G. E. Moore
- "G.E. Moore" redirects here. For the cofounder of Intel, see Gordon Moore.
| Western Philosophy 19th-century philosophy, 20th-century philosophy | |
|---|---|
| 200px | |
| Name: George Edward Moore | |
| Birth: November 4, 1873 | |
| Death: October 24, 1958 | |
| School/tradition: Analytic philosophy | |
| Main interests | |
| Ethics, Philosophy of Language, Epistemology | |
| Notable ideas | |
| Naturalistic fallacy, Moore's paradox | |
| Influences | Influenced |
| Gottlob Frege, F. H. Bradley, John McTaggart | 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 English philosopher who attended and taught at the University of Cambridge. He was, with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of the Analytic tradition in philosophy.
Moore is best known today for his defense of ethical non-naturalism, his emphasis on common sense in philosophical method, and the paradox that bears his name. He was greatly admired by other philosophers and also by the Bloomsbury Group, but he remains today mostly unknown outside of academic philosophy. As an essayist, Moore is known for his clear, circumspect writing style and for his methodical and patient approach to philosophical problems. His most famous works are his book Principia Ethica and his essays "The Refutation of Idealism", "A Defence of Common Sense", and "A Proof of the External World".
During Moore's time as a student and teacher, he exerted a notable influence on the British philosophical commmunity, and Cambridge enjoyed what is now known as its golden age of philosophy. He broke away from the "absolute idealism" then popular among his colleagues and professors and was a staunch defender of the "common sense" approach to philosophy. This break soon gave birth the analytic school of philosophy.
Life and Works
George Edward Moore was born on November 4, 1873 to Daniel and Henrietta Moore and grew up in South London. From a very young age, he was taught reading, writing, music, and French by his parents. At the age of eight, he began attending school at Dulwich College where he studied the classics in Greek and Latin. Moore enrolled in Cambridge University at the age of eighteen, and, having already mastered Greek and Latin, he became interested in the study of philosophy.
Moore befriended fellow student Bertrand Russell, and the two began a lifelong friendship and philophical alliance. Moore graduated in 1896 with a first class philosophy degree and soon won a fellowship to continue his studies at Cambridge's Trinity College. He left in 1904 for a seven-year hiatus but returned to Cambridge to teach and lived there for the rest of his life.
Moore was a professor of philosophy from 1925 to 1939, and from 1921 to 1944 he also served as the editor of Mind— a leading philosophical journal. He also traveled to the United States to teach at several universities from 1940 to 1944.
Academics aside, Moore is remembered by friends and colleagues as a man of remarkable moral character. He also enjoyed a successful family life with his wife of 42 years Dorothy and two children Nicholas and Timothy. G.E. Moore died in Cambridge in 1958.
Ethics
Moore's most important and influential work in the field of ethics is his Principia Ethica. The Principia is one of the main inspirations of the movement against ethical naturalism and is partly responsible for the twentieth-century concern with meta-ethics.
In Principia Ethica, Moore charges that most philosophers of ethics have made a mistake called the "Naturalistic fallacy". This is the false belief that one can define goodness by describing the qualities that make things good. Moore agreed that the study of ethics "aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good."[1] For example, hedonists claim that being pleasant is what makes things good, while other theorists may claim that complexity is what makes things good. The only problem, Moore said, was that "far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good."[2]
Moore's argument for the indefinability of good is often called the "Open Question Argument" and 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." Thus, Moore concludes, any attempt to analyze goodness is bound to fail. If goodness could be analyzed, then such questions and statements would be trivial and obvious. Since they are anything but trivial and obvious, goodness must be indefinable.
Moore concluded that the only way to define "good" is to point to an action or a thing and say that it is "good." By analongy, one cannot describe to a blind man exactly what yellow is. One can only show a sighted man a piece of yellow paper or a yellow scrap of cloth and say that it is yellow.
Critics of Moore's arguments sometimes claim that he is appealing to general puzzles concerning analysis (cf. the paradox of analysis), rather than revealing anything special about value. Other responses appeal to the Fregean distinction between sense 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 by non-reductive materialists in philosophy of mind).
In addition to categorizing goodness as indefinable, Moore also emphasized that it is a non-natural property. In other words, two objects that are identical in every way cannot have different values. An object's goodness 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".
Moral knowledge
Moore argued that once arguments based on the naturalistic fallacy had been discarded, questions of intrinsic goodness could only be settled by appeal to what he (following Sidgwick) 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 by later writers as an advocate of ethical intuitionism.
Moore distinguished his view from the view of deontological intuitionists, who held that "intuitions" could determine questions about what actions are right or required by duty. Moore, as a consequentialist, 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). In 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.
Refutation of Idealism
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 F. H. Bradley and John McTaggart) and his defense of what he regarded as a "common sense" form of realism. Moore agreed with many of the general ideas held by Idealists such as the spiritual nature of reality, but he also believed that much of their arguments were based on psychologism, which assumes that "whatever is experienced, is necessarily so." Moore thought that the gap between perception and reality was crucial and too often overlooked by Idealists.
In his 1925 essay "A Defence of Common Sense" he 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 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 influenced Wittgenstein, who spent his last weeks working out a new approach to Moore's argument in the remarks that were published posthumously as On Certainty.)
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 by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who described the paradox as the most impressive philosophical insight that Moore had ever introduced.
Organic Wholes
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 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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Notes
Works online
- 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)
External links
- Summary of life and work of G. E. Moore at http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/moor.htm
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- [1] Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Books
- Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles by Paul Levy (1979), ISBN 9780030536168
- A Defense of Realism: Reflections on the Metaphysics of G. E. Moore by E.D. Klemke ISBN 1573927325
Sources
- G.E. Moore, On Defining "Good," in Analytic Philosophy: Classic Readings, Stamford, CT: Wadsworth, 2002, pp.1-10. ISBN 0-534-51277-1.
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