Principia Ethica

by G.E. Moore

First published in 1903, this volume revolutionized philosophy and forever altered the direction of ethical studies. It clarifies some of moral philosophy's most common confusions and redefines the science's terminology. 6 chapters explore: the subject matter of ethics, naturalistic ethics, hedonism, metaphysical ethics, ethics in relation to conduct, and the ideal.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Classics, Politics, 20th Century, Academic, Reference

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1903

About the author

George Edward "G. E." Moore OM, FBA was an English philosopher, one of the founders of the analytic tradition along with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and (before them) Gottlob Frege. With Russell, he led the turn away from idealism in British philosophy, and became well known for his advocacy of common sense concepts, his contributions to ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, and "his exceptional personality and moral character." He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, highly influential among (though not a member of) the Bloomsbury Group, and the editor of the influential journal Mind. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1918. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the intellectual secret society, from 1894, and the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back at the dawn of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell was telling folks to smarten up and learn to think analytically. Well, the general population thought nothing much about the kerfuffle that he was making at Oxbridge...

But a young fellow philosopher decided he might as well make it his business to analyse GOODNESS out of existence. WHY, for Goodness’ Sake?

Can you imagine trying to do that today, when we’re desperately clinging to simple values of decency in a world gone nuts with evil, amidst its relentless toll of lost illusions?

You’d be dismissed as just another crank with an axe to grind!

The philosopher’s name was G.E. Moore. And this is the Great Book that proves Goodness is an illusion.

1903: it was the dawn of the Twentieth Century and youthful philosophical students had grown fed up with the elder statesmen of Victorian Absolute Idealism.

So they opened the windows of their minds, and took their inspiration from the fresh air of the New Physics and radical continental philosophical thinking for a new way of looking at things.

G.E.Moore was such as these, and he had envisioned an ethical statement which his fellow Young Turks could call their own: it was to be called, with a Latin flourish, The Principles of Ethics - Principia Ethica.

The young Moore liked to frequent Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s relaxed Bloomsbury property, for their garden parties would attract a who’s-who of progressive London thinkers.

As well as Moore and his fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell, those glittering soirées would attract various luminaries - from the economist John Maynard Keynes and belle-lettrist Lytton Strachey to the junior rising star T.S. Eliot - reserved and aloof as he always was at such free-wheeling functions.

On the latter point, Leonard Woolf recalled in his memoirs a stroll with the great poet from which Woolf took a break in the bushes to relieve himself. Eliot, the eternal Prufock, was aghast at his lack of manners!

The funny thing about Moore’s new book on ethics - as he probably confided to his Bloomsbury confrères - is that according to him there were in fact from henceforth to be no more principles, but a free life in which ethics were no longer any big deal.

That blessed metaphysical saint, Spinoza, author of the classic bible on ethics, must have turned over in his grave!

Moore’s book was to sell like wildfire, though, and make him famous.

But as Prometheus found out, there’s a price to be paid for stealing fire from the gods. And goodness from the hearts of ordinary people.

And Moore’s later freewheeling ways were to cause him regret. He soon sank into a classic Slough of Despond.

It was Virginia Woolf, in her diaries, who tells us from that point of instant fame there followed a period of rapid decline in Moore’s life - morally and professionally - while his friend Bertrand Russell kept advancing to further glories, especially as his philosophical tomes gave way to fast-selling books on pop psychology for Everyman.

See, Russell was trying to do some positive Good for people!

After a while, Moore’s output diminished and he wandered into relative obscurity, except in academic circles.

A little freedom can be a dangerous thing - especially for those with a staid Victorian upbringing. He should have stuck to his roots.

In his now-lesser stature we probably will never know if he found hope and his sense of bien-être again. In anonymous circumstances such as those, we may pose, and answer the ironical question as Auden did:

Was he free? Was he happy?
The question is absurd -
Had anything been wrong
We should certainly have heard!

[Turbulent_Architect · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wittgenstein once quipped of G.E. Moore that “He shows you how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatever.” It is debatable to what extent he really meant for this as an insult, but there can be little doubt that he was thinking at least in part of Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), a book he notoriously disdained. In fact, in a letter written to their mutual friend Bertrand Russell some ten years after the book’s publication, he wrote: “I do not like it at all. (Mind you, quite apart from disagreeing with most of it).”

The Principia represents the very first attempt to extend the methods of analytic philosophy to the domain of ethics. The main doctrine of the book is that goodness is an irreducible non-natural property apprehended via intuition—irreducible because, like colour properties, it cannot be further decomposed into constituent parts, and non-natural because, if it cannot be identified with any physical property or set thereof. An object is intrinsically good if it possesses this property itself and instrumentally good if it produces consequences that themselves possess it.

The upshot of Moore’s analysis is to make ethics into a science. Moral judgments turn out to be completely unproblematic propositions. If the objects to which they attribute goodness possess it, then they are true. Otherwise, they are false. This also makes it possible to reason about ethics in the sense of discovering whether moral judgments are true and deriving conclusions from them. No wonder, then, that Wittgenstein disliked the book so much, given his own view in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that ethics and theology are beyond language and reason.

Philosophical doctrines have a funny way of coming and going. In part due to Wittgenstein’s influence, Moore’s non-naturalist realism was routinely lampooned for most of the twentieth century. It practically became a case study in how not to do ethics. Yet the last forty years or so have seen a startling return to Moorean realism in moral ontology, and with a good reason. For all the Principia’s obvious flaws, any anti-realist theory must of value must face the hurdle of explaining away its core insight: That it seems to be possible to know by direct acquaintance that certain experiences are intrinsically more worth pursuing than others.

[Ali Reda · Rating 3 out of 5]

It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer.

All ethical questions fall under one or other of three classes:
1) What is good?
2) What things are good in themselves or has an intrinsic value?
3) What kind of actions ought we to perform or what is the right action to do? (Practical Ethics)

A great part of the vast disagreements prevalent in Ethics is to be attributed to failure in analysis and in differentiation between the 3 questions. Unless we know what good means, unless we know what is meant by that notion in itself, as distinct from what is meant by any other notion:
1) We shall not be able to tell when we are dealing with Good and when we are dealing with something else, which is perhaps like it in some aspects, but not the same.
2) We can never know on what evidence an ethical proposition rests. We cannot favor one judgment that this or that is good, or be against another judgment that this or that is bad.

By the use of conceptions which involve both that of intrinsic value and that of causal relation, as if they involved intrinsic value only, philosophers found in answering questions 2 and 3, an adequate definition of Ethics and not that they are defined by the fact that they predicate a single unique objective concept. This what Moore calls the "Naturalistic Fallacy", i.e equating a property with a thing that has a relation to this property, ex. this property possess the thing (Good possess pleasure so Good is pleasure) or equating a means with a property as an end (an action which is a means to pleasure is Good so Good is pleasure). Accordingly we face two problems with Philosophers' ethical systems:
1) Confusing Question 1 with Question 2 in which the casual relation is "Possession"
2) Confusing Question 1 with Question 3 in which the causal relation is "means"

The source of this confusion, is that Good is undefinable. Good is a simple notion, just as yellow is a simple notion; that it isn't composed of any parts, which we can substitute for it in our minds when we are thinking of it because they are the ultimate terms of reference to which whatever is capable of definition must be defined, there is no relevant evidence whatever which can be cited from any other truth, except themselves alone. Therefore, we cannot define "good" by explaining it in other words, we can only point to an action or a thing and say "That is good." It can only be shown. We can only show a sighted person a piece of yellow paper and say "That is yellow." So just as you cannot explain "what yellow is" to anyone who does not already know what a color is, you cannot also explain what good is. So Good is self-evident. By saying that a proposition is self-evident, we mean emphatically that its appearing so to us, is not the reason why it is true: for we mean that it has absolutely no reason.

Consider yellow, for example. We may try to define it, by describing its physical equivalent; we may state what kind of light-vibrations must stimulate the normal eye, in order that we may perceive it. But a moment’s reflection is sufficient to show that those light-vibrations are not themselves what we mean by yellow. They are not what we perceive. The most we can be entitled to say of those vibrations is that they are what corresponds in space to the yellow which we actually perceive.

And there must be an indefinite number of such undefinable terms; since we cannot define anything except by an analysis, which when carried as far as it will go, refers us to something, which is simply different from anything else, and which by that ultimate difference explains the peculiarity of the whole which we are defining: for every whole contains some parts which are common to other wholes also.

Every one does in fact understand the question "Is this good"? When he thinks of it, his state of mind is different from what it would be, were he asked Is this pleasant, or desired, or approved? It has a distinct meaning for him, even though he may not recognize in what respect it is distinct.

Moore proposes a method to know what degree of value a thing has in itself, is that we should see it as if it existed in absolute isolation, stripped of all its usual accompaniments.

He then discusses a few concepts that show the mistakes of the philosophers whose ethical statements fall in the category of the first problem.

