Principia Ethica Book

When I was pursuing my undergraduate degree, a professor of mine lamented that philosophers only ever read Chapter 1 of J.L. Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Chapter 1 contains the articulation and defense of Mackie's Error Theory of morals, which is the only part that anyone ever talks about. The rest of the book, in which he seeks to refute competing theories and to elaborate his own moral system, is paid little to no attention.

Something very similar can be said of Moore. If students of philosophy read them at all, they read only the first chapter of Principia Ethica. That is where he presents all of his most notorious ideas: the Naturalistic Fallacy, the Intuitionist theory of ethics, and the theory of Organic Wholes. More likely than not, however, they do not read him at all, but merely read about him in meta-ethics textbooks, next to such other relics as Emotivism and Prescriptivism.

This is perhaps understandable. Most of what is essential to Principia Ethica is contained in ch. 1, and much of the rest can be dismissed as filler. Moore dedicates an inordinate amount of space to his refutations of evolutionary ethics, hedonism, and "metaphysical ethics", which are ridden with uncharitable readings of such pivotal figures as Kant, Mill, and Sidgwick. However, the final two chapters do much to clarify Moore's position and method. He is frequently misunderstood, and I would venture to say that this is due, more than anything else, to the lack of attention paid to the last chapters of his book.

Despite the scathing critiques it received in the mid-20th century, Moore's Intuitionism seems to me plausible, if not necessarily correct. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to taking Moore's position seriously is his claim that goodness is a non-natural property perceived via intuition. This notoriously raises thorny metaphysical and epistemological questions. In what exactly does such a mysterious entity as goodness consists? How exactly do we become aware of it? In the case of conflicting intuitions, how do we determine who is correct?

It seems to me that these question attack, so to speak, the letter of Moore's argument rather than its spirit. It is important to point out here that for Moore, the only kinds of objects capable of possessing goodness are experiences. His basic point, which seems to me intuitively obvious, is that there are certain kinds of experiences ' say, the experience one has in contemplating a work of art, in feeling oneself to be securely integrated in a community, or what have you ' are inherently worth pursuing, i.e. worth choosing for their own sake, quite apart from anything else. Moreover, some are more worth pursuing than others.

This terminology already dissipates the most frequently cited criticism of Moore, namely that, if goodness were merely a property, then judgments about it could not be inherently motivating. For to say that something is worth pursuing just is to say that it "counts" toward action. If I am not mistaken, this also dispels both the metaphysical and the epistemological worries. What is claimed is no more complex than the idea that certain states that are available to beings who have evolved like us ' agony, elation, anxiety, peacefulness, etc. ' count toward either pursuit or avoidance. Following more recent realists like Derek Parfit and Peter Singer, it seems to me that positing the existence of rational relations like this poses no more problem than positing that of rational relations of the kind involved in mathematics.

To my mind, Moore's Intuitionism provides an fruitful way to shed some light on cultural difference without reducing it to the arbitrariness of different incommensurable forms of life. On the reading I am suggesting, cultural customs and traditions may be understood at once as modes of access to certain goods around which they are centered. As strange as a synthesis between Moore and Heidegger might seem on the surface, this seems to me to suggest a realist reading of Heidegger's notion of world-disclosure: certain kinds of practices and self-understandings make accessible some subset of the range of independent goods available to beings like us. I certainly won't go as far as to say that the book is salvageable in its entirety, but as the recent "return to Moorean roots" in meta-ethics suggests, there is more than enough here to warrant the attention of any serious student of ethical theory.