G. E. Moore

"G.E. Moore" redirects here. For the cofounder of Intel, see Gordon Moore.

Western Philosophy 19th-century philosophy, 20th-century philosophy
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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." 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."

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 seen in the works of his former teachers F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart, and his defense of what he regarded as a "common sense" form of realism.

Moore agreed with many of the general beliefs held by Idealists such as the spiritual nature of reality, but he also argued that their conclusions were based largely on psychologism, which, according to Moore, assumes that "whatever is experienced, is necessarily so." According to Moore, the Idealists blurred the distinction between the ideas of the subject who is observing an object and the nature of the object itself. He argued against Bradley's idea that the nature of an object depends on one's experience of the object.

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.)

Moore's Paradox

Moore is also remembered for drawing attention to the peculiar inconsistency involved in uttering a sentence such as "It will rain, but I do not 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 does not seem to be any logical contradiction between "It will rain" and "I do not believe that it will rain". Indeed, it is not unusual for such conjunctions to be true.

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.

Philosophical Method

Although many of Moore's ideas were disputed and even abandoned by Moore himself, his unique way of approaching philosophy had a lasting impact. Rather than attempting to create a comprehensive philosophical system, Moore simply approached the specific areas of philosophy which interested him. Although he hardly considered himself an innovator, his attempts to clearly understand and analyze those specific areas of interest proved to be influential in the founding of Analytic philosophy.

As Moore explained, "I started discussing certain kinds of questions, because they happened to be what interested me most; and I only adopted certain particular methods (so far as I had adopted them) because they seemed to me suitable for those kinds of questions."

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
  • G.E. Moore
  • G.E. Moore's Moral Philosophy
• [2] 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

1. G.E. Moore, On Defining "Good," in Analytic Philosophy: Classic Readings, Stamford, CT: Wadsworth, 2002, pp.1-10. ISBN 0-534-51277-1.
2. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy G.E. Moore
3. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [3]

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