Organic Unity

It has just been said that what has intrinsic value is the existence of the whole, and that this includes the existence of the part; and from this it would seem a natural inference that the existence of the part has intrinsic value. But the inference would be as false as if we were to conclude that, because the number of two stones was two, each of the stones was also two or in reverse all the parts of a picture may be meaningless unless they are put together thus makes the whole meaningful. We may admit, indeed, that when a particular thing is a part of a whole, it does possess a predicate which it would not otherwise possess, that it is a part of the whole. Thus, to take a typical example, if an arm be cut off from the human body, we still call it an arm. Yet an arm, when it is a part of the body, undoubtedly differs from a dead arm. So in considering the different degrees in which things themselves possess a property, we have to take account of the fact that a whole may possess it in a degree different from that which is obtained by summing the degrees in which its parts possess it. This what Moore calls the principle of Organic Unity.

I'll give an example related to Theodicy, courage and compassion seem to involve essentially a cognition of something evil or ugly. In the case of courage the object of the cognition may be any kind of evil; in the case of compassion, the proper object is pain. These virtues involve a hatred of what is evil or ugly and if so, there are admirable things, which may be lost, if there were no cognition of evil. Once we recognize the principle of organic unities, any objection to this conclusion, founded on the supposed fact that the other elements of such states have no value in themselves, must disappear. It might be the case that the existence of evil was necessary, not merely as a means, but analytically, to the existence of the greatest good. But we have no reason to think that this is the case in any instance whatever. So the right action entails the suppression of some evil impulse, is necessary to explain the plausibility of the view that virtue consists in the control of passion by reason. Accordingly, the truth seems to be that, whenever a strong moral emotion is excited by the idea of rightness, this emotion is accompanied by a vague cognition of the kind of evils usually suppressed or avoided by the actions which most frequently occur to us as instances of duty; and that the emotion is directed towards this evil quality. We may, conclude that the specific moral emotion owes almost all its intrinsic value to the fact that it includes a cognition of evils accompanied by a hatred of them.

The Open Question Argument

For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them. The direct object of Ethics is knowledge and not practice; and any one who uses the naturalistic fallacy has certainly not fulfilled this first object, however correct his practical principles may be.

Moore proposed a test, to see whether goodness is identical to X, he called it The Open Question Argument which depends on our common sense and that Good is self-evident.

X is not identical to goodness if the question, “Is X good?” is open.

Applying it in a few examples:
The question, “Is pleasure good?” is open and meaningful. It makes sense to wonder about this.
The question, “Is pleasure pleasure?” seems settled and pointless. It doesn't make sense to wonder about this; the answer is trivially “yes.”

For a complete analysis of the book, visit this link.

[Francesca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did anyone participating in metaethical philosophy ever consider that it’s the most painstakingly dull agonisingly irrelevant debate ever

[Xander · Rating 3 out of 5]

In meta-ethics, the search for the ultimate foundation of morals, there are a few names which instantaneously ring a bell. Plato saw meta-ethics in the contemplation of the mind of the abstract Idea of Good – to be abstracted from everyday (imperfect) manifestations of good and bad. Ethics was, according to Plato, founded in rationalism. This was also the idea of René Descartes and Immanuel Kant – both claimed that the principles of ethics can be known a priori, without any recourse to experience (i.e. sensation and perception). Just by doubting we can find the self-evident truths; once we have found these principles, we can apply logic (i.e. deduction) to derive new certain truths from these.

But in Britain, there has, ever since the seventeenth century, a totally different, opposing view. This is the view as propagated by people like John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith, which is called empiricism, and says that knowledge ultimately derives from experience. There is no understanding without experience – sheer logic can only discover what is already present in the principles, no new knowledge can be gathered without our senses.

In short: rationalism claims knowledge is transcendental, supernatural and can only be known through reasoning; empiricism claims knowledge can only be known through experience. This is what Immanuel Kant meant when he claimed “understanding without experience is empty; experience without understanding is blind” – Kant saw the flaws in both systems and tried to square the circle.

But Kant’s system led to a whole new kind of morality. According to Kant, certain concepts, such as Free Will, God and the immortal Soul, are not part of the world as our senses represent it to us; those concepts are part of the transcendental world which is inaccessible to our senses and can only be slightly discovered through the use of reason (i.e. Kant’s synthetic a priori judgements). This then leads to an autonomous Ethics: the Free Will is unbound by the restrictions and limitations of this world, and can because of its freedom, discover the Moral Law. Good is following this Moral Law, and the Free Will cannot do anything but follow this moral code. This is an ethics that is characterized as intentionalism – why I do something is much more important than the consequences of my deeds: if I respect the moral law then I do good, no matter the consequences.
After Kant, Hegel came along and perverted Kant’s system of epistemology as well as his ethics and created a delusional world is Ideas as the only real entities. He even saw history as a development of a World-Historical Idea.

Around the same time that Hegel poisoned the minds of his students with his absurd metaphysical babbling, in Britain there arose an opposing tradition which focused on the consequences of one’s actions as a yardstick for goodness. Good is what brings the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This consequentialist ethics is called utilitarianism, since it measures the goodness of our actions by the utility of these actions to….to whom exactly? Some claimed the individual himself, which is called Egoism (or selfishness); others claimed society as a whole. But utilitarians were not able to explain the incompleteness of their system of ethics: who includes this society – is it our family? Our city? Our nation? Our race? The world population? And who is included – is it those currently living? Or the next generation as well? Or maybe even later generations? And how do we weigh all these different interests?

In short: utilitarianism seeks its principles in human pleasure, but is not able to explain why pleasure is the principle and not some other (combination of) thing(s) as well as how we weigh all the different interests of those involved to acquire a practical guideline for us to follow. Autonomous morality is much more practical (it’s not for nothing Kant called it “praktischen Vernunft”), but leaves aside the consequences of our actions and in that sense is an ethics not rooted in reality of everyday life.

Then, at the end of the nineteenth century British moral philosopher G.E. Moore came along and decided to do away with all the philosophical disputes. In his Principia Ethica (1903), he decides investigate the foundations of ethics and end all the philosophical nonsense. According to Moore, philosophers have hitherto tried to answer the wrong questions – or rather more accurately: have failed to ask the questions and have instead rushed to explain what good and bad are. Very unphilosophical.

To understand where Moore’s coming from, one has to remind oneself that Moore is part of the British tradition called analytical philosophy that became famous in the twentieth century and which was a reaction against the road continental philosophy was taking: ever wilder speculations about ever more abstract notions – starting with Hegel’s Absolute Idea and ending in Nietzsche’s nihilism. Philosophy simply wasn’t the ‘philos sophia’ – love of wisdom – anymore. So analytically minded philosophers decided to leave the pursuit of natural knowledge to the emerging sciences of the day, and occupy themselves with analysing these scientific findings, looking for a foundation of science (ultimately mathematics) in logic, and interpreting and integrating these scientific discoveries into a consistent and coherent worldview.

One important characteristic of the analytic school is the careful investigation of philosophical disputes; another important characteristic is the formulation of precise and well-formulated questions; and one more important characteristic is the modest attitude in answering these questions. Often, analytical philosophers occupy themselves solely with clarifying current notions and ideas, while shunning answering any of these questions – the philosopher as a linguistic therapist, so to speak. And what does the therapist in question cure? Fallacious thinking. By linguistic analysis, these philosophers try to show how our fallacious ways of thinking lead us to pose meaningless questions and/or come up with inadequate and invalid answers to meaningful questions.

So what has this to do with Moore and his Principia Ethica?

Moore wants to find the real principles of ethics. To do this, he has (1) to pose the right questions and to (2) explain how all of his predecessors were wrong. If he manages both, he will have clarified a lot in the field of Ethics – which is amazing in and of itself. Does he manage?

First of all, Moore sees Ethics being concerned with three distinct questions:

1. What is Good in itself?
2. What things are good?
3. How should we conduct ourselves?

These questions are all important, but they aren’t all alike. The question ‘What is Good in itself?’ looks for Good as something that is, without being rooted in reality. In other words: the question cannot be answered by having recourse to experience, i.e. empirical science. The answer is an intuition – the ‘knowing’ of the mind that it has stumbled on a self-evident truth. A truth that cannot be explained in terms of something else.

The second question ‘What things are good?’ is the question of what the predicate ‘good’ means. Things are objects in reality and can be studied as such. Empirical science can study objects and discover causal relationships between different objects. This actually means that a part of Ethics, the part that is non-intuitionistic, has to occupy itself with the real world and has to be modelled as a natural science. For Moore, Ethics is a synthetic science, discovering new knowledge through experience – intuitions cannot lead anywhere, since they aren’t grounded in objective reality. The bridge between supernatural and natural can only be bridged through causality, which is a concept that can only be understood in terms of real objects. (A problem Kant’s system couldn’t deal with.)

The last question ‘How should we conduct ourselves?’ is a practical question. It is a question of conduct: what should we do and what shouldn’t we do? Practical Ethics is a branch of Ethics, but it should be noted that the answers to this question should be grounded in the answer to the second question (What things are good?). For Moore, an act can only be good as means to an end; the end being ‘Good’. This literally means there is no such things as good deeds for good deeds’ sake – exit Kant’s autonomy.

Alright, but how were Moore’s predecessors mistaken, exactly?
Moore sees two different types of Ethics as developed within the history of philosophy: hedonism and metaphysical. Hedonism can be subdivided into hedonism proper (the pursuit of pleasure) and evolutionism (the pursuit of biological fitness).

