NAME: EMMANUEL ABEL

DEPARTMENT: PHILOSOPHY
LEVEL:100
COURSE: PHIL 105
GROUP: 5

ASSIGNMENT
Discuss the relevance of George Moore ethical theory to the
contemporary Nigerian society.
INTRODUCTION

The writings of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica of 1903 is often considered a

revolutionary work that set a new agenda for 20 th-century ethics. This historical
view is, however, somewhat overstated. In metaethics Moore’s non-naturalist
realism was close to that defended by Henry Sidgwick and other late 19 th-
century philosophers such as Hastings Rashdall, Franz Brentano, and J.M.E.
McTaggart; in normative ethics his ideal consequentialism likewise echoed
views of Rashdall, Brentano, and McTaggart. But Principia Ethica presented its
views with unusual force and vigor. In particular, it made much more of the
alleged errors of metaethical naturalism than Sidgwick or Rashdall had, saying
they vitiated most previous moral philosophy. For this reason, Moore’s work
had a disproportionate influence on 20th-century moral philosophy and remains
the best-known expression of a general metaethical view also shared by later
writers such as H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross, and C.D. Broad.

Brief history of George Edward Moore (1873-1958)

George Edward Moore was born on November 4, 1873, G. E. Moore was
raised in the Upper Norwood district of South London. His early education
came at the hands of his parents: his father taught him reading, writing, and
music; and his mother taught him French. At eight he was enrolled at Dulwich
College, where he studied mainly Greek and Latin, but also French, German,
and mathematics. At eighteen he entered Cambridge University's, where he
began as a student in Classics.
His first two years of University study proved to be less than challenging, his
time at Dulwich having already prepared him exceptionally well in Greek and
Latin. It was during this time that Moore became interested in philosophy. As
he later reminisced:
I had indeed at Dulwich read Plato’s Protagoras …; but I was certainly not then
very keenly excited by any of the philosophical questions which that dialogue
raises …. What must have happened, during this second year at Cambridge, was
that I found I was very keenly interested in certain philosophical statements
which I heard made in conversation. (Moore 1942a, 13).
The conversations in question involved such notables as Henry Sidgwick, James
Ward, and J.M.E. McTaggart, who became his teachers, and Bertrand Russell—
then a student two years ahead of Moore—who for a time became his friend and
philosophical ally. Moore’s and Russell’s relationship was lifelong, but it
became strained early on. It was Russell who convinced Moore to study Moral
Science, a division of philosophy in the British University system. In 1896,
Moore took first-class honors in both Classics and Moral Science. After this, he
attempted to win a Prize-Fellowship, as McTaggart and Russell had done before
him. He succeeded in 1898, on his second attempt, and
(such as the Aristotelian Society and the Moral Sciences Club) and publishing
his work.
Edward Moore was a highly influential British philosopher of the early
twentieth century. His career was spent mainly at Cambridge University.
Moore’s main contributions to philosophy were in the areas of metaphysics,
epistemology, ethics, and philosophical methodology.
In epistemology (knowledge), Moore is remembered as a stalwart (Loyal)
defender of commonsense realism. Rejecting skepticism (an attitude of doubt or
a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular subject) on
the one hand, and, on the other, metaphysical theories that would invalidate the
commonsense beliefs of “ordinary people” (non-philosophers), Moore
articulated three different versions of a commonsense-realist epistemology over
the course of his career.
In ethics, Moore is famous for driving home the difference between moral and
non-moral properties, which he cashed-out in terms of the non-natural and the
natural. Moore’s classification of the moral as non-natural was to be one of the
hinges upon which moral philosophy in the Anglo-American academy (English
and American; of or between England and the U.S.) turned until roughly 1960.
Moore’s approach to philosophizing involved focusing on narrow problems and
avoiding grand synthesis (the act of combining different ideas or things to make
a whole that is new and different from the items considered separately). His
method was to scrutinize the meanings of the key terms in which philosophers
expressed themselves while maintaining an implicit commitment to the ideals of
clarity, rigor, and argumentation.
Earlier it has been mentioned that George Edward Moore’s main contributions
to philosophy were in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and
philosophical methodology, but for the benefit of this research I would be
looking at Moore’s theory of ethics.
Moore’s work Moral Philosophy
First published Wed Jan 26, 2005; substantive revision Mon Mar 22, 2021
1. Non-naturalism and the Open-Question Argument
2. Metaethical Innovations
3. Impersonal Consequentialism
4. The Ideal

1. Non-naturalism and the Open-Question Argument

Moore’s non-naturalism comprised two main thesis. One was the realist thesis
that moral and more generally normative judgements, like many of his
contemporaries. Moore did not distinguish the two, are true or false objectively,
or independently of any beliefs or attitudes we may have. The other was the
autonomy-of-ethics thesis that moral judgements are sui generis, neither
reducible to nor derivable from non-moral, for example scientific or
metaphysical, judgements; they express a distinctive kind of objective truth.
Closely connected to his non-naturalism was the epistemological view that our
knowledge of moral truths is intuitive, in the sense that it is not arrived at by
inference from non-moral truths but rests on our recognizing certain moral
propositions as self-evident, by a kind of direct or immediate insight.
Moore expressed the realist side of his non-naturalism by saying that
fundamental moral judgements ascribe the property of goodness or badness to
states of affairs, though especially in Principia Ethica he tended not to
distinguish moral concepts and moral properties. Like others of his time, he
seems to have taken the realist view that moral judgements are objectively true
for granted; he certainly did not defend it extensively against anti-realist
alternatives. Thus the first sentence of Principia Ethica refers casually, and
without any sense of controversy, to the “truth” of some ethical judgements
(1903: 1/1993: 53). In this he was doubtless influenced by the grammar of
moral judgements, which have a standard subject-predicate form, as in “x is
good.” But it may also be relevant that, at least early on, the only version of
subjectivism he seems to have been aware of was the naturalist view that to say
“x is good” is to report some psychological fact such as that you approve of x or
that most people in your society do. In his later book Ethics he argued, among
other things, that this view does not allow for moral disagreement, since, for
example, my report that I approve of x and your report that you disapprove of it
can both be true (1912: 100–03/1947: 62–64/1965: 42–43). Late in his life he
encountered the non-cognitivist emotivism of C.L. Stevenson, which says that
moral judgements express rather than report feelings and therefore can conflict
(Stevenson 1942). He initially conceded, surprisingly, that Stevenson’s anti-
realist view had as good a claim as his own to be true (1942: 544–45), but
shortly after he reverted to his earlier non-naturalism, saying he could not
imagine what had induced him to consider abandoning it (Ewing 1962: 251).
Especially in Principia Ethica, Moore spent much more time defending his other
non-naturalist thesis, about the autonomy of ethics, which he expressed by
saying the property of goodness is simple and unanalyzable, and in particular
unanalyzable in non-moral terms. This meant the property is “non-natural,” or
distinct from any of the natural properties studied by science, though he also
thought it distinct from metaphysical properties. Views that denied this thesis
committed what he called “the naturalistic fallacy” (1903: 10/1993: 62), which
he found in hedonists such as Jeremy Bentham, evolutionary ethicists such as
Herbert Spencer, and metaphysical ethicists such as T.H. Green. His main
argument against their view was what has come to be known as the “open-
question argument,” though he actually stated in two slightly different ways.
