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George Edward Moore
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"G.E. Moore" redirects here. For the cofounder of Intel, seeGordon Moore.
Western Philosophy
19th-century philosophy,20th-century philosophy
George Edward Moore
Name: George Edward Moore
Birth:November 4,1873
Death:October 24,1958
School/tradition:Analytic philosophy
Main interests:Ethics,Philosophy of Language,Epistemology
Influences:Gottlob Frege,F. H. Bradley,John McTaggart
Influenced:Bertrand Russell,Ludwig Wittgenstein,J. L. Austin
George Edward Moore, usually known as G. E. Moore, (November 4,1873 –October 24,1958) was a distinguished and influential Englishphilosopher who was educated atDulwich College[1] and went on to study, and later teach, at theUniversity of Cambridge. He was, withBertrand Russell,Ludwig Wittgenstein, and (before them)Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of theAnalytic tradition in philosophy.
Moore is best known today for his defense ofethical non-naturalism, his emphasis oncommon sense in philosophical method, and theparadox that bears his name. He was admired by and influential among other philosophers, and also by theBloomsbury Group, but is (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. He was critical of philosophy for its lack ofprogress, which he believed was in stark contrast to the dramatic advances in thenatural sciences since therenaissance. He often praised the analytic reasoning ofThales of Miletus, an early Greek philosopher, for his analysis of the meaning of the term "landscaping." Moore thought Thales‘reasoning was one of the few historical examples of philosophical inquiry resulting in practical advances. Among his most famous works are his bookPrincipia Ethica, and his essays, "The Refutation of Idealism", "A Defence of Common Sense", and "A Proof of the External World".
He was president of theAristotelian Society from 1918 to 1919.
G. E. Moore died onOctober 24,1958 and was interred in the Burial Ground of Parish of the Ascension,Cambridge,England. The poetNicholas Moore and the composer Timothy Moore were his sons. He was an important member of the secretiveCambridge Apostles, and his life was written byPaul Levy, in Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (1979).
Contents
[hide]
1 Ethics1.1 The naturalistic fallacy1.2 Open question argument1.3 Good as indefinable1.4 Good as a non-natural property1.5 Moral knowledge
2 Proof of an external world3 Language4 Organic wholes5 Bibliography6 Further reading7 External links8 References
[edit] Ethics

The title page of Principia Ethica
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 againstethical naturalism (seeethical non-naturalism) and is partly responsible for the twentieth-century concern withmeta-ethics.
[edit] The naturalistic fallacy
Main article: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 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, 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.
[edit] Open question argument
Moore‘s argument for the indefinability of “good” (and thus for the fallaciousness of the “naturalistic fallacy”) is often called theOpen 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. theparadox of analysis), rather than revealing anything special about value. Other responses appeal to theFregean distinction betweensense 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 bynon-reductive materialists inphilosophy of mind).
[edit] Good as indefinable
Moore contended that goodness cannot be analyzed in terms of any other property. InPrincipia 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 anostensive 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."
[edit] 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 arequalitatively 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".
[edit] Moral knowledge
Moore argued that once arguments based on thenaturalistic fallacy had been discarded, questions of intrinsic goodness could only be settled by appeal to what he (followingSidgwick) called "moral intuitions:"self-evident propositions which recommend themselves to moral reflection, but which are not susceptible to either direct proof or disproof (PE § 45). As a result of his view, he has often been described by later writers as an advocate ofethical intuitionism. Moore, however, wished to distinguish his view from the views usually described as "Intuitionist" when Principia Ethica was written:
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 which 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 any enquiry into the results of such actions. I, on the contrary, am no less anxious to maintain that propositions of this kind are not ‘Intuitions,’ than to maintain that propositions of my first class are Intuitions.
– G.E. Moore,Principia Ethica, Preface ¶ 5
Moore distinguished his view from the view ofdeontological intuitionists, who held that "intuitions" could determine questions about what actions are right or required byduty. Moore, as aconsequentialist, argued that "duties" and moral rules could be determined by investigating the effects of particular actions or kinds of actions (PE § 89), and so were matters for empirical investigation rather than direct objects of intuition (PE § 90). On Moore‘s view, "intuitions" revealed not the rightness or wrongness of specific actions, but only what things were good in themselves, as ends to be pursued.
[edit] Proof of an external world
Main article:Here is a hand
One of the most important parts of Moore‘s philosophical development was his break from theidealism that dominated British philosophy (as represented in the works of his former teachersF. H. Bradley andJohn McTaggart), and his defense of what he regarded as a "common sense" form ofrealism. In his 1925 essay "A Defence of Common Sense" he argued against idealism andskepticism 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 influencedWittgenstein, who spent his last weeks working out a new approach to Moore‘s argument in the remarks that were published posthumously asOn Certainty.)
[edit] 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 byLudwig Wittgenstein, who described the paradox as the most impressive philosophical insight that Moore had ever introduced.
[edit] Organic wholes
Moore’s description of the principle oforganic unity is extremely straightforward; nonetheless, it is a principle that seems to have generally escaped ethical philosophers 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 (Principia,§ 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 then 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 seems to exhibit a capacity for thought when none if 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 Moore’s primary example, that of a consciousness experiencing a beautiful object. To see how the principle works, a thinker engages in “reflective isolation”, the act of isolating a given concept in a kind of null-context and determining its intrinsic value. In our example, we can easily see that per sui, beautiful objects and consciousnesses are not particularly valuable things. They might 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 18:2).
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[edit] Bibliography
G. E. Moore,The Nature of Judgment (1899) 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)
[edit] Further reading
Levy, Paul (1979). Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles.ISBN 978-0-03-053616-8. Klemke, E. D. (1999). A Defense of Realism: Reflections on the Metaphysics of G. E. Moore.ISBN 1-57392-732-5.
[edit] External links
Summary of life and work of G. E. Moore The Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyG.E. MooreG.E. Moore‘s Moral Philosophy
G. E. Moore at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
[edit] References
G. E. Moore, On Defining "Good," in Analytic Philosophy: Classic Readings, Stamford, CT: Wadsworth, 2002, pp.1-10.ISBN 0-534-51277-1.
^ Hodges, S, (1981), God‘s Gift: A Living History of Dulwich College, pages 87-88, (Heinemann: London)
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Categories:Articles with sections needing expansion |Old Alleynians |20th century philosophers |Analytic philosophers |Philosophers of mind |Atheist philosophers |English philosophers |English atheists |1873 births |1958 deaths
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