Hedonistic Ethics is founded in the pleasure-principle. Human beings want to experience pleasure and avoid pain, hence Pleasure becomes an ethical principle. Good is what brings Pleasure. This tradition goes back to ancient Greece (Epicureanism), but Moore focuses on the utilitarian approach as propagated by British philosophers John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick. Good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Evolutionism on the other hand, is inspired by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Organisms vary on a wide array of characteristics; all organisms are part of the same environment; resulting in variations in fitness, as in fit between organism and environment. Some organisms are more adapted to survival and reproduction than others, resulting in extinction, over geological time, of all those who are (relatively) less adapted. Evolution is historical development; Man is one specie of many; hence, Man is also subject to evolution. An ethics based on evolution then draws the implication that Good is what’s good for the survival of the individual or species – there have been many different views on this. More mainly focuses on Herbert Spencer, who claimed (in summary) that increasing the population means increasing the capacity for pleasure, hence propagation of the species is good.

But according to Moore, both hedonism proper and evolution succumb to a fundamental error. This is Moore (infamous) ‘naturalistic fallacy’. It might very well be that human beings seek pleasure and that some things promote pleasure more than others; just as it might well be that more human beings means more capacity for experiencing pleasure; but both statements are factual claims about the real world. In and of itself they don’t contain any ethical statement. Drawing ethical implications from these factual claims is logically impossible.

Why? Because ‘good’ as a predicate refers to the intuition of Good. An intuition that exists, but not as a real object in the world. Saying Pleasure is good, means that a human experience (fact) contains some part of the intuition ‘good’ (no fact). In David Hume’s words: “you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.”

Also, according to Moore, utilitarianism is incapable of showing why Pleasure is the sole good and not some other good or any combination of goods. And whether utilitarianism should be Egoistic, good is pursuing my pleasure, or Utilitarian proper, good is pursuing the good of (all/some/who?). Exit Mill, Spencer and Sidgwick.

Now, metaphysical ethics avoid some of the problems of hedonistic ethics, because it searches for ethical principles not in the real world but in a transcendental realm. Good is rooted in some other world: a hereafter, a transcendental world, etc. But then again, it suffers from the same naturalistic fallacy while introducing its own specific unsurmountable problems.

Metaphysical ethics claims Good exists supernaturally and concludes from this that goodness in this world exists. This is, again, deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. It doesn’t follow that a supernatural existence of Good has moral implications for this world. For example, Kant claimed that Free Will exists supernaturally and that the Freedom of this Will consists in discovering and following the Moral Law as an autonomous object. This can be perfectly true (how we can possibly know such a thing is another question) but it doesn’t follow from this that this implies something for me, in this real world.

So again, we stumble upon the naturalist fallacy, it’s just that this time the predicate ’good’ refers not to this world (Pleasure) but to another world. Again it is supposed that Good (as intuition) exists because the thing which is good exists (as experience). If Kant says Good is what the Will wills, he derives an ethical statement (Good) from an empirical statement (I will something). In other words: the object of a cognition (for example Good) isn’t the same as the cognition of an object (me).

A problem peculiar to metaphysical ethics, which utilitarianism doesn’t have, is the question how a supernatural world can have any ethical meaning for me in this world. If there is a hereafter, then life will start only in this transcendental world, what does this life matter? This is not simplistic nit-picking on Moore’s part, it is a fundamental problem. If the supernatural world is the real world, then ethics becomes literally meaningless, because it refers to an unreal world. If Christians and Muslims believe the hereafter to be the real world and this world only a passage or a test, then it becomes unexplainable how this-worldly ethical rules refer to reality at all.

So, now Moore has answered the questions ‘What is Good?’ (an intuition) and has refuted utilitarianism (Spencer, Mill, Sidgwick) and autonomous ethics (Kant), he still has to offer his own answers to the remaining questions ‘What things are good?’ and ‘How should we conduct ourselves?’

According to Moore, the question of ‘What things are good?’ should be rephrased as ‘What is the nature of the predicate peculiar to Ethics?’ and ‘What kinds of things possess this predicate, and in what degree?’ Once we have answered this, the question ‘How should we conduct ourselves?’ becomes easy to answer.

In the last chapter, Moore offers an answer by asking: ‘What things are such that, if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we should judge their existence to be good?’ The isolation-element is important, since Moore states that things can be composed of different parts and the value of the whole is not identical with the sum of its parts. Also, if there are multiple things that contain goodness, ‘what comparative value seems to attach to the isolated existence of each?’
Things that possess intrinsic value, and are consequently ‘good’ derive this value both from the common character of kind of thing it is as well as the specific character of that particular thing. This means, for example, that our consciousness of the thing and our emotional attitude towards the thing are both included in the intrinsic value of the object.

In general, personal affections and beautiful objects are the only two good things that exist. Based on this, Moore distinguishes three types of things:

1. Unmixed goods. This is our love of beautiful things and our love of good persons.
2. Evils. This is our love of the evil and ugly, our hatred of the good and beautiful, and our consciousness of pain.
3. Mixed goods. Things that include some element that is evil or ugly.

This distinction tackles both the kinds of things question as well as the in what degree question. We now know what Good is and what things are good – all that’s left is to develop a practical ethics: how should we conduct ourselves?

In this sense, Moore is a utilitarian: we have public and private duties only insofar as our actions promote the pleasures of human intercourse and/or the enjoyment of beautiful objects. This means our consciousness of these things, not the bare things themselves. Virtue only exists as long as these duties exist; fulfilling these duties literally is virtue. Moore even claims these two complex things (personal affection and beauty) are the sole criterion with which to measure social progress.

Sounds vague? That’s true. Moore admits that this is as close as we can come within practical ethics. We have to account for both personal affection and beauty in the near-future. We don’t have any information about the future; we can only conduct ourselves in the here and now and can only reckon to a (very limited) limit with the future.

Also, Moore finds himself in another trouble spot. If he claims the goal of his Principia Ethica, and ethics as an empirical science, is to discover “which of a given set of alternatives is the best means to procure the most good in the near-future?” he has to specify whose good. In this sense, he succumbs to the same ambiguity as the utilitarians did: am I the criterion here? Or rather, is a group of human beings, of which I am a member, the criterion? But then, which group?

But to give Moore his due credit: he does state (multiple times) in the last two chapters that his analysis of current ethics and his clarification of the true ethical questions is the sole purpose of his book. His own attempts at constructing a practical ethics is an attempt, and a preliminary attempt at that. So, while stating that “consciousness of beauty” is “the fundamental truth of Moral Philosophy” (p. 189), he also states that his own attempt at a positive ethics (as in positing something and not falsifying something) is just a stepping stone to a more fundamental and coherent ethics of the future.

My own view on this is simple. Moore lays bare the flaws in all ethical system developed up to 1903 and should be credited for this. His own attempt at constructing an ethical system fails for the same reasons as did the systems of his predecessors. Moore tries to found ethics in the real world – empirical science – but he still falls prey to the theoretical-practical divide. It’s one thing to assert personal affection and beautiful objects are ethical principles, but it’s a whole other thing to translate this into everyday life. One person’s good can be another person’s ugly, and vice versa
.
The most important lesson I take away from Principia Ethica is that philosophers should stop founding ethics in analytical, a priori notions. Analytical statements are empty without real-world experience. Ethics deals with human conduct and should be synthetic, based on human experience, as such. Moore’s attempt to construct ethics as an empirical science is commendable.

Also, the book is such a strong argument in favour of analytic philosophy. I can’t seem to wrap my head around continental philosophers like Edmund Husserl or Martin Heidegger, and it frustrates me tremendously. I honestly don't see the meaning in their arguments. But every time I pick up a book of analytic philosophers like Bertrand Russell, Hans Reichenbach, and now G.E. Moore, my understanding of the subjects dealt with deepens tremendously. It is absolutely beautiful how these bright minds are able to do away with long-standing philosophical discussions by distinguishing between meaningful and meaningless questions, clarify difficult concepts, and offering a whole new way to look at former problems.

I think I’ll stick to the other side of the ocean from now on…

[Randal Samstag · Rating 4 out of 5]

Principia Ethica (PE) was first published in 1903 and it is still in print today. I would think that there is hardly an introductory university course in ethics that could do without some mention of it. Moore says in the preface that the book is intended to sort two kinds of questions. “The two questions may be expressed, the first in the form: What kind of things ought to exist for their own sakes? the second in the form: What kind of actions ought we to perform?” In this preface he says the “One main object of this book may, then, be expressed by slightly changing one of Kant’s famous titles. I have endeavored to write a ‘Prolegomena' to any future Ethics that can possibly pretend to be scientific.” It is interesting that he expresses hopes at a “scientific” Ethics, for most modern proponents of “scientific” ethics (like Sam Harris) are proponents of some version of the utilitarianism that Moore attacked savagely in PE.

PE is divided into six chapters and it is convenient to discuss the book under subheadings provided by these chapters.

The Subject Matter of Ethics

The first chapter of PE sets out Moore’s famous answer to the question, “What is good?” His answer is that “good” is indefinable or simple: “for if by definition be meant the analysis of an object of thought, only complex objects can be defined.” He says “Propositions about the good are all of them synthetic and never analytic; and that is plainly no trivial matter. And the same thing may be expressed more popularly, by saying that, if I am right, then nobody can foist upon us such axioms as the ‘Pleasure is the only good’ or that ‘The good is the desired’ on the pretense that this is ‘the very meaning of the word.’”

