G. E.
Moore G. E.
Moore Emotivist theory. Ethics as emotions.
Cambridge professor G. E. Moore was the single most influential British philosopher of the twentieth century. His critique of the idealism of his teachers helped to break its hold on Anglo-American thought. In "The Refutation of Idealism" (1903), Moore rejected the core principle of idealism and offered a distinctly realistic alternative. Every form of idealism, he noted, relies on the principle expressed by Berkeley in the Latin phrase, esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived." This belief that everything is really just an object of experience in some mind, Moore pointed out, must be necessarily true in order to have its intended consequences for the idealist scheme. Yet it seems clear that the belief is not analytic, since there is at least a conceptual difference between being on the one hand and being perceived on the other.
The ordinary beliefs human beings hold are to be accepted at face value: they mean what they say and are true, standing in no need of philosophical correction or proof. The purpose of philosophical analysis, according to Moore, is merely to explicate the precise implications of the truth of such beliefs, and that is the procedure he followed in "A Defence of Common Sense" (1925).
From the beginning, Moore anticipated that his methods could be applied fruitfully to significant issues in moral philosophy. The first chapter of his Principia Ethica (1903) famously sought to analyze the concept of "good" as the basis for all moral valuation. Such an investigation is meta-ethical in nature; its goal is clarity and precision, not substantive normative content.
Although the question, "What is good?" might be answered in any of several ways, Moore dismissed most of the likely answers as irrelevant to his task. What we need is neither a list of specific things in life that happen to be good nor even a set of principles by means of which to identify such things. The proper answer must be a correct general explanation of the concept (not merely the word) "good," applicable in every possible instance. Moore's central contention was that good is a simple, non-natural quality that certain things in the world happen to exhibit.
Although many philosophers of the Western tradition had claimed to define good in terms of some other feature of the world, but Moore argued that such attempts typically confuse part with whole or cause with effect. That every attempt to define good by reference to something else fails is evident from the open question that invariably remains: "Is this really good?" (When a hedonist proposes that "Good is pleasure," for example, we naturally ask, "But is pleasure always good?") The open question shows that each effort to identify good with something else is mistaken, Moore held, and since most of these attempts equate good with a natural property, he labelled their erroneous procedure the "naturalistic fallacy."
Although indefinable, the concept of good is not meaningless, since we use it to distinguish good
from bad every day. Hence, Moore concluded that "good" must be a simple, non-natural,
indefinable quality that good things have. We recognize it in our experience, even though there is
no explaining it; this is a version of ethical intuitionism. In later chapters of the book, Moore
himself proposed that good is most evident in our appreciation of physical objects with aesthetic
value and in the uniquely worthwhile experience of human friendships. Even many whose notions about
morality differ from Moore's would seem to share his basic conviction that they can only be
intuited, not defined or explained. From Garth
Kemerling
Encyclopedia Entries
G. E. Moore - Wikipedia
Moore, G. E., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy
Related OCP articles on: analysis, analytic philosophy, Cambridge philosophy, English philosophy, linguistic philosophy, moral philosophy, the naturalistic fallacy, non-natural properties, the open question argument, and internal and external relations.
Moore, G. E. Columbia Encyclopedia
ethical non-naturalism, ethics as emotions - good is a simple, non-natural, unanalyzable quality
Also
"The Refutation of Idealism,"
"A Defence of Common Sense,"
"A Proof of the External World,"
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Secondary sources: