4.

Ideal Utilitarianism

G. E. Moore strongly disagreed with the hedonistic value theory adopted by the Classical Utilitarians.
Moore agreed that we ought to promote the good, but believed that the good included far more than
what could be reduced to pleasure. He was a pluralist, rather than a monist, regarding intrinsic value. For
example, he believed that ‘beauty’ was an intrinsic good. A beautiful object had value independent of
any pleasure it might generate in a viewer. Thus, Moore differed from Sidgwick who regarded the good
as consisting in some consciousness. Some objective states in the world are intrinsically good, and on
Moore's view, beauty is just such a state. He used one of his more notorious thought experiments to
make this point: he asked the reader to compare two worlds, one was entirely beautiful, full of things
which complimented each other; the other was a hideous, ugly world, filled with “everything that is
most disgusting to us.” Further, there are not human beings, one imagines, around to appreciate or be
disgusted by the worlds. The question then is, which of these worlds is better, which one's existence
would be better than the other's? Of course, Moore believed it was clear that the beautiful world was
better, even though no one was around to appreciate its beauty. This emphasis on beauty was one facet
of Moore's work that made him a darling of the Bloomsbury Group. If beauty was a part of the good
independent of its effects on the psychological states of others — independent of, really, how it affected
others, then one needn't sacrifice morality on the altar of beauty anymore. Following beauty is not a
mere indulgence, but may even be a moral obligation. Though Moore himself certainly never applied his
view to such cases, it does provide the resources for dealing with what the contemporary literature has
dubbed ‘admirable immorality’ cases, at least some of them. Gauguin may have abandoned his wife and
children, but it was to a beautiful end.

Moore's targets in arguing against hedonism were the earlier utilitarians who argued that the good was
some state of consciousness such as pleasure. He actually waffled on this issue a bit, but always
disagreed with Hedonism in that even when he held that beauty all by itself was not an intrinsic good, he
also held that for the appreciation of beauty to be a good the beauty must actually be there, in the
world, and not be the result of illusion.

Moore further criticized the view that pleasure itself was an intrinsic good, since it failed a kind of
isolation test that he proposed for intrinsic value. If one compared an empty universe with a universe of
sadists, the empty universe would strike one as better. This is true even though there is a good deal of
pleasure, and no pain, in the universe of sadists. This would seem to indicate that what is necessary for
the good is at least the absence of bad intentionality. The pleasures of sadists, in virtue of their desires to
harm others, get discounted — they are not good, even though they are pleasures. Note this radical
departure from Bentham who held that even malicious pleasure was intrinsically good, and that if
nothing instrumentally bad attached to the pleasure, it was wholly good as well.

One of Moore's important contributions was to put forward an ‘organic unity’ or ‘organic whole’ view of
value. The principle of organic unity is vague, and there is some disagreement about what Moore
actually meant in presenting it. Moore states that ‘organic’ is used “…to denote the fact that a whole has
an intrinsic value different in amount from the sum of the values of its parts.” (PE, 36) And, for Moore,
that is all it is supposed to denote. So, for example, one cannot determine the value of a body by adding
up the value of its parts. Some parts of the body may have value only in relation to the whole. An arm or
a leg, for example, may have no value at all separated from the body, but have a great deal of value
attached to the body, and increase the value of the body, even. In the section of Principia Ethica on the
Ideal, the principle of organic unity comes into play in noting that when persons experience pleasure
through perception of something beautiful (which involves a positive emotion in the face of a
recognition of an appropriate object — an emotive and cognitive set of elements), the experience of the
beauty is better when the object of the experience, the beautiful object, actually exists. The idea was
that experiencing beauty has a small positive value, and existence of beauty has a small positive value,
but combining them has a great deal of value, more than the simple addition of the two small values (PE,
189 ff.). Moore noted: “A true belief in the reality of an object greatly increases the value of many
valuable wholes…” (199).

This principle in Moore — particularly as applied to the significance of actual existence and value, or
knowledge and value, provided utilitarians with tools to meet some significant challenges. For example,
deluded happiness would be severely lacking on Moore's view, especially in comparison to happiness
based on knowledge.