Moore claims that if good is a simple notion “just as ‘yellow’ is a simple notion” this means that you cannot explain to anyone who already doesn’t know it what the word means. One can explain to someone what a chimera is but in doing so one is describing a complex notion, but the parts of which this complex notion are composed cannot be broken down any further. When told that a chimera is a an animal with a lioness’s head and body and a goat’s head growing from the middle of its back with a snake in place of a tail, you have to already know what a lioness, goat, and snake are. And if “good” is indefinable, then to try to define it by saying that it has this property or that is to commit what Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy.”(NF) Moore defines it thus:

“It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named these other properties that they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not ‘other’ but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and of it I shall now endeavour to dispense. “(PE, p. 10)

He considers two example contenders for the definition of “good”: 1) good is pleasure or 2) good is that which is desired. In the first case the person claiming this is saying that the object of his desire is not pleasure, he contradicts himself directly. “If good is defined as something else, it is then impossible either to prove that any other definition is wrong or even to deny such a definition.” In the other case, he says “the discussion is after all a verbal one. When A says ‘Good means pleasant’ and B says ‘Good means desired.’ They may merely wish to assert that most people have used the word for what is pleasant and for what is desired respectively.” Only this is not an “ethical” discussion, according to Moore.

The other well-known topic taken up in Chapter I is Moore’s take on Hegel’s “organic whole” or “organic unity”. Moore insists that “in considering the different degrees in which things themselves possess this property (goodness), we have to take into account of the fact that a whole may possess it in a degree different from that which is obtained by summing the degrees in which its parts possess it.” (PE, p. 36) What he means by this is taken up in his last chapter.

Naturalistic Ethics

In his second chapter Moore takes on those ethical theories that he feels commit his NF. These include Stoic Ethics, for they declared ethics to be the task of discovering a ‘life according to nature.” He defers his (brief) discussion of the Stoics and their metaphysical ethics to Chapter IV, however. In this chapter Moore bores in on Herbert Spencer’s “Evolutionistic Ethics” (in The Data of Ethics) for ridicule. Evolutionistic ethics in his mind defines the good as that which is "natural" and for that reason, is “therefore certainly fallacious”; that is, not included in the category of ethical knowledge according to Moore’s definition. He derides Spencer for “’constantly’ using the term ‘more evolved’ as equivalent to ‘higher.’” He is not sure whether to criticize Spencer as an evolutionistic ethicist or as a hedonist. But when Spencer says that ”‘virtue’ cannot ‘be defined otherwise than in terms of happiness’” Moore declares him therefore guilty of the NF.

Hedonism

Moore has a separate chapter for Hedonism, which he sees as a special case of the NF. Here he credits Henry Sidgwick (a fellow Apostle) for “clearly recognizing that by ‘good’ we do mean something unanalysable” and who “has alone been led thereby to emphasise the fact that, if Hedonism be true, its claims to be so must be rested solely on its self-evidence – that we must maintain ‘Pleasure is the sole good’ to be a mere intuition.” His refutation of Hedonism he explains as follows: “In fact, my justification for supposing that I shall have refuted historical Hedonism, if I refute the proposition ‘Nothing is good but pleasure’ is that although Hedonists have rarely stated their principle in this form and though its truth, in this form, will certainly not follow from their arguments, yet their ethical method will follow logically from nothing else.” (PE, p. 61) Among the group of Hedonists he includes Aristippus, founder of the Cyrenaic school and follower of Socrates, the Epicureans, and the Utilitarians: Bentham, Mill, Spencer, and Sidgwick.

His method of refuting Mill is to take his quotes like “we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and that the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons” and then convict him of NF. So, even though Mill has not said that happiness is the sole good, Moore, regardless convicts him of NF: he has “attempted to establish the identity of good with the desired, by confusing the proper sense of ‘desirable,’ in which it denotes that which it is good to desire, with the sense which it would bear if it were analogous to such words as ‘visible.’”

Having finished with Mill, in his mind, he moves on to Sidgwick. He maintains that Sidgwick has seen the inconsistency between the Hedonistic principle that “Pleasure is the sole good” and that one pleasure may be better than another. Yet, he still chooses “Pleasure alone is good as an end.” His case against Hedonism ultimately rests on Socrates’s discussion with Protarchus in the Philebus. Socrates gets Protarchus to admit that although he has maintained that to “live your whole life in the enjoyment of the greatest pleasures” is his doctrine, he is speechless when Socrates explains that intelligence, memory, knowledge, and wisdom would be excluded from such a life.

Metaphysical Ethics

In this chapter Moore moves on to the Stoics, Spinoza, and Kant. “They all imply, and many of them expressly hold, that ethical truths follow logically from metaphysical truths – that Ethics should be based on Metaphysics.” He defines metaphysics as a “profession to prove the truth about non-natural existents. I define ‘metaphysical,’ therefore, by a reference to supersensible reality; although I think that the only non-natural objects, about which it as succeeded in obtaining truth, are objects which do not exist at all.” The Stoics, for example, asserted that a life in accordance with Nature was perfect. But they did not mean “Nature” as Moore defines it, but “something supersensible which they inferred to exist, and which they held to be perfectly good.” He deals likewise with Spinoza’s Absolute Substance and ‘intellectual love’ of God and with Kant’s “Kingdom of ends” which is ideal. And with modern writers “who tell us that the final and perfect end is to realize our true selves.” (PE, p. 113) But, remarkably, Moore indicts the metaphysical ethicists of NF: “They . . . imply, as I said, that this ethical proposition follows from some proposition which is metaphysical: that the question ‘What is real?’ has some logical bearing upon the question ‘What is good?’ It was for this reason that I described ‘Metaphysical Ethics in Chapter II as based upon the NF.” He ends up maintaining that, just like being good is not just experiencing pleasure, being good is not identical with being willed (a la Kant) or felt in a certain way.

Perhaps it is the right place here to bring up Bernard Williams’s comment that “It is hard to think of any other widely used phrase in the history of philosophy that is such a spectacular misnomer” as the NF (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 121). Williams says the NF is not in Moore’s usage a mistake in inference as opposed to what “in Moore’s view was an error, or else simple redefining the word.” To be fair to Moore, he often finds mistakes in inference (most commonly by reductio) in the arguments of his opponents. But there is something to Williams’s quarrel that when Moore argues by induction or points out inconsistencies in deduction he is never alive to the irony as old as Sextus Empiricus that neither induction nor deduction can be defended as anything more than conventional argument, even though Moore at one point says, “it follows from the meaning of good and bad, that such propositions are all of them, in Kant’s phrase, ‘synthetic’: they all must be simply accepted or rejected, which cannot be logically deduced from any other proposition.” And we know this, not just from Sextus Empiricus, but also from Moore’s bête noir, J.S. Mill.

Ethics in Relation to Conduct

Moore’s fifth chapter in PE is devoted to exploring the question of “What ought we to do?” He says that this question “can only be answered by an entirely new question – the question what things are related as causes to that which is good in itself.” He says that the job here is to determine what conduct is good as a means to good results. This is the question of practical ethics. His first conclusion is that “Intuitionism is mistaken since no proposition with regard to duty is self-evident.” His hope here is not to identify good means with certainty, but with a high degree of probability. His appeal here is often to "Common Sense." He finds that virtues are not to be defined as dispositions that are good in themselves, but as dispositions to perform actions that are "generally" good as a means. Finally, he finds that virtue consists in the "conscientiousness" that is the disposition not to act in certain cases until we believe that our action is right. The value of this feeling has been emphasized by Christian theology, but it “is certainly not, as Kant would lead us to think, either the sole thing of value, or always good as a means.”

The Ideal

The last chapter of PE seems to have been the only chapter read seriously by the artists and aesthetes of the Bloomsbury group. It is here that Moore finds that the "ideal" state of affairs is that which is “generally good in itself.” Here he finds in personal affection and aesthetic enjoyment “by far the greatest goods with which we are acquainted.” He here argues for the value of knowledge and of the intrinsic superiority of knowledge based on reality, as opposed to an imagined reality. He finds that “cognition of material qualities, and even their existence, is an essential constituent of the Ideal or Summum Bonum.” The book ends with a consideration of 1) unmixed goods, 2) evils, and 3)mixed goods. At this point, a weary reader may be excused for wondering if the whole chapter doesn’t fall under the category of the famous NF! And if so, just which ethical theory doesn't.

Proof of an External World

This consideration of the philosophy of GE Moore can’t end without his most famous quote, from his above named paper:

“I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, 'Here is one hand', and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, 'and here is another'. “

This paper comes from the end of Moore’s long and distinguished career as the King of Cambridge. Perhaps he had just gotten tired of all the wrangling, as have I.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

The continental/analytical divide, which has split philosophy for around the past hundred years, is less a debate than a division of labour. Continental philosophers, liberated by Kant from the need to ground their intuitions empirically, have taken on the grand mantle of philosophy of old: metaphysics, aesthetics, history. Analyticals, mostly concentrated in the Anglophone world, have preferred to focus on more modest fields, mostly of modern provenance: philosophy of language, mathematics and science; and formal logic. (The one exception might be Analytical philosophy of mind, which goes back to Descartes and Leibniz, and has antecedents in Classical Philosophy.)

