|
 Philosopher
of the Month
July
2003 - G. E. Moore
Bart
Schultz
With
the centenary of the publication of G E Moore's classic Principia
Ethica (1903), upon us, it is a safe bet that there will soon
be much rethinking of the Moorean legacy. Curiously, there will
probably be an unusual degree of doubt about the current value of
that legacy as well.
Why
the doubt? George Edward Moore was born in 1873, and educated at
Dulwich College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became
a fellow. After his fellowship, he floated about for seven years
doing philosophy on his own, but returned to Cambridge as a university
lecturer in moral science in 1911, becoming a Litt.D in 1913, a
fellow of the British Academy, a legendary stalwart of the Moral
Sciences Club, and eventually, in 1925, James Ward's successor as
Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic. He served as editor of
Mind from 1921 to 1947, was awarded the OM in 1951, and died
in 1958, having achieved sufficient philosophical fame to be featured
in a volume of the Library of Living Philosophers. As the
legend runs, Moore and Bertrand Russell were the dynamic duo who
broke the spell of British Idealism, ushering in the age of analytic
philosophy. Moore's 'Refutation of Idealism', also from 1903, supposedly
set the philosophical world on fire with its head-on assault on
idealist epistemology. And Russell always credited his friend and
fellow Apostle with having led the way. Moore was also teacher,
colleague and conversational partner to the likes of Frank Ramsey
and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the latter succeeding him as professor
in 1939.
Beyond
serving as philosophical midwife to Russell, Ramsay, and Wittgenstein,
Moore was revered as a god, the model of moral and mental purity,
by the leading members of Bloomsbury. An ecstatic Lytton Strachey
proclaimed that Principia Ethica marked the birth of the
Age of Reason. Surely, a man who could go down in history as both
the philosopher's philosopher, in the age of Russell and Wittgenstein,
and the icon of Bloomsbury should not be suspected of leaving too
little behind.
Yet
across today's philosophical landscape, one can find plenty of Wittgensteinians
and a vocal minority of (more or less) Russellians, but no one happily
described as 'Moorean'. Moore himself, in his autobiographical statement
for the Living Philosophers volume, confessed that Wittgenstein
"has made me think that what is required for the solution of
philosophical problems which baffle me, is a method quite different
from any which I have ever used - a method which he himself uses
successfully, but which I have never been able to understand clearly
enough to use it myself."
What
were Moore's chief claims? Principia Ethica, at least, is
often described as combining a substantive theory of ideal utilitarianism
and a metaethics of Platonic intuition. For Moore, much of past
ethical philosophising - though not his old teacher Sidgwick's -
was tainted by a 'Naturalistic Fallacy,' that confusion of the 'is'
of attribution (for example, 'water is wet') and the 'is' of identity
(for example, 'water is H2O') that supposedly infects, for instance,
utilitarian efforts to say that the ultimate good is pleasure. By
contrast, Moore argues that goodness is a simple, indefinable, non-natural
prop erty or quality or entity, on a par with 'yellow', and that
the not very helpful last word on what good is is simply that good
is good.
Against
reductive definitions, which, for example, define good in terms
of happiness, one could always sensibly ask whether what they called
good was really good. This 'open question' test undercut the ambitions
of ethicists from Aristotle to Mill and Spencer. Yet one can helpfully
ask what things are good, and on this Moore gives a most eloquent
pitch for such things as friendship, art and knowledge as forming
the ideal that utilitarian rules will conduce to maximising ('ought'
being definable as what maximizes good). It was this appeal to art
and friendship as simply and irreducibly good, or intrinsically
valuable, that so thrilled Bloomsbury, though Moore gives a fairly
sophisticated account of these goods in terms of 'organic unities',
more than the sum of the good of the parts. To confirm just which
things have intrinsic value, he invokes the test of imagining the
thing to exist in complete isolation.
As
a type of utilitarian, Moore was more limited than his great predecessor
Sidgwick; his was a utilitarianism without benefit of political
economy or political theory. And his Platonistic view of good as
an objective indefinable property came in for a severe drubbing
in the thirties and forties. Yet Darwall, Gibbard and Railton, in
Moral Discourse and Practice, manage to claim that 'it seems
impossible to deny that Moore was on to something' in Principia
Ethica. If it is scarcely clear from their generous account
how far the "controversy Moore began" is "lively
today" because of continuing engagement with Moore, clarification
may well be coming.
Suggested
reading
The Philosophy of G E Moore, ed. P Schilpp (Open Court)
G E Moore, T Baldwin (Routledge)
Moral Discourse and Practice, S Darwall, A Gibbard, P Railton
(Oxford)
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured mid August 2003
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