George Edward Moore
Categories: Section stubs | 1873 births | 1958 deaths | 20th century philosophers | Analytic philosophers
- This article is about the English philosopher. For the G.E. Moore who co-founded Intel and coined what became Moore's law, see Gordon Moore.
George Edward Moore, also known as G.E. Moore, (November 4, 1873 – October 24, 1958) was a distinguished and hugely influential English philosopher who was educated and taught at the University of Cambridge. He was, with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and (before them) Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of the Analytic tradition in philosophy, which now predominates in the English-speaking world.
Moore is best known today for his defense of ethical non-naturalism, his emphasis on common sense in philosophical method, and the paradox which bears his name. He is very much "philosopher's philosopher"—greatly admired and influential among other philosophers, but (unlike his friend and colleague Russell) mostly unknown today outside of academic philosophy. Moore's essays are known for his clear, circumspect writing style, and for his methodical and patient approach to philosophical problems. Among his most famous works are his book Principia Ethica, and his essays, "The Refutation of Idealism", "A Defence of Common Sense", and "A Proof of the External World".
G.E. Moore died on October 24, 1958 and was interred in the Burial Ground of Parish of the Ascension, Cambridge, England. The poet Nicholas Moore is his son.
Contents |
Ethics
Moore is also well-known for the so-called "open question argument," which is contained in his (also greatly influential) Principia Ethica. The Principia is one of the main inspirations of the movement against ethical naturalism (see ethical non-naturalism) and is partly responsible for the twentieth-century concern with meta-ethics.
The Naturalistic Fallacy
Moore charged that most other philosophers who worked in ethics had made a mistake he called the "Naturalistic fallacy". The business of ethics, Moore agreed, is to discover the qualities that make things good. So, for example, hedonists about value claim that the quality being pleasant is what makes things good; other theorists could claim that complexity is what makes things good. With this project Moore has no quarrel. What he objects to is the idea that, in telling us the qualities that make things good, ethical theorists have thereby given us an analysis of the term 'good' and the property goodness. Moore regards this as a serious confusion. To take an example, a hedonist might be right to claim that something is good just in case it is pleasant. But this does not mean, Moore wants to insist, that we can define value in terms of pleasure. Telling us what qualities make things valuable is one thing; analyzing value is quite another.
Open Question Argument
- Main article: Open Question Argument
Moore's argument for the indefinability of “good” (and thus for the fallaciousness of the “naturalistic fallacy”) is often called the Open Question Argument; it is presented in §13 of Principia Ethica. The argument hinges on the nature of statements such as "Anything that is pleasant is also good" and the possibility of asking questions such as "Is it good that x is pleasant?" According to Moore, these questions are open and these statements are significant; and they will remain so no matter what is substituted for "pleasure". Moore concludes from this that any analysis of value is bound to fail. In other words, if value could be analyzed, then such questions and statements would be trivial and obvious. Since they are anything but trivial and obvious, value must be indefinable. Critics of Moore's arguments sometimes claim that he is appealing to general puzzles concerning analysis (cf. the paradox of analysis), rather than revealing anything special about value. Other responses appeal to the Fregean distinction between sense and reference, allowing that value concepts are special and sui generis, but insisting that value properties are nothing but natural properties (this strategy is similar to that taken by non-reductive materialists in philosophy of mind).
Good as indefinable
Moore contended that goodness cannot be analyzed in terms of any other property. In Principia Ethica, he writes:
- 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 those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not "other," but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. (§ 10 ¶ 3)
Therefore, the only definition we can give of "good" is an ostensive one; that is, we can only point to an action or a thing and say "That is good." Similarly, we cannot describe to a blind man exactly what yellow is. We can only show a sighted man a piece of yellow paper or a yellow scrap of cloth and say "That is yellow."
Good as a non-natural property
In addition to categorizing "good" as indefinable, Moore also emphasized that it is a non-natural property. That is, two objects that are qualitatively identical cannot have different values. There cannot be two yellow shirts that are identical in every way (same shade of yellow, made at the same factory, the same brand name, the same style, etc...) except for their reception of the predication of "good" (one cannot be good and the other not good). An object's property of "good" is determined by what other properties the object has. It is a property that is a product of having other properties. Therefore, if two objects are qualitatively identical, they must have the same value of "good".
Moral knowledge
To support his proposed arguments, Moore contended that man has a "moral intuition" that helps him locate what exactly is "good". In this he was a follower of Ethical intuitionism.
Proof of an External World
One of the most important parts of Moore's philosophical development was his break from the idealism that dominated British philosophy (as represented in the works of his former teachers F. H. Bradley and John McTaggart), and his defense of what he regarded as a "common sense" form of realism. In his 1925 essay "A Defence of Common Sense" he argued against idealism and skepticism toward the external world on the grounds that they could not give reasons to accept their metaphysical premises that were more plausible than the reasons we have to accept the common sense claims about our knowledge of the world that skeptics and idealists must deny. He famously put the point into dramatic relief with his 1939 essay "Proof of an External World", in which he gave a common sense argument against skepticism by raising his right hand and saying "Here is one hand," and then raising his left and saying "And here is another," then concluding that there are at least two external objects in the world, and therefore that he knows (by this argument) that an external world exists. Not surprisingly, not everyone inclined to skeptical doubts found Moore's method of argument entirely convincing; Moore, however, defends his argument on the grounds that skeptical arguments seem invariably to require an appeal to "philosophical intuitions" that we have considerably less reason to accept than we have for the common sense claims that they supposedly refute. (In addition to fueling Moore's own work, the "Here is one hand" argument also deeply influenced Wittgenstein, who spent his last weeks working out a new approach to Moore's argument in the remarks that were published posthumously as On Certainty.)
Language
Moore is also remembered for drawing attention to the peculiar inconsistency involved in uttering a sentence such as "It will rain but I don't believe that it will"--a puzzle which is now commonly called "Moore's paradox". The puzzle arises because it seems impossible for anyone to consistently assert such a sentence; but there doesn't seem to be any logical contradiction between "It will rain" and "I don't believe that it will rain". (Indeed, it is not unusual for such conjunctions to be true — for example, whenever I am wrong about the weather forecast.)
In addition to Moore's own work on the paradox, the puzzle also inspired a great deal of work by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who described the paradox as the most impressive philosophical insight that Moore had ever introduced.
Works Online
- G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903)
- G. E. Moore, Review of Franz Brentano's The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong (1903)
- G. E. Moore, The Refutation of Idealism (1903)
- G. E. Moore, Ethics (1912)
External Resources
- Summary of life and work of G. E. Moore at http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/moor.htm
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Books
- A Defense of Realism: Reflections on the Metaphysics of G. E. Moore by E. D. Klemke ISBN 1573927325
Sources
- G.E. Moore, On Defining "Good," in Analytic Philosophy: Classic Readings, Stamford, CT: Wadsworth, 2002, pp.1-10. ISBN 0-534-51277-1.bg:Джордж Едуард Мур
de:George Edward Moore et:George Edward Moore pl:George Edward Moore fi:George Edward Moore sv:George Edward Moore