G.E. Moore sits firmly in the second camp, but ambitiously attempts to reclaim the field of ethics to the analytical fold. To do so, he begins by clearing up a lot of the incorrect notions which had accumulated in the field, including hedonism, utilitarianism, and Kantian ethics. Pretty much every serious study of ethics has at some point fallen back on an appeal to nature or the like. Moore calls this the "naturalistic fallacy". Having dismissed all of the rest, he attempts a positive construction of what might be defined as good, and thus as desirable.

And here is where he stumbles. Freely admitting that much work remains, Moore (himself known for his high ethical character, incidentally) struggles to define exactly what we might consider good, and on what basis. Especially in the field of aesthetics, his own judgments seem to veer dangerously close to the naturalistic fallacy. The assumption that some virtues are inherently good, while tempting, does seem to need more formal grounding.

The strength of this book is in its thorough and clear examination - and repudiation - of most of the previous ethical theories to gain currency in the Western world. But the spectre of Postmodernism haunts this book: as logical positivism crumbled to dust by mid-century, Continentals would turn to moral relativism, while Analyticals would withdraw from the field altogether. Neutral moral judgments, seen as intuitive to most of us as children, aren't nearly as simple as they appear.

[J · Rating 1 out of 5]

G.E. Moore is a British philosopher in the worst sense, and this book of his is characteristically boring to the point of being offensive to the reader. The most insightful part of this book is the incredibly NOT insightful realization "good" does not literally mean "utility", "hedonism", "jammy-dodgers", etc. After attempting to slog through this mess, I gained a real appreciation of Wittgenstein's contempt of Moore as a person who can make it far in life with absolutely no intelligence whatsoever. If you want to read English philosophy that doesn't suck, I'd go with Hume or Ayer, the former being somewhat entertaining, and Ayer because he's one of the few British philosophers of the past centuries with anything worthwhile to say.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

One good point need not make a book.

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moore's book, regarded as one of the classics on ethics, is probably mostly known nowadays for one short, but important, section in the first chapter. Here Moore introduces the much debated "naturalist fallacy". Chapter 1 also explains Moore's views on "organic wholes", which is helpful.

It's an interesting book from the ideas perspective, clearly written and fairly accessible. It is a little dull in writing style (not unusual for philosophy books to be fair) and I found it repetitive. I think an author writing this in the present era would have tried to complete it in half the number of pages. At times it reads like a period piece, as it was written in 1903. This is a shame as most of the chapters still have relevance to anyone studying ethics, with the exception of chapter 2 which seems mostly to be an attack on Herbert Spencer. Does anyone read the once famous Spencer anymore? I suspect practically no one. Moore's analysis and rejection of Hedonism in chapter 3 still has much to value. Chapter 5 has some helpful thoughts, but could be stated in a much more condensed way.

I can't say anyone needs to read this book anymore as most of the important contents have been absorbed into later ethicists thinking, but it is still and influential book, and worth a go if you have the time.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica marked a watershed moment in analytic philosophy that liberated British philosophy from the tyranny of utilitarianism and exercised major influence on the Bloomsbury Group, whose members considered it as a kind of ethical bible. Moore’s ethical intuitionism also paved the way for non-cognitivism in ethics, most notably emotivism, even if Moore himself promoted non-natural moral realism. While Moore’s constructive moral theory has not exactly stood the test of time (few now endorse his brand of consequentialism), his conception of the naturalistic fallacy continues to spark debate in contemporary moral philosophy.

In the preface to Principia Ethica, Moore identifies a series of problems that he claims lead to confusion in moral philosophy. First, he claims that philosophers have not properly differentiated the question, What should exist for its own sake, because it is good in itself or has intrinsic value? from the question, What should we do? At the same time, and in relation to both questions, Moore claims philosophers have not properly differentiated what has value as a means to some further end from what is valuable in itself. Put differently, philosophers on Moore’s view have not adequately asked and answered the question, What is good? and this has led them to errors with respect to specific ethical precepts and their justification in relation to certain ends. Moore hopes to clear up this confusion by way of a reductionist conception of ethics and its task.

Another core problem that Moore claims leads to confusion is that, in their moral theories, philosophers have almost always committed what he calls the naturalistic fallacy, which consists in any attempt to define goodness in relation to some natural or supersensible object or property. For Moore, the naturalistic fallacy does not only apply to empiricist philosophers who confuse goodness with a natural object (a critique shared by Kant), but also idealist philosophers (like Kant) who associate goodness with a metaphysical object, like the good will. When philosophers commit the naturalistic fallacy, it leads them to posit a univocal definition of goodness concomitant with a value monism that fails to account for many types of intrinsically good entities. Importantly, the naturalistic fallacy is only a fallacy if one accepts one of Moore’s most crucial metaethical claims: that goodness cannot be defined, because it is unanalyzable—i.e. there can be no analytic definition of goodness.

Moore claims that goodness cannot be analyzed, and so cannot be defined in relation to a natural or metaphysical object, because it is a simple and not a complex property. That is, whereas some properties are complex insofar as they are constituted by more basic properties—Moore offers the example of a horse, whose horse-ness consists in a certain combination of its constitutive elements—others are simple insofar as they cannot be explained in relation to any other property except themselves—for example, the color yellow: while we can identify certain physical properties that accompany yellowness, what we mean by yellow is not these physical properties but simply yellowness itself. Goodness, Moore asserts, is a simple property like yellow, and he offers a defense of this claim by way of what is often called the open question argument. The open question argument simply states that whenever a philosopher commits the naturalistic fallacy and defines goodness in relation to a natural or metaphysical object or property, it can always be asked whether that object or property is itself good. If this is true, then goodness transcends its relation to any one object or property, and hence there exists a crucial distinction between the question, What is good? and the question, Is x good?

For example, when a hedonist philosopher claims that goodness is pleasure, one can ask whether pleasure is good. And while pleasure may indeed be good, the fact that one can ask this question means that goodness is not reducible to pleasure. As is clear from this last example, Moore’s contention that goodness is unanalyzable is not to say that what philosophers have often claimed constitutes goodness is not good—pleasure (Mill), the good will (Kant), and contemplation (Aristotle) can still be goods even if none of them exhaust what goodness means. Importantly, because goodness cannot be defined in this way, Moore insists that we know what is good based on intuition: certain moral propositions are self-evident, i.e. they are only true in relation to themselves. When it comes to moral truths, “no relevant evidence whatever can be adduced: from no other truth, except themselves alone, can it be inferred that they are either true or false” (iv).

With this much established, Moore undertakes a critique of ethical naturalism, hedonism, and what he calls “metaphysical ethics,” i.e. Kantianism and other idealist theories. Each of these, Moore contends, commits the naturalistic fallacy, and hence each cannot adequately justify its ethical precepts. Moore first turns to ethical naturalism, an obvious culprit for the naturalistic fallacy, since naturalism necessarily understands goodness in relation to a natural object. When, as is common in ancient naturalistic theories, goodness is defined in terms of what is normal or necessary, this leads to obvious contradictions (for example, it is clear that not all that is good is normal; often what is abnormal is better than the normal, 43). Yet there are also serious problems with more contemporary versions of ethical naturalism, like the evolutionary ethics of Herbert Spencer, which identifies goodness with human conduct that is more evolved. For Moore, “no conduct is better, because it is more evolved,” since, apart from the fact that we can always ask whether more evolved human conduct is good (because it is an open question), we have no reason to believe that the laws of nature operate so as to produce more moral human conduct over time (50, 57). At best, evolution can serve as a criterion of moral value, and even then only by way of comprehensive empirical analysis to determine whether it is a relatively stable corollary of moral action (50).

Hedonism, which Moore understands to hold that pleasure is the sole good, runs into similar issues due to the naturalistic fallacy. While Moore offers a bevy of criticisms of hedonistic utilitarianism, two are most important. The first is that Mill commits the naturalistic fallacy when, in his so-called proof of utilitarianism, he claims that good means desirable, and to know what is desirable, one must ascertain what humans actually desire. Consequently, what is good amounts to what we desire, and since we all desire pleasure, pleasure is the sole good. The problem, Moore observes, is that Mill conflates what is desirable with what is desired: whereas the desirable means what should be or deserves to be desired, the desired simply means what is desired (66-7). Mill therefore blatantly commits the naturalistic fallacy, the consequence of which is that his moral theory does not tell us what we should do, but merely what we do do—i.e. his ethics is entirely descriptive, not prescriptive (73). Moore’s second important criticism is that pleasure cannot, for intuitive reasons, be the sole good. First, Moore makes the essential clarification, often overlooked by hedonist utilitarians, that pleasure would have absolutely no value apart from human consciousness of it. Charitably, then, the hedonists must mean that consciousness of pleasure is the sole good. Nevertheless, this contention also fails, since, if we were to consider what value we would attach to the consciousness of pleasure “if it existed in absolute isolation, stripped of all its usual accompaniments,” we would not find consciousness of pleasure very valuable—in view of which we must find other properties or objects valuable as well, and hence the hedonistic thesis is false (91). To help see this, consider the pleasurable contemplation of a beautiful object. Can it be true that, if one were to isolate the consciousness of pleasure in this example, it would account for all the value ascribed to this whole? Or rather, as Moore thinks must be the case, does a pleasurable contemplation of beauty have much more value than mere consciousness of pleasure, on account of which all the value in this whole does not come solely from consciousness of pleasure? In short, Moore insists—correctly, I think—that the value of a pleasurable whole does not come exclusively from the pleasure it contains, even if pleasure may be a necessary constituent of many valuable wholes.