Consider a particular naturalist claim, such as that “x is good” is equivalent to
“x is pleasant” or “x is pleasure.”If this claim were true, he argued, the
judgement “Pleasure is good” would be equivalent to “Pleasure is pleasure,” yet
surely someone who asserts the former means to express more than that
uninformative tautology. Alternatively, if this naturalist claim were true, “x is
pleasant but x is not good” would be self-contradictory. Once it was established
that x is pleasant, the question whether it is good would then be closed, or not
worth considering, whereas, he argued, it remains open. The same argument can
be mounted against any other naturalist proposal: even if we have determined
that something is what we desire to desire or is more evolved, the question
whether it is good remains open, in the sense of not being settled by the
meaning of the word “good.” We can ask whether what we desire to desire is
good, and likewise for what is more evolved, more unified, or whatever (1903:
10–17/1993: 62–69). Sidgwick had used one form of this argument against
Bentham and Spencer, but only in passing (1907: 26n, 109); Moore developed it
a greater length and made it central to his metaethics. And though he applied it
specifically to “good,” it can equally well be used about other moral or
normative concepts such as “ought” and “duty.”
 2. Metaethical Innovations
The main elements of Moore’s non-naturalism – moral realism and the
autonomy of ethics – had been defended earlier by Sidgwick and others and
were reasonably well known when Moore wrote. This is reflected in the initial
reviews of Principia Ethica, many of which questioned its claims to metaethical
originality (see Welchman 1989). But Moore did add two metaethical
innovations. One was his view that the fundamental moral concept is “good”
(plus its contrary “bad”), which he expressed by saying that goodness is simple
and unanalyzable, even in moral terms. This had not been Sidgwick’s view. For
him the central moral concept was “ought,” and he defined good in terms of
ought, more specifically, as what one ought to desire (1907: 112). Principia
Ethica took the exactly opposite view, defining ought in terms of good, so “one
ought to do x” literally means “x will produce the most good possible” (1903:
25, 146–48/1993: 76–77, 196–98). But Moore was quickly persuaded by
Bertrand Russell that this view is vulnerable to his own open-question
argument, since in saying “one ought to do what will produce the most good”
we do not mean “what will produce the most good will produce the most good”
(Russell 1904: 330). In later work such as Ethics he therefore held that ought is
a distinct moral property from good (1912: 173, 180–81/1947: 107–08, 112–
13/1965: 73, 76–77; also 1942: 558–59), and in an uncompleted Preface to a
planned second edition of Principia Ethica he allowed that it would not affect
the essence of his non-naturalism if good were defined in moral terms, say, as
what one ought to desire (1993: 5, 14–15). But he continued to prefer the view
that good is a simple concept, not definable in deontic terms (1942: 574–77),
and there was vigorous debate on this topic in this general period, with
Brentano, Broad, and A.C. Ewing defending reductive analyses similar to
Sidgwick’s while Ross preferred a non-reductive view like Moore’s. On the
Moorean view judgements about the goodness of states of affairs are not
shorthand for judgements about how we ought or have reason to respond to
those states; they are independent judgements that explain, synthetically but as
following “from the very nature” of goodness, why we ought so to respond.
Moore’s second innovation was his view that the intrinsic value of a state of
affairs can depend only on its intrinsic properties, ones it has apart from any
relations to other states. Earlier writers had distinguished between goodness as
an end, which they also called intrinsic or ultimate goodness, and goodness as a
means, and had said the former cannot rest just on a state’s causally producing
goods external to itself. But they seemed to allow that goodness as an end can
depend on other relational properties; thus they talked as if a belief’s being true,
which is necessary for its being knowledge, can increase its value, while a
pleasure’s being that of a bad person can make it worse. Moore did not
explicitly state his more restrictive view that intrinsic goodness can depend only
on intrinsic properties until “The Conception of Intrinsic Value” of 1922, but it
nonetheless guided Principia Ethica at two points. One was the book’s specific
formulation of its principle of organic unities, discussed below. The other was
its testing for a state’s intrinsic value by the “method of isolation,” which
involves asking whether a universe containing only that state and no other
would be good (1903: 91, 93, 95, 187–88, 208/1993: 142, 145, 147, 236–37,
256); the point of this method is precisely to insulate judgements of intrinsic
value from facts about a state’s external relations by ensuring that there are
none such. Moore’s strict view was shared by some later writers such as Ross
(1930: 75), while others argued that a better theory of value results if intrinsic
goodness is allowed to depend on some relational properties (e.g. Ewing 1947:
114). But Moore was the first to raise this issue clearly.
