"IT WILL RAIN, BUT I DON'T BELIEVE IT WILL."

G. E. Moore (1873-1958) would have hated to be called George Edward, both of which names he, for some reason, intensely disliked. To indulge this little weakness, I shall refer to him from now on only as Moore.

In the thin forest of post-Nietzschean philosophers Moore stands out as a large, albeit relatively little-known, tree. He was by no means a system-builder, and none of his theoretical elaborations are convincing. But the rich originality of his brainstorms, the questions he was in the habit of posing all his life, even if his answers seldom measured up to his questions, propel him to the forefront of philosophy, reassuring his indisputable historical greatness.

The reader may not remember, but it was Moore who occupies a prominent place in my Contradiction entry Keynesian Ethics As A Watchdog Over Economics, otherwise devoted to Moore’s admirer Keynes, to which I am gladly referring my reader now, feeling no need to reiterate in different words or to repeat verbatim the Moore passages there.

I shall however place a fairly large stock of reference material in this entry, to serve me as a starting point in its future rewriting and personal elaboration. So, here it is.

Moore asserts that most other philosophers working in ethics had made the mistake he calls the Naturalistic fallacy. The business of ethics, he agrees, is to discover the qualities that make things good. So, for example hedonists 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 the case that it is pleasant. But this does not mean that we can define value in terms of pleasure. Telling what qualities make things valuable is one thing, but analyzing value is quite another.

Moore is well-known for the so-called open question argument, which is contained in his greatly influential Principia Ethica. This work is one of the main inspirations of the movement against ethical naturalism, and it is partly responsible for the twentieth-century concern with meta-ethics.

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 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?” These questions are “open,” according to Moore, and these statements are “significant”, and they will remain so no matter what is substituted for “pleasure.” He 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.

Moore argues that goodness cannot be analyzed in terms of any other property. 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. 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! Similarly we cannot describe to a blind man what yellow is whereas we can only show a sighted man a piece of yellow paper or a yellow scrap of cloth and say: That is yellow!”

In addition to categorizing “good” as indefinable, Moore emphasized that it is a non-natural property. That is, two objects that are identical cannot have different values. There cannot be two yellow shirts identical in every way (the 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. This 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.” (This is actually wrong, as two identical substances can have opposite effect in two different sets of circumstances, for as they say, one man’s cure is another man’s poison. Thus the very same thing can be “good” or “bad,” depending on the method and purpose of its use and application.)

Moore says that once arguments based on the naturalistic fallacy have been discarded, questions of intrinsic goodness can only be settled by appealing to what he called moral intuitions that is self-evident propositions which recommend themselves to moral reflection, but are not susceptible to either direct proof or disproof. “In order to express the fact that ethical propositions of my first class (propositions about what is good as an end in itself) are incapable of proof or disproof I have sometimes followed Sidgwick’s usage in calling them ‘Intuitions.’ But I beg that it may be noticed that I am not an ‘Intuitionist,’ in the ordinary sense of the term. Sidgwick himself seems never to have been clearly aware of the immense importance of the difference that distinguishes his Intuitionism from the common doctrine, which has generally been called by that name. The Intuitionist proper is distinguished by maintaining that propositions of my second class propositions (which assert that a certain action is right, or a duty) are incapable of proof or disproof by enquiring into the results of such actions. I, on the contrary, am anxious to maintain that propositions of this kind are not “Intuitions,” whereas propositions of my first class are Intuitions.” (Principia Ethica, Preface.)

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 Bradley and McTaggart), and his defense of what he regarded as a “common sense” form of Philosophical Realism. In his 1925 essay A Defense of Common Sense, Moore 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 this 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, defended 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 years working out a new approach to Moore’s argument in the remarks published posthumously as On Certainty.

Moore is also remembered for drawing attention to a peculiar inconsistency involved in uttering a sentence such as “It will rain, but I don’t believe 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 does not seem to be any “logical contradiction” between “It will rain” and “I don’t believe that it will rain.”

In addition to Moore’s own work on the paradox, the puzzle inspired a great deal of work by Wittgenstein, who described the paradox as the most impressive philosophical insight that Moore had ever introduced.

And finally, Moore’s description of the principle of organic unity is extremely straightforward; nonetheless, it is a principle that seems to have generally escaped ethical philosophers and ontologists before his time:

The value of a whole must not be assumed to be the same as the sum of the values of its parts (Ethica §18).

According to Moore, a moral actor cannot survey the “goodness” inherent in the various parts of a situation, assign a value to each of them, and generate a sum in order to get an idea of its total value. A moral scenario is a complex assembly of parts, and its total value is often created by the relations between those parts, and not by their individual value. The organic metaphor is thus very appropriate: biological organisms seem to have emergent properties, which cannot be found anywhere in their individual parts. For example, a human brain exhibits a capacity for thought when none of its neurons exhibit any such capacity. In the same way, a moral scenario can have a value far greater than the sum of its component parts.

To understand the application of the organic principle to questions of value it is perhaps best to consider his primary example, that of a consciousness experiencing a beautiful object. To see how the principle works, a thinker engages in “reflective isolation”, that is, an act of isolating a given concept in a kind of null-context, and determining its intrinsic value. We can easily see that per sui, beautiful objects and consciousnesses are not very valuable things; they may have some value but when we consider the total value of a consciousness experiencing a beautiful object, it seems to exceed the simple sum of these values (Principia Ethica 18:2).

Here ends our extended selection on Moore’s ethics, which clearly demonstrates that, in the ethical field, his position is solid as a legitimate heir of the great ethical philosophers of the past.