Finally, Moore critiques what he calls “metaphysical” moral theories, which he interprets to hold that what is perfectly good exists, but is not natural, and therefore “has some characteristic possessed by a supersensible reality” (113). For these metaphysical theories, ethics follows from metaphysics—i.e. what is good depends on the nature of reality understood in a non-natural sense. Yet if this is true, then metaphysical ethics also commits the naturalistic fallacy, this time not in relation to a natural object, but a metaphysical one. As Moore explains, metaphysical ethics fails to perceive that “any truth which asserts ‘This is good in itself’ is quite unique in kind—that it cannot be reduced to any assertion about reality, and therefore must remain unaffected by any conclusions we may reach about the nature of reality” (114). The best that metaphysics can do in relation to ethics is to help answer the practical moral question about what we should do insofar as it can help us determine the future effects of our actions; “what it can not tell us,” Moore insists, “is whether those effects are good or bad in themselves” (140). Moore’s critique of metaphysical theories—specifically his criticism of Kantian ethics—is less persuasive than his critiques of ethical naturalism and hedonism; as far as I can tell, his objections rely more heavily on his thesis that goodness is an unanalyzable property than in previous chapters, where that thesis, were it accepted, would eliminate contradictions that inevitably arise in ethical naturalism and hedonism. Still, if one accepts Moore’s account of goodness, then it is sufficiently clear how and on what terms metaphysical ethics commits the naturalistic fallacy.

At this point in Principia Ethica, Moore turns to his constructive project, which consists, first, in a case for a kind of rule consequentialism and, second, in an articulation of what he calls the ideal, coupled with an explanation of what entities are intrinsically valuable. These two chapters therefore answer the two questions Moore claims philosophers have typically confused: first, What should we do? (rule consequentialism) and second, What should exist for its own sake? (intrinsically valuable entities, the ideal).

While Moore is intensely critical of utilitarianism for its myopic value monism, he readily endorses consequentialism. “To ask what kind of actions we ought to perform, or what kind of conduct is right,” he states, “is to ask what kind of effects such action and conduct will produce” (146). Put differently, “‘I am morally bound to perform this action’ is identical with the assertion ‘This action will produce the greatest possible amount of good in the Universe’” (147). To defend this consequentialism, Moore observes that when it comes to human actions, “we may ask both how far they are good in themselves [as Kant would have it] and how far they have a general tendency to produce good results [as Mill would have it]” (24). Every action necessarily has consequences whose value can be assessed, and, in a particular case, to deny that the consequences matter with respect to the moral worth of the action is simply “to make a judgment of their intrinsic value, as compared with the action itself” (25). Admittedly, this defense (if it can be called that) presumes the truth of consequentialism, but it also differentiates Moore’s consequentialism from most utilitarian theories in that Moore thinks that an action can have intrinsic value apart from its consequences, but that any overall assessment of an action must also take into account the moral value of its effects, be they instrumental or intrinsic. For example, Moore can claim, unlike a utilitarian, that one should perform a particular action because it has more intrinsic value than any alternative, when “both its consequences and those of the alternatives are absolutely devoid either of intrinsic merit or intrinsic demerit” (25). For a utilitarian, such an action would be morally indifferent, since the moral worth of an action lies entirely in its consequences.

More specifically, Moore endorses a form of rule consequentialism, per which we should always observe any rule that is in most cases useful, not because in every particular case it will be useful, but because in any particular case it is more likely to be useful than the likelihood that we will be able to decide correctly that we are faced with an instance of its disutility (162). The basic idea here is that the epistemic conditions to know whether a specific action is useful in that it causes more good to exist in the universe than any possible alternative (i.e. is a duty, as Moore understands it) are such that we can never know with certainty that any action is a duty (149). As Moore explains, “an ethical law has the nature not of a scientific law but of a scientific prediction: and the latter is always merely probable, although the probability may be very great” (155). Consequently, we can never really be sure that in a particular case we should break a rule that, in most cases, promotes the most good, and it is more probable that in such an instance we will err should we choose to break the rule. In fact, Moore states that, “even if we can clearly discern that our case is one where to break the rule is advantageous [i.e. useful, promotes the most good], yet, so far as our example has any effect at all in encouraging similar action, it will certainly tend to encourage breaches of the rule which are not advantageous” (163). Hence we are never permitted to break typically useful rules of this kind, and in this Moore’s position echoes certain forms of rule utilitarianism.

In the final chapter, Moore describes the ideal, by which he means not the best state of affairs conceivable, nor even the best possible state of affairs in this world, but simply those goods which are good in themselves, as ends, “in a high degree” (184). In other words, the ideal for Moore is composed of intrinsically valuable entities that we would consider good if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation. Famously, Moore concludes that “by far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects” (188). Key to this conclusion is Moore’s principle of organic unities, without which philosophers are likely to err in the assessment of the relative values of various goods. On this principle, the value of a whole is not necessarily equal to the sum of the value of its parts. For example, in the admiration of a beautiful object, which as a whole is very good, neither the beautiful object itself nor the emotion directed toward it makes the whole good: the existence of a beautiful object in isolation may have some intrinsic value, but it is very small compared to the consciousness of beauty; likewise, admiration may have some value, or even none at all, if it existed by itself (189-90). However, the whole as such, constituted by both these relatively low value elements, has considerable intrinsic value that well exceeds the value of the sum of its parts. Moore uses this principle to come to his conclusion about interpersonal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in art or nature as the most valuable wholes, which we should therefore seek as ends. He also uses the principle of organic unities to assess the value of evil wholes and what he calls mixed goods, the latter of which include some element that is evil or unseemly, but are as wholes nevertheless good. Compassion towards others in pain is an example of such a mixed good.

What becomes most clear in Moore’s chapter on the ideal is that he endorses a kind of value pluralism juxtaposed to the value monism he critiques in ethical naturalism, hedonism, and metaphysical ethics, which all commit the naturalistic fallacy. That is, Moore thinks that there are several different kinds of intrinsically valuable entities, or goods, each of which is a complex whole comprised of the consciousness of an object, which itself is complex, and (in almost all cases) an emotional attitude toward this object (224). “These complex wholes themselves, and not any constituent or characteristic of them,” he writes, “form the rational ultimate end of human action” (189). There are, in short, many goods, and philosophers are not warranted in their attempts to siphon off one as the sole good and ultimate end of moral action. While one may want to call into question Moore’s intuitionism and his claim that goodness is unanalyzable, this aspect of his ethics is commendable. There are, surely, many types of intrinsically valuable goods, and certainly many more than Moore entertains in Principia Ethica.

[Vytautas Vyšniauskas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sunku apsispręsti, kas palieka didesnį įspūdį: autoriaus revoliucingas užmojis, kurio skrupulingas įgyvendinimas lėmė tektoninius lūžius pasaulio minties ir metodologijų istorijoje, ar nemokėjimas rašyti aiškia kalba ir skaitytojo skandinimas bereikšmėse ir akivaizdžiomis atrodančiose detalėse. Matyt, ne be jo įtakos akivaizdžiai atrodo dalykai, kurie rašymo metais tokie nebuvo.

Tuo pačiu liūdna matyti, kad taip griežtai surašytas ir kruopščia analize paremtas veikalas liko praignoruotas didelės dalies vėlesnių mokslininkų ir moralės tyrinėtojų, jau nekalbant apie mažiau apsiskaičiusius žmones, kurie ir toliau iki šių dienų laikosi seniai intelektualiai nerentabiliomis tapusių moralinių sampratų.

Nei religinė, nei natūralistinė moralės sampratos, redukuojančios moralę į metafizinius (Dievo įsakymai) arba natūralius (skausmas ir malonumas) predikatus, be Moore’o argumentų atrėmimo, nebegali būti laikomos kažkuo daugiau nei drambliukų svajonėmis. Žinoma, yra autorių, kurie supranta, jog šių dalykų ignoravimas faktiškai prilygsta loginei klaidai, todėl bando jos išvengti.

Tačiau stulbina žinojimas, kad kaip tik šios dvi moralės sampratos, kurios turi mažiausiai teisės egzistuoti, yra labiausiai paplitusios ir netgi įsišaknijusios visuomenėse ir asmeniniuose mąstymuose kaip neišraunamos tiesos, kurioms nematoma alternatyvų.

Moralė savo esme yra labiau atsakymų nei klausimų sritis, tačiau Moore’as pasirenka klausimų be atsakymų kelią, tuo tapdamas amžinu moralistų priešu, sykiu dalinai imančiu graužti pačią moralę kaip apčiuopiamą ar bent tokiu atrodžiusį dalyką, priverčiantį visus, norinčius kalbėti moralinėmis sąvokomis, pirmiausia apmąstyti tų sąvokų reikšmes ir jų santykius. Tai nesibaigiantis darbas, galintis turėti demoralizuojantį efektą, po kurio ir sąvokų aptartis nebetenka prasmės.

