GE Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy and Open Question Argument Reconsidered by William ...

221 Pages·2007·0.56 MB·English

G.E. Moore’s Naturalistic Fallacy and Open Question Argument Reconsidered

by

William Piervincenzi

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the

Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by

Professor Robert L. Holmes

and

Senior Lecturer John Gates Bennett

Department of Philosophy
The College
Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester
Rochester, New York

2007
ii

© 2007, William Piervincenzi
iii
Curriculum Vitae

The author was born in Bethpage, New York on May 24, 1969. He
attended the University at Stony Brook from 1988 to1992 and graduated with a
Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy. He came to the University of Rochester in
the Fall of 1994 and began graduate studies in Philosophy. He received a Rush
Rhees Fellowship in 1994 and held teaching assistantships for the subsequent four
years. He pursued his research in Ethics under the direction of Professor Robert
Holmes and received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Rochester in
1999.
iv
Acknowledgments

Completion of this dissertation would not have been possible for me
without the kindness and generosity of people too numerous to mention. I wish to
extend special thanks, however, to the following:
Eileen Daly and Eva Cadavid for inspiring me to stick with it and to question
others instead of myself; Greg Janssen for his friendship and encouragement over
the years; Keith McPartland for his enthusiasm and comments, with Greg, on
chapter drafts over coffee at Canal Town; my family, and especially my parents,
Bill and Edna Piervincenzi who stopped asking “when will you be done?” just in
time; Mary Schweizer for good times and pizza; the Diggin family, especially
Cecilia for love and support and especially for Kerry; John G. Bennett who gave
so much of himself through the final months of writing; Robert L. Holmes for his
patience and calming influence; Joe and Jeanne Norwin for being our spiritual
sherpas; all of the Delaware Park Olde Tymers for whom it is always summer;
and Chewbacca, Goldie, and Quincy for quiet comfort when it was needed most.

I extend the most special thanks and love to my wife, Kerry Diggin, to whom this
work is dedicated. (Heaven knows she’s earned it).
v
Abstract

G.E. Moore is justly famous for his arguments against ethical naturalism;
however, after one hundred years of commentary, Moore’s arguments of the
opening chapters of Principia Ethica—his claim that most ethical theories commit
the naturalistic fallacy and his argument that moral goodness is a simple,
indefinable property—are poorly understood. This work seeks to augment our
understanding of these crucial arguments. This work offers an interpretation of
what it means to commit the naturalistic fallacy that is maximally consistent with
Moore's text and examples, distinguishes Moore’s claims about the naturalistic
fallacy from the open question argument, and corrects mistaken interpretations of
the open question argument. In pursuing these goals, I find that the naturalistic
fallacy and the open question argument are complementary, rather than redundant,
arguments. I also find that, contrary to the traditional reading, Moore’s open
question argument actually consists of two arguments, one of which is supported
by at least five sub-arguments, most of which turn on our intuitions about
language and meaning, and none of which is wholly successful. Moore uses the
open question argument to show that goodness is not identical with any complex
natural or metaphysical property. This still leaves the possibility that goodness is
identical with a simple natural or metaphysical property. His claim that
philosophers who attempt to define goodness commit the naturalistic fallacy
vi
undermines support for any such identification, even if it does not conclusively
refute such definitions.
vii
Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Legacy of Principia Ethica 1

Chapter 2 Goodness, Simple and Indefinable 15

Chapter 3 What is the Naturalistic Fallacy? 35

Chapter 4 The Naturalistic Fallacy: A New Interpretation 88

Chapter 5 Moore’s Proof that ‘Good’ Refers to a Simple,
Non-natural Property 136

Chapter 6 Conclusions 194

Bibliography 211
1
Chapter 1

The Legacy of Principia Ethica
I. Introduction
It is safe to say that after G.E. Moore published Principia Ethica,1 just
over one hundred years ago, philosophical ethics underwent a dramatic change.
All forms of ethical naturalism and metaphysical ethics,2 theories that accounted
for the majority of approaches to ethics, were under attack. Moore offered an
ambitious and vexing collection of arguments that inspired, and continues to
inspire, high praise and scathing criticism.3 And while his arguments did not
sound a death knell for naturalism, they did inspire the development of plenty of
alternative views.4
Moore’s intent in Principia Ethica was to create a new science of ethics,
one that better captured what we had in mind when we called an action or a state
of affairs good. He tried to accomplish this through observations about how we

