taking it to justify what they called Higher Sodomy. And by their own later admission they tended to ignore the impartial consequentialism within which Moore embedded those goods, and so concentrated on pursuing them in their own lives rather than encouraging their wider spread in society. Also important for Principia Ethica's extra-philosophical appeal was its brash iconoclasm, its claiming, however, inaccurately, to sweep away all past moral philosophy. This tone entirely fit its time, when the death of Victoria had led many in Britain to think a new, more progressive age was beginning.
The book's influence within philosophy was even greater. On the normative side, views close to its ideal consequentialism remained prominent and even dominant through the 1930s, though it is hard to know how far this is attributable to Moore, since similar views had been widely accepted before him. In metaethics his non-naturalism likewise remained dominant for several decades, though here Moore played a larger role, especially for later generations, because of the vigor with which he presented the view. He said more about its metaphysics than predecessors such as Sidgwick had, if only by making explicit its commitment to non-natural properties. And he defended it more extensively, by placing more weight on the open-question argument. When Sidgwick had noticed Bentham or Spencer equating goodness with a natural property such as pleasure, he thought it a minor slip that in charity should be ignored; Moore thought it vitiated the philosopher's entire system. By so emphasizing the two elements of non-naturalism — its realism and commitment to the autonomy of ethics — Moore helped initiate a sequence of developments in 20th-century metaethics.
The first reaction to non-naturalism, other than simple acceptance, came from philosophers who accepted the autonomy of ethics but, often under the influence of logical positivism, rejected its moral realism, holding that there are no facts other than natural facts and no modes of knowing other than the empirical and the strictly logical. They therefore developed various versions of non-cognitivism, which hold that moral judgements are not true or false but express attitudes (emotivism) or issue something like imperatives (prescriptivism). These views allow for moral disagreement, since attitudes and imperatives can oppose each other. They also, their proponents claimed, give a better explanation of the open-question argument, since they find a distinctive emotive or action-guiding force in moral concepts and judgements that is not present in non-moral ones. Non-cognitivism can also explain why morality matters to us as it does. Non-naturalism implies that moral judgements concern a mysterious type of property, but why should facts about that property be important to us or influence our behavior? If such judgements express deep-seated attitudes, the question answers itself.
A still later generation turned against non-cognitivism, in part for flouting the grammar of moral judgements and our natural response to them, both of which suggest realism, but also for a reason shared with non-naturalism. When Moore and the other non-naturalists defended substantive moral judgements, they often said baldly that the judgements were self-evident, so anyone who denied them was morally blind. To the later generation this was unacceptably dogmatic, and the failing was even more plainly present in non-cognitivism, which pictured moral debate as the mere venting of emotions or issuing of commands. These philosophers therefore sought an account of ethics that would better allow for rational moral discussion. While many alternatives were canvassed, one that came to prominence in the late 1950s was a neo-Aristotelian view according to which, if it is true that one ought, say, to relieve others' pain, this is because doing so will contribute to one's own flourishing as a human being. Since such flourishing was to be understood in terms of humans' biological nature, this view at least implicitly challenged the autonomy of ethics. Many of its partisans also rejected the calculating side of Moore's consequentialism, which identified right acts by adding up the goods and evils in their effects. Moral principles, they said, cannot be codified or theorized in that way. And even philosophers who did accept calculation tended to reject Moore's ideal consequentialist values as unacceptably extravagant; if right acts promoted goods, those had to be less contentious and more empirically measurable ones such as preference-satisfaction. By the 1960s, it seems fair to say, Moore's moral philosophy was about as dead as it is possible to be. It was still important to read Principia Ethica, as having started the sequence of developments that led to the current views, but from the standpoint of those views Moore's approach to ethics was hopelessly mistaken.
Forty years later the situation is more favorable to Moore. A growing body of philosophers now defend non-naturalism, some claiming to do so with less ontological extravagance than Moore, but all embracing some account of moral truth that separates it from scientific truth. In normative ethics, too, there is increasing sympathy for accounts of the good with an ideal or perfectionist content, and admiration for particular features of Moore's view, such as his valuing of personal love and his principle of organic unities. Even Moore's style of defending moral claims, which so outraged philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s, is in effect the standard style of contemporary normative ethics, though it tends to take a more complex and circumspect form. Whereas Moore sometimes claimed that certain moral propositions are self-evident when considered on their own, philosophers today are more likely to give coherence arguments, appealing to intuitive judgements at different levels of generality and if possible on different topics, to arrive at an overall position with intuitive support at many points. But the basis of this more complex procedure, which Moore also sometimes used, is essentially the same appeal to intuitive moral judgements. And it is possible to see it as, not arrogant, but philosophically modest. Moore and his contemporaries from Sidgwick in the 1870s to Ross in the 1930s believed that if one asked, for example, why we should relieve others' pain, there was no answer: we simply should. The duty to promote others' good was an underivative one for which no deeper explanation could be given and which could only be recognized by intuition. In taking this stance they assumed that the more grandiose justifications offered by philosophers, such as the neo-Aristotelian argument that benefitting others is necessary for one's own flourishing, or the Kantian argument that maxims contrary to it cannot be universalized, can never succeed. There is no moral philosopher's stone, or no way of escaping the need for direct moral judgement. Their moral methodology therefore reflected a modest belief about what philosophy can accomplish in normative ethics, as against the intuitive reflection that is also exercised, if less systematically, by non-philosophers. This philosophical modesty freed them to look more closely at the details of substantive moral views than philosophers seeking grand justifications usually do and to uncover more of their underlying structure. In this respect contemporary ethics, which has spent several decades remaking many of their discoveries, is returning to their path. This is another way in which, however slowly, contemporary ethics is coming back to Moore.
Copyright © 2005 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
-plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore-moral
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