Moore’as mums davė galingą ginklą, kuriuo galime tiek sutvirtinti savo moralinius apmąstymus, tiek ir apskritai juos sunaikinti ar nuvesti į akligatvius. Dažnam taip ir nutinka, nes per šimtą metų mes dar neišmokome tuo įrankiu naudotis, dažnai kaip tik paskandindami bet kokius reikšmingus apmąstymus sąvokinėje analitinėje kombinatorikoje, kuri niekur neveda ir svarbiausius dalykus paverčia tik loginiu žaidimu, neturinčiu pabaigos, kurio vienintelis tikslas – moralės pabaiga. Ne visai tai, ko siekė pats Moore’as. Turime priešintis.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading G.E. Moore was responsible for what I consider my first interdisciplinary intellectual breakthrough. When the professor in my philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein course assigned part of Moore's book for us to read, he asked us to focus on his statement that, "When I put my hand in front of my face, I know that it is my hand in front of my face etc." Presumably, now that I think about it, this question calls to mind Wittgenstein's "On Certainty", which we were yet to read. Anyway, I had been studying the writings of Jacques Lacan in a class I was taking simultaneously on deconstruction and psychoanalysis that semester, I appropriated the concept of proprioception, the state of awareness and coming-to-knowledge of your own body in three dimensions which takes place, according to Lacan, as if within a mirror-image located in the mind; I used it in my weekly paper to bolster Moore's argument, which I believe my Prof. found enlightening and original. God knows how much specialized theorists of knowledge are isolated from one another! He gave me an "A" in the class, one of the few I received while at Bard, except for my Senior Thesis, where I got one by outright pleading, Lol.

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boken innehåller en detaljerad genomgång av vad etik är eller inte är, med fokus på de definitioner som utgör grunden för våra åsikter, oavsett om dessa definitioner är explicita eller implicita, eller ens medvetna contra omedvetna.

Det som i huvudsak imponerade på mig, var diskussionen om begreppet godhet, och hur det hänger samman med etiska åsikter - det som han kallar för den naturalistiska felslutet. Argumentet är detsamma som Sokrates förde fram för 2000 år sedan - att det goda kommer att variera i olika situationer, och alltså inte kan definieras av externa empiriska exempel. Istället återvänder Moore till något som liknar synderesisbegreppet, dvs. idéen om att vi har ett slags moralisk instinkt, som hjälper oss att göra rätt. Han definierar detta ganska väl, och påpekar att moral kommer att ha karaktären av vetenskaplig hypotes, snarare än vetenskaplig lag.

Ett antal väldigt väl använda timmar. Jag rekommenderar den för både beslutsteoretiker och filosofinördar.

[Tim Landström · Rating 2 out of 5]

I find a lot of the argumentation interesting, but some parts of seems excessive. Most of the book serves more as clarification of the questions raised, than positive answers to them. Which I guess is the point, but it gets exhausting after a while (I am also not very interested in the subject matter, which does not help).

[Joshua Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moore's Principia is considered a classic in the field of meta-ethics in the early 20th century. It has all of the unfortunate hallmarks of the intellectually rich British philosophy of that era: It is terribly dry, superficial in its understanding of scientific concepts which had barely been borne, and not self-conscious in rehashing its historical situation with respect to the ideas that clearly inform it.

The critique of ethical naturalism that Moore raises in the book is largely seen today as a non-sequitur, as there are plenty of non-naturalists who maintain the sort of utilitarianism developed by Sidgwick. As Moore's primary interlocutor, having some familiarity with Sidgwick is important, but even a passing familiarity will get the job done, as what Moore does discuss he quotes extensively at length.

There are a number of problems with Moore's positions, but that doesn't make for a bad piece of philosophy. Lots of mistaken pieces of philosophy have turned out to be tremendously important. That seems to have been true for Moore and many others who took his hard-line position on meta-ethics. His attacks on Sidgwick turn out to be reasonably salient, but Sidgwick's utilitarianism seems to have survived, though in a somewhat different form.

Though Moore's non-naturalism in meta-ethics is still being debated, it is probably the most important concept presented in the book; in fact, that is probably the reason that it is still being debated. The metaphysical grounding for ethics is something that really gets a lot of engines rolling and Moore has provided a lot of support for secular ethics, in part inadvertantly, by helping to reformulate the non-naturalism of Hume that seems to have permeated the British philosophical tradition.

The book is a solid and important read for those who are interested in early 20th century philosophy, particularly ethics; because it is historically dated, though, it is hard to argue for its importance for someone studying, for example, contemporary ethics. It just isn't going to be of much use to those getting into the contemporary conversation, compared to modern ethicists. Someone interested in ethics is probably better off focussing on contemporary ethicists.

[Dr. A · Rating 4 out of 5]

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Read this and reviews of other classics in Western Philosophy on the History page of www.BestPhilosophyBooks.org (a thinkPhilosophy Production).
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This is a key work by one of the founders of the contemporary Analytic tradition in Philosophy. In this best loved work, Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore argues for a common sense approach to ethics that is given the name of “ethical naturalism.”

In "ethical naturalism," ethical decisions are based not on idealized or abstract principles, like some notion of the “good” (which Moore argues is not definable), but by a number of objectively determined values that are context dependent. For example, one might make a decision in a given context based on what is good in terms of aesthetics or beauty; on social norms (for example, of friendship); or on what is known to be true.

In short, the right thing to do is what will produce the most good, but how goodness is determined varies.

His argument is as compelling as it is easy to follow and absorb, and his work has been very influential on the likes of 20th Century philosophers like Bertrand Russell and pragmatist Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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Read this and reviews of other classics in Western Philosophy on the History page of www.BestPhilosophyBooks.org (a thinkPhilosophy Production).
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[adam · Rating 1 out of 5]

G.E. Moore is the father of analytic philosophy, which is why you shouldn't read this book. It is basically a 200-page treatise on ethics that fails to actually give a definition of "the good" (since Moore believes it to be a simple concept that is beyond definition) and instead only outlines the ways in which one must define the realm of ethics. My favorite part is when he is debunking the Darwinists and says that evolution is a "temporary historical process" and therefore "more evolved" does not mean "better."

This is one of those highly influential books that is better left unread.

[Cooper Ackerly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imperfect, yes, but a work of genius — a clear-eyed attempt to reach the truth, and ultimately a convincing proof of the value of the good, of beauty, and of the love of one and thus the other.

[Rommel Harlequin Monet · Rating 5 out of 5]

(1903)

127. (3) The third class of great positive evils appears to be the class of pains

With regard to these it should first be remarked that, as in the case of pleasure, it is not pain itself, but only the consciousness of pain, towards which our judgments of value are directed. Just as in Chap. III., it was said that pleasure, however intense, which no one felt, would be no good at all; so it appears that pain, however intense, of which there was no consciousness, would be no evil at all.

It is, therefore, only the consciousness of intense pain, which can be maintained to be a great evil. But that this, by itself, may be a great evil, I cannot avoid thinking. The case of pain thus seems to differ from that of pleasure: for the mere consciousness of pleasure, however intense, does not, by itself, appear to be a great good, even if it has some slight intrinsic value. In short, pain (if we understand by this expression, the consciousness of pain) appears to be a far worse evil than pleasure is a good. But, if this be so, then pain must be admitted to be an exception from the rule which seems to hold both of all other great evils and of all great goods: namely that they are all organic unities to which both a cognition of an object and an emotion directed towards that object are essential. In the case of pain and of pain alone, it seems to be true that a mere cognition, by itself, may be a great evil. It is, indeed, an organic unity, since it involves both the cognition and the object, neither of which, by themselves, has either merit or demerit. But it is a less complex organic unity than any other great evil and than any great good, both in respect of the fact that it does not involve, beside the cognition, an emotion directed[p. 213] towards its object, and also in respect of the fact that the object may here be absolutely simple, whereas in most, if not all, other cases, the object itself is highly complex.

This want of analogy between the relation of pain to intrinsic evil and of pleasure to intrinsic good, seems also to be exhibited in a second respect. Not only is it the case that consciousness of intense pain is, by itself, a great evil, whereas consciousness of intense pleasure is, by itself, no great good; but also the converse difference appears to hold of the contribution which they make to the value of the whole, when they are combined respectively with another great evil or with a great good. That is to say, the presence of pleasure (though not in proportion to its intensity) does appear to enhance the value of a whole, in which it is combined with any of the great unmixed goods which we have considered: it might even be maintained that it is only wholes, in which some pleasure is included, that possess any great value: it is certain, at all events, that the presence of pleasure makes a contribution to the value of good wholes greatly in excess of its own intrinsic value. On the contrary, if a feeling of pain be combined with any of the evil states of mind which we have been considering, the difference which its presence makes to the value of the whole, as a whole, seems to be rather for the better than the worse: in any case, the only additional evil which it introduces, is that which it, by itself, intrinsically constitutes. Thus, whereas pain is in itself a great evil, but makes no addition to the badness of a whole, in which it is combined with some other bad thing, except that which consists in its own intrinsic badness; pleasure, conversely, is not in itself a great good, but does make a great addition to the goodness of a whole in which it is combined with a good thing, quite apart from its own intrinsic value.