These two innovations, though not trivial, do not affect the core of a non-
naturalist metaethics. Some critics, however, charge that Moore did change that
view fundamentally, and for the worse. They say Sidgwick’s non-naturalism
was comparatively modest, holding only that there are truths about what people
ought or have reason to do that we can know by reflection. Moore, the objection
runs, supplemented this modest view with an extravagant metaphysics of non-
natural properties inhabiting a dubious supersensible realm and a mysterious
faculty of intuition that acquaints us with them. These additions opened non-
naturalism to entirely avoidable objections and led, regrettably, to its
widespread rejection by later philosophers (e.g. Mackie 1976: 323; Shaver
2000: 263–65; Phillips 2011: 29–30).
These charges are, however, hard to sustain. Principia Ethica actually
downplayed the metaphysical side of its non-naturalism, saying that goodness
has “being” but does not “exist”, as numbers, too, have being but do not exist;
in particular, goodness does not exist in any “supersensible reality,” because
there is no such reality (1903: 110–12, 123–25/1993: 161–63, 174–76). What
exactly Moore meant by these claims is unclear, but it’s at least possible to read
them as suggesting a non-metaphysical moral realism like those defended more
recently by Nagel (1986), Scanlon (1998, 2014), and Parfit (2011, vol. 2: 464–
87 ). Nor did his explicit talk of properties mark a significant departure from
Sidgwick. This is partly because he did not clearly distinguish concepts and
properties, and partly because if Sidgwick thought people ought to pursue
pleasure, he would surely have to grant that pleasure has the property of being
something people ought to pursue. The question is how ontologically robust
Moore’s talk of a property of goodness was, and given his denial that such
goodness exists the answer is uncertain. The distinction between more and less
metaphysical forms of non-naturalism is not one he clearly addressed.
3. Impersonal Consequentialism
Moore’s normative view again comprised two main theses. One was impersonal
consequentialism, the view that what is right is always what produces the
greatest total good impartially considered, or counting all goods equally. The
other was the ideal or perfectionist thesis that what is good is not only or
primarily pleasure or the satisfaction of desires but certain states whose value is
independent of people’s attitudes to them. Moore recognized several such states,
but in Principia Ethica he famously said that “by far the most valuable things…
are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the
pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects” (1903:
188/1993: 237). According to his ideal consequentialism, what is right is in
large part what most promotes loving personal relationships and aesthetic
appreciation for all persons everywhere.
Principia Ethica took the consequentialist part of this view to be analytically
true, since it defined the right as what most promotes the good. But once Moore
abandoned this definition, he had to treat the consequentialist principle as
synthetic and he did so in Ethics, which allowed that deontological views that
say some acts that maximize the good are wrong are coherent. But even there he
did not argue at length for consequentialism, simply announcing that it is self-
evident (1912: 180–81/1947: 112–13/1965: 76–77). This in part reflected a
common assumption of his time, when a majority of moral philosophers
accepted some form of consequentialism. But it may also be relevant that the
only alternative he seems to have considered was an absolute deontology like
Kant’s, which says that some acts such as killing and lying are wrong no matter
what their consequences (1903: 106/1993: 157; 1912: 175–81/1947: 109–
13/1965: 74–77). His major ethical works did not consider a moderate
deontology such as would later be developed by Ross (1930), in which
deontological prohibitions against killing and lying often outweigh
considerations of good consequences but can themselves be outweighed if
enough good is at stake. It is not clear what Moore’s response to such a
moderate deontology would have been.
Principia Ethica also took the impartialism of its view to be analytic, and in
particular claimed that ethical or rational egoism, which says each person
should pursue only his own good, is self-contradictory. (Despite his interest in
personal love, Moore never considered the intermediate view that Broad (1971))
would call self-referential altruism, according to which each person should care
more about the good of those close to him, such as his family and friends.)