1 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903). There are two versions of Principia Ethica in wide use,
which have the same text and different pagination. The newer version is the “revised edition” of
1993. Since this new version contains a useful, previously unpublished preface to a planned but
never written second edition of Principia Ethica, all future citations will be to the newer version.
The appropriate citation is G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica, revised edition, Thomas Baldwin, ed.
(Cambridge 1993) [henceforth ‘Principia Ethica’].
2 Broadly defined, these are theories that hold that hold that goodness is identical with some
natural or metaphysical property. See, e.g., Principia Ethica, § 27.
3 Alisdair MacIntyre holds Moore’s arguments to play a key role in the decline of Anglo-
American ethical thought, and in the ongoing decay of Western culture. See Brian Hutchinson,
G.E. Moore’s Ethical Theory (Cambridge 2001) p. 3, citing Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd
ed. (University of Notre Dame Press) 1984, pp 14-19.
4 Most notably, by those who rejected Moore’s positive views, like A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson.
2
use moral language, what we intend, what it is we seem to be attributing to an
action when we call it good, and through arguments that appear to demonstrate
that whatever we have in mind when we use moral language, it can not be
anything like what is proposed by ethical naturalists.

II. Overview of Principia Ethica.
Moore begins Principia Ethica by attempting to identify the scope of
ethical inquiry. He wants to answer the questions: What is the subject matter of
ethics? and, What is it that we purport to study when we engage in moral
reasoning? Clearly, the answer is conduct. But there are other disciplines besides
ethics that study conduct, so in order to differentiate ethics from those, Moore
takes his study a step further. What Ethics studies is good conduct. And since
“all conduct is not good; for some is certainly bad, and some may be indifferent,”5
Moore looks to see what all ethical judgments have in common as their subject
and determines that this common subject is goodness. This prompts Moore to
accept that ethics is the “general enquiry into what is good.”6
To determine what the nature of goodness is, in chapter I, Moore examines
what we mean by the word ‘good.’ We use the word ‘good’ in many ways, most
of which have nothing to do with ethics. For instance, I may say, “This eggplant
is really good” or write, “Good soil and high moisture ensure acceptable rates of

5 Principia Ethica, p. 54.
6 Principia Ethica, p. 54.
3
propagation.” In these contexts, ‘good’ means tasty or fertile, clearly not what we
mean when using ethical language.
There is one sense of this word that Moore concludes is the uniquely
moral sense of the word. This is the sense that Moore calls ‘intrinsic goodness’ or
sometimes ‘intrinsic value.’ For simplicity, I will refer to this predicate as
‘goodness,’ throughout this work. When it appears in single quotes, as in
‘goodness’
I am talking about the word that refers to the property goodness. When it appears
in regular text, without quotes, I use it to refer to the property itself. Moore
asserts throughout Principia Ethica that people make a mistake when they attempt
to define ‘good.’ But clearly, the problem is not in defining the word ‘good.’
Linguistic definition is not what Moore is after. He writes, “A definition does
indeed often mean the expressing of one word’s meaning in other words. But this
is not the sort of definition I am asking for. Such a definition can never be of
ultimate importance in any study except lexicography.”7 A linguistic definition
might tell us how people tend to use a word, or it might define a word by
stipulation. One mistake people make is in claiming that a mere verbal definition
is supposed to be an analysis of the uniquely moral sense of ‘good,’ namely, the
property goodness. While it is a mistake to confuse a verbal definition with a
property analysis, Moore is concerned to illustrate and avoid a different mistake—

7 Principia Ethica, p. 58.