Contents · 7 sections · 4 min
Moore in Five Ideas
the essentialsThe naturalistic fallacy
Good cannot be defined as pleasure, or what we desire, or any natural property; it is a simple, indefinable quality, known by intuition.
The open-question argument
Of anything said to define “good” — “pleasure”, say — one can always sensibly ask, “but is pleasure good?” So the definition fails.
Common sense
We know with certainty many ordinary truths — that the earth has existed for many years, that I have a body — more certainly than any philosophical premise that would deny them.
Here is one hand
A proof of an external world — “here is one hand, and here is another” — as good as any proof can be.
Moore's paradox
“It is raining, but I do not believe it is raining” may be true, yet it is absurd to assert it.
George Edward Moore was a Cambridge philosopher who, with his friend Bertrand Russell, led the break from idealism that founded analytic philosophy (Analytic Philosophy). He was famous less for any system than for a manner: a relentless demand to know exactly what a philosophical statement meant, and a refusal to accept any conclusion — that time is unreal, that we cannot know there are material things — that contradicted what everyone ordinarily knows. His Principia Ethica (1903) argued that “good” is a simple, indefinable property and that every attempt to define it commits the naturalistic fallacy; its account of the supreme goods — personal affection and the enjoyment of beauty — made it the creed of the Bloomsbury Group. His “Defence of Common Sense” (1925) and “Proof of an External World” (1939) made him the patron of common-sense philosophy.
Life
Moore was born on 4 November 1873 in Upper Norwood, south London, the fifth of eight children of a doctor; the poet Thomas Sturge Moore was his brother. He studied classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Russell persuaded him to take up philosophy and the Apostles elected him. A prize fellowship (1898–1904) allowed him to write his early papers and Principia Ethica. After some years in Edinburgh and London on a private income, he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer (1911) and was professor of philosophy (1925–39), editing the journal Mind from 1921 to 1947. He married Dorothy Ely in 1916. His students and admirers remembered his transparent honesty, his gasping intensity in discussion, and the gesture of holding up his hands. He died in Cambridge on 24 October 1958.
The refutation of idealism
In “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903) Moore attacked the principle, central to Berkeley and the British Hegelians, that esse est percipi — “to be is to be perceived”. Every sensation, he argued, has two elements: the act of consciousness, common to all sensations, and its object, which differs — blue in one case, green in another. The object is distinct from the awareness of it, and need not depend on it; so there is no reason to think that what we are aware of exists only in being perceived. Russell later wrote that he and Moore together “rebelled”: “with a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green”.
Principia Ethica
Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) begins with the question “What is good?” and answers that “good” is indefinable: like “yellow”, it names a simple quality that cannot be analysed into parts. Philosophers who identified good with pleasure (the utilitarians), with what is desired, with what is more evolved (Herbert Spencer), or with what God commands, committed what he called the naturalistic fallacy — confusing good with some other property that good things may have.
His proof was the open-question argument. If “good” meant “pleasant”, then “Is pleasure good?” would mean “Is pleasure pleasant?” — a closed, trivial question. But it is not trivial; it is a real, open question. The same holds for any proposed definition. Therefore good is a non-natural property, known by intuition. (Later philosophers — Ayer, R. M. Hare, and the expressivists — took the argument to show that “good” is not a property at all, but an expression of attitude or a recommendation.)
In the last chapter, “The Ideal”, Moore asked what things are good in themselves, and answered that “by far the most valuable things… are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects”. For the young members of the Apostles and the later Bloomsbury Group — John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry — this was a liberation from Victorian duty into a religion of friendship and art. Keynes said they took the first part of the book and ignored the rest, including Moore’s quite conventional view that we should generally follow established rules.
Common sense and the external world
In “A Defence of Common Sense” (1925) Moore listed a series of truisms he claimed to know with certainty: that there exists now a living human body which is his body; that it was born some time ago and has been on or near the earth ever since; that many other human beings have bodies and experiences; that the earth existed for many years before he was born. Any philosophical argument that denied these — that time or matter is unreal — must, he held, have some premise less certain than the truisms it denies. Philosophers who denied them contradicted themselves, since in philosophising they presupposed other people and a shared world.
In the British Academy lecture “Proof of an External World” (1939) he went further: holding up his hands, he said, “Here is one hand”, and, gesturing with the other, “and here is another”. From this it followed that there are at least two external objects, and so that an external world exists. The proof, he argued, met every condition of a good proof: its premises were known, different from the conclusion, and the conclusion followed. Many found this either profound or absurd. Wittgenstein’s last notes, published as On Certainty (1969), were a long meditation on Moore’s claims, arguing that such propositions are not known but are the “hinges” on which our doubts and inquiries turn.
Moore’s paradox
Moore observed that a sentence like “It is raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining” can be true — it may be raining and I may not believe it — yet it seems absurd to assert. This puzzle about the relation between assertion and belief, which Wittgenstein named Moore’s paradox, remains much discussed in philosophy of language and epistemology.
In conversation
- The naturalistic fallacy — the claim that good cannot be defined by any natural property.
- “Here is one hand” — common sense against scepticism.
- Bloomsbury’s bible — friendship and beauty as the highest goods.
G. E. Moore in two minutes
The Cambridge philosopher who, with Russell, led the revolt against idealism; whose Principia Ethica named the “naturalistic fallacy” and inspired the Bloomsbury Group; and who answered scepticism by holding up his hands — “here is one hand, and here is another”.
- The naturalistic fallacy. Good cannot be defined as pleasure, or what we desire, or any natural property; it is a simple, indefinable quality, known by intuition.
- The open-question argument. Of anything said to define “good” — “pleasure”, say — one can always sensibly ask, “but is pleasure good?” So the definition fails.
- Common sense. We know with certainty many ordinary truths — that the earth has existed for many years, that I have a body — more certainly than any philosophical premise that would deny them.
- Here is one hand. A proof of an external world — “here is one hand, and here is another” — as good as any proof can be.
- Moore's paradox. “It is raining, but I do not believe it is raining” may be true, yet it is absurd to assert it.
Answering: David Hume, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · Answered by: Ludwig Wittgenstein, A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin
Curiosities
did you know?- Keynes said Principia Ethica was ‘the beginning of a renaissance’; it became the bible of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster.
- Wittgenstein named ‘Moore’s paradox’ in his honour, saying it was the most important thing Moore had discovered.
- As examiner for Wittgenstein’s doctorate in 1929 — on the Tractatus — he reportedly wrote: ‘It is my personal opinion that Mr Wittgenstein’s thesis is a work of genius; but, be that as it may, it is certainly well up to the standard required for the Cambridge degree of Doctor of Philosophy.’
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Can ‘good’ be defined?
- Is common sense a better guide than philosophical argument?
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