Sidgwick had claimed that if a rational egoist confines himself to saying that
each person’s pleasure is good for him, or from his point of view, he cannot be
argued out of his position (1907: 420–21). But Moore argued that the concept of
agent-relative goodness invoked here is unintelligible (1903: 97–102/1993:
148–53), and that conclusion does follow from his view that goodness is simple
and unanalyzable. If goodness is a simple property, how can a state such as
person A’s pleasure have this property “from one point of view” but not “from
another”? (Compare squareness. An object cannot be square from one point of
view but not from another; it either is square or is not.) All that talk of the good
“for” a person can pick out, he urged, is what is simply good and located in that
person; and simple goodness gives everyone equally reason to pursue it. In
Ethics Moore abandoned this argument, saying that egoism cannot be proven
false by any argument, even though he thought its falsity is self-evident (1912:
228–32/1947: 141–43/1965: 98–100). But it is not clear how he could make this
concession if he still held, as he preferred to, that goodness is a simple property.
Perhaps he was tacitly allowing, as he would in the uncompleted draft Preface
to Principia Ethica (1993: 5, 14–15), that it would not centrally damage his
position if good were analyzed in terms of ought, as it had been by Sidgwick.
There is no contradiction in saying that what each person ought to desire is
different, say, just his own pleasure. But if all oughts derive from a simple
property of goodness, as Moore always preferred to hold, all oughts must be
impartial.
4. The Ideal
One of this chapter’s larger aims was to defend value-pluralism, the view that
there are many ultimate goods. Moore thought one bar to this view is the
naturalistic fallacy. He assumed, plausibly, that philosophers who treat
goodness as identical to some natural property will usually make this a simple
property, such as just pleasure or just evolutionary fitness, rather than a
disjunctive property such as pleasure-or-evolutionary-fitness-or-knowledge. But
then any naturalist view pushes us toward value-monism, or toward the view
that only one kind of state is good (1903: 20; 1993: 72). Once we reject
naturalism, however, we can see what Moore thought is self-evident: that there
are irreducibly many goods. Another bar to value-pluralism is excessive
demands for unity or system in ethics. Sidgwick had used such demands to
argue that only pleasure can be good, since no theory with a plurality of
ultimate values can justify a determinate scheme for weighing them against
each other (1907: 406). But Moore, agreeing here with Rashdall, Ross, and
others, said that “to search for ‘unity’ and ‘system,’ at the expense of truth, is
not, I take it, the proper business of philosophy” (1903: 222/1993: 270). If
intuition reveals a plurality of ultimate goods, an adequate theory must
recognize that plurality.
According to a famous part of Principia Ethica, one of those goods is the
existence of beauty. Arguing against Sidgwick’s view that all goods must be
states of consciousness (1907: 113–15), Moore asked readers to imagine a
beautiful world with no minds in it: is this world’s existence not better than that
of a horribly ugly world (1903: 83–85/1993: 135–36)? In answering yes, he
anticipated some strands in present-day environmental ethics, which likewise
hold that there can be value in features of the natural environment apart from
any awareness of them. But he did not insist on this view. Later in Principia
Ethica he said that beauty on its own at most has little and may have no value
(1903: 202, 203/1993: 250, 251), and in Ethics he implicitly denied that beauty
on its own has value. There he held, as Sidgwick had, that all intrinsic goods
involve some state of consciousness and perhaps even of pleasure (1912: 239–
41, 249/1947: 147–49, 153/1965: 103–04, 107). But his first book had defended
the contrary view.
RELEVANCE OF GEORGE MOORE THEORY TO THE
CONTEMPORARY NIGERIAN SOCIETY
1. Moore ethical theory states that the property of goodness is simple and
unanalyzable.
Reference
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore-moral/
https://iep.utm.edu/moore/#SH3a
http://fair-use.org/g-e-moore/ethics/chapter-i
https://peped.org/philosophicalinvestigations/summary-moores-open-question-
argument/