128. But finally, it must be insisted that pleasure and pain are completely analogous in this: that we cannot assume either that the presence of pleasure always makes a state of things better on the whole, or that the presence of pain always makes it worse. This is the truth which is most liable to be overlooked with regard to them; and it is because this is true, that the common theory, that pleasure is the only good and pain the[p. 214] only evil, has its grossest consequences in misjudgments of value. Not only is the pleasantness of a state not in proportion to its intrinsic worth; it may even add positively to its vileness. We do not think the successful hatred of a villain the less vile and odious, because he takes the keenest delight in it; nor is there the least need, in logic, why we should think so, apart from an unintelligent prejudice in favour of pleasure. In fact it seems to be the case that wherever pleasure is added to an evil state of either of our first two classes, the whole thus formed is always worse than if no pleasure had been there. And similarly with regard to pain. If pain be added to an evil state of either of our first two classes, the whole thus formed is always better, as a whole, than if no pain had been there; though here, if the pain be too intense, since that is a great evil, the state may not be better on the whole. It is in this way that the theory of vindictive punishment may be vindicated. The infliction of pain on a person whose state of mind is bad may, if the pain be not too intense, create a state of things that is better on the whole than if the evil state of mind had existed unpunished. Whether such a state of things can ever constitute a positive good, is another question.

129. II. The consideration of this other question belongs properly to the second topic, which was reserved above for discussion namely the topic of ‘mixed’ goods. ‘Mixed’ goods were defined above as things, which, though positively good as wholes, nevertheless contain, as essential elements, something intrinsically evil or ugly. And there certainly seem to be such goods. But for the proper consideration of them, it is necessary to take into account a new distinction the distinction just expressed as being between the value which a thing possesses ‘as a whole,’ and that which it possesses ‘on the whole.’

..... For by far the greater part of the actions, of which we commonly think as duties, are negative: what we feel to be our duty is to abstain from some action to which a strong natural impulse tempts us. And these wrong actions, in the avoidance of which duty consists, are usually such as produce, very immediately, some bad consequence in pain to others; while, in many prominent instances, the inclination, which prompts us to them, is itself an intrinsic evil, containing, as where the impulse is lust or cruelty, an anticipatory enjoyment of something evil or ugly. That right action does thus so frequently entail the suppression of some evil impulse, is necessary to explain the plausibility of the view that virtue consists in the control of passion by reason. Accordingly, the truth seems to be that, whenever a strong moral emotion is excited by the idea of rightness, this emotion is accompanied by a vague cognition of the kind of[p. 219] evils usually suppressed or avoided by the actions which most frequently occur to us as instances of duty; and that the emotion is directed towards this evil quality. We may, then, conclude that the specific moral emotion owes almost all its intrinsic value to the fact that it includes a cognition of evils accompanied by a hatred of them: mere rightness, whether truly or untruly attributed to an action, seems incapable of forming the object of an emotional contemplation, which shall be any great good.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/...

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In a letter at the time of its publication, John Maynard Keynes wrote that the book “is a stupendous and entrancing work, *the greatest* on the subject” [Keynes’s italics], and a few years later he wrote to Strachey, “It is impossible to exaggerate the wonder and originality of Moore. … How amazing to think that only we know the rudiments of a true theory of ethic[s].” And, in a 1938 paper to the Bloomsbury Group, entitled “My Early Beliefs,” Keynes recalls that the Principia’s “effect on us, and the talk which preceded and followed it, dominated and perhaps still dominates, everything else.” He added that the book “was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a new renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on earth” (Skidelsky 1983, pp. 133–34;
Keynes [1951] 1972, pp. 436–49)

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is (a) dopey, (b) frustrating, and (c) one of the greatest works of moral philosophy of the 20th century. It's dopey because its concern with metaethics hardly touches on practical moral issues. It's frustrating because it takes a long time to say simple things. And it's one of the greatest works of moral philosophy of the 20th century for its implications for ethics at large.

There are plenty of inconsistencies and outright absurdities to pick nits about when it comes to G.E. Moore, but in what follows I'm going to read his ethical system as generously as possible. Moore convincingly argues that what human beings regard as "good" is not reducible to any other thing. If this is true, it follows that any attempt to conceive of what is good as the maximization of pleasure is misguided. But what Moore does believe is that any ethical system ought to maximize the greatest good or to approximate it by trying to bring about a world with the greatest number of goods. Our way of moralizing will always be only approximate because as humans we're limited in knowing the full consequences of our actions. We may fail. We may even bring about something worse. Despite this limitation, we are still responsible for those foreseeable consequences, or more precisely put, we are responsible for the consequences that any reasonable person would foresee.

Now here is where I will be critical of Moore. He wants to say that because those higher goods in which we aim are so remote, we would do better to pursue more immediate self-interested aims. But this is not only mere assertion, it's a categorical confusion. While it is true, as he says, that we don't know if pursuing greater goals will bring about those goals, what is often undeniable is that were those greater goals brought about, we would have a better world. To take a concrete case, let's look at Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." This was a response to liberal pastors who were telling him to stave off the civil rights movement and wait for a more opportune time. King argued that while it might be more convenient and easier for everybody if he and the other activists ended the fight, it was undeniable that we would have a more just society were civil rights secured for African Americans. Even the partial security was worth it.

Another criticism of Moore: he seems to suffer from a lack of imagination. When it comes time to lay out the highest goods that would be in our benefit to seek, they are limited to "certain states of consciousness" (undefined) and "aesthetic enjoyment." No doubt those are worth pursuing. But what of certain guarantees of material benefits? Or universal human rights? Just because Moore was limited in his imagination doesn't mean we need to be.

[Bernard English]

Moore is obviously a very careful and precise writer, but towards the end of the book, I was rather fatigued by his effort. There are lots of statements such as "The object would no more have the beauty it has, without its specific qualities, than without those that are generic; and the generic qualities,  by themselves, would fail, as completely, to give beauty, as those which are specific." The book is not primarily about art, but somehow I thought the application of his approach to something more concrete than art reveals the limits of his analysis better than when he discusses ethics. Another application of his approach to a concrete thesis, is when he offers this argument against Theodicy:
"It might be the case that the existence of evil was necessary, not merely as a means, but analytically, to the existence of the greatest good. But we have no reason to think that is is the case in any instance whatsoever."
Be warned, this is about as concrete of a statement he will make. He basis this argument on earlier ones which are even more abstract. I realize it may well be necessary to get these formal foundations straight before tackling real world problems, but it does make for some dreary reading, at least for me.

Unfortunately, he doesn't follow up on his interesting observation that "the principle of division of labour, according to special capacity, which is recognised in respect of employments, would also give a better result in respect of virtues." That's too bad as I recall Edward Wilson seems to have made a somewhat similar suggestion in his Sociobiology, in the context of evolutionary ethics. But in Wilson's case, it was actually quite controversial and engendered lots of debate.

[Stella R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolute banger. Moore writes with incredible clarity and precision -- you can tell he is doing everything he possibly can to help you understand his arguments, and, honestly, to understand what the hell every single moral philosopher has been saying.

Problem is that I'm not sure if I believe any of it. I really like his distinction between "good" and "good human action," and I think he's right that we need to figure out what "good" is first. He ends up saying that it is undefinable because it is a simple category not a composite one -- he doesn't really argue for that and I don't really know what that could mean.

[Frederico · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got into this book thinking: "I only really need to read one chapter of this, but I might as well read it all. After all, it is one of the most important texts in contemporary ethics."

I can now say that I definitely do not regret reading it - which is definitely not to say that I'm happy with what I read. It is is such a distant treatment of the everyday-ethical world of common people that one could say it is even offensive that Moore sees his ultimate conclusions as being accessible through mere common-sense.

[Adrian Schroeder · Rating 2 out of 5]

In itself a revolutionary approach to ethics to build from scratch and logic. Unfortunately, he gets lost in applying his logic and loses the thoroughness of the first chapters. Further, there are some grave misunderstandings of Kant's principles and Nietzsche's worldview which undermine the credibility of his own proposal. Freely after Nietsche: "Utilitarians are only concerned with british happiness for the british people: comfort and a seat in parliament."

[Adrián Sánchez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contiene una fuerte crítica a la ética naturalista basada principalmente en la falacia naturalista, falacia que viene por el hecho de que al no poder definir lo que es bueno, no se pueden concluir valores morales de hechos naturales que por lo general no son morales, para el autor se pueden descubrir valores morales a través de la intuición y el sentido común, realizando comparaciones de lo que tienen en común varios juicios éticos.

[Ryan Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classics are classics for a reason.

Have you ever noticed that when you're really impressed by something, and think "ya, that's about right," then years pass, and your own views drift, then you return to that initial thing, and find yourself really surprised by some of the views in it: "I don't remember that! I thought Moore and I were aligned on this point,"

welp, comes from having a poor memory

great book.

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them. The direct object of Ethics is knowledge and not practice; and any one who uses the naturalistic fallacy has certainly not fulfilled this first object, however correct his practical principles may be.

[Stinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moore argues that the good may include but is not identical with that which causes pleasure. He proposes that goodness is itself undefinable and irreducible, and I find myself in agreement with him.

Therefore, the best for one does not necessarily entail whether one had fun or enjoyed something, though it could.

[Ruthie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this book for school. Although I think that the points it made were invaluable (good is good, our duty is to achieve the greatest total possible good), it was SO difficult to understand. I would read pages over and over again trying to understand what it was that I just read.