Moore on Right and Wrong: The Normative Ethics of G. E. Moore

212 Pages·1995·3.221 MB·English

by  William H. Shaw (auth.)

MOORE ON RIGHT AND WRONG
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES
Founded by Wilfrid S. Sellars and Keith Lehrer
Editor
KEITH LEHRER, University ofA rizona, Tucson
Associate Editor
STEWART COHEN, Arizona State University, Tempe
Board of Consulting Editors
LYNNE RUDDER BAKER, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
ALLAN GffiBARD, University of Michigan
DENISE MEYERSON, University of Cape Town
RONALD D. MILO, University ofA rizona, Tucson
FRAN<:OIS RECANAT I, Ecole Poly technique, Paris
STUART SILVERS, Clemson University
NICHOLAS D. SMITH, Michigan State University
VOLUME 61
MOORE ON
RIGHT AND WRONG
The Normative Ethics of G. E. Moore
WILLIAM H. SHAW
Department of Philosophy
San Jose State University
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Shaw, Will iam H., 1948-
Moore on right and wrong the normative ethics of G. E. Moore I
by William H. Shaw.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-481-4489-1 ISBN 978-94-015-8537-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8537-8
1. Moore, G. E .. <George Edward), 1873-1958--Ethics. 2. Ethics.
1. Title.
B1647.M74S48 1995
171' .2--dc20 94-38968
ISBN 978-90-481-4489-1
Printed on acid-free paper
AII Rights Reserved
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1995
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover lst edition 1995
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
For Carolyn
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1 "GOOD" AND THE THINGS THAT ARE GOOD 8
The Naturalistic Fallacy 9
Organic Wholes 15
Against Hedonism 18
Goods aIid Evils 27
The Value of the Virtues 35
2 MOORE'S COMMITMENT TO CONSEQUENTIALISM
Three Criticisms of Utilitarianism 41
A Closer Look at Utilitarianism 46
Good and Moral Obligation 53
Principia's Arguments 58
Moore's Later Account of "Right" 61
3 REBUTIALS AND REFINEMENTS 68
Attitudinal Theories of Ethics 68
Egoism 77
Duty and Expediency 81
Virtue Once More 85
Motives 89
4 LIMITS TO MORAL KNOWLEDGE 94
No Self-Evident Moral Rules 95
Prima Facie Duties 97
No Action Known to Be Our Duty 104
Overlooked Options 107
Future Reversals 109
Consequences, Actual and Probable 114
Retreating from Skepticism 120
Vll
viii T ABLE OF CONTENTS
5 MORAL RULES 123
Justifying Moral Rules 123
The Rule against Murder 127
The Universal Core of Ordinary Morality 131
Rules Resting on Contingent Circumstances 135
Rules Not Generally Observed 140
Review and Reformulation 145
6 INDIVIDUAL MORAL CHOICE 148
Part I: Obeying the Rules 148
No Exceptions 149
Bad Examples 155
Three Things Moore Could Have Said 160
Part II: Beyond Rules 163
Situations without Valid Rules 164
Three Principles 167
CONCLUSION 179
BIBLIOGRAPHY 189
INDEX 195
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sabbatical leave from San Jose State University made writing this book
possible. I am indebted also to the following friends and colleagues for
reading and commenting on all or part of my manuscript: Jonathan
Bennett, Clement Dore, Sterling Harwood, Tom Leddy, Lucretia "Quee"
Nelson, Rita Manning, Joe Waterhouse, and Andy Ward. Whatever its
defects, this book is better than it would have been without their useful
suggestions and insightful criticisms. I also thank Susan Neuhoff for
her help in preparing the manuscript and Carolyn Martin Shaw for her
wise counsel at every stage of the project.
ix
INTRODUCTION
G. E. Moore was a central figure in twentieth-century philosophy. Along
with Russell and Wittgenstein, he pioneered so-called analytic philos
ophy, and his argumentative technique, his intellectual example, and
his characteristic philosophical concerns have informed the way more
than one generation of philosophers have approached their discipline.
As a result, Moore's influence is hard to exaggerate. Even if few philoso
phers today self-consciously adhere to any distinctively Moorean methods
or philosophical tenets, his legacy is deeply and permanently embedded
in Anglo-American philosophy.
In no realm of philosophy has Moore's legacy been more significant
than in ethics, and few, if any, would dissent from the judgment that
"no philosopher had greater impact on Anglo-American moral phi
losophy in the first half of the 20th century than G. E. Moore.")
Moore's Principia Ethica of 1903 restructured the field, and for nearly
seventy years, no single work in ethics was to have repercussions as
profound.
In Principia Moore saw the task of ethics as that of addressing certain
basic questions. He undertook to formulate those questions with preci
sion, to clarify the differences among them, and to define the funda
mental concepts involved in, and specify the procedures appropriate to,
answering them. This emphasis drove ethics toward conceptual analysis
and away from synthetic and systematic moral theorizing. In large
measure because of Principia Ethica, metaethical disputes came to
dominate professional ethics; that is, disputes over the nature of moral
judgment, the meaning of moral language, and the possibility, if any,
of justifying ethical propositions. All sides to those debates agreed
that metaethical questions represented the distinctive province of philo
sophical ethics and that those questions needed to be answered before
philosophers could usefully address substantive moral principles and
concrete ethical problems.
I Stephen Darwall, "Moore to Stevenson," p. 366.
2 INTRODUCTION
Principia itself had argued that almost all prior moral theories were
flawed at their foundations - guilty of what Moore called the "natural
istic fallacy," that is, of viewing the truth of ethical propositions as in
some way or other a function of natural facts. Moore was a cognitivist
who believed that there are true ethical propositions and that we can know
some of them. But his doctrine that ethical knowledge involves the appre
hension of a nonnatural property (namely, goodness) never found as much
favor as did his bracing critique of naturalism. Although this critique had
a powerful impact, the appeal of Moore's nonnaturalistic cognitivism was,
by contrast, relatively weak. In the decades following Principia, many
philosophers who were persuaded by the former ended up abandoning
cognitivism altogether in favor of the position that distinctively ethical
discourse is not cognitive at all, but rather an expression of attitude or
emotion. As a result of this development, twentieth-century metaethics
has long been understood to be a three-way dispute among naturalism,
nonnaturalism, and noncognitivism.
Moore's challenge to naturalism still lies at the heart of metaethical
debate, but philosophical discussion has, as one would expect, moved
beyond Moore's contribution to that debate.2 Furthermore, philosophers
no longer shy away from substantive ethical questions. In particular,
since the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971, many
analytically minded philosophers have set aside traditional metaethical
topics in order to investigate and assess normative principles and theories,
on the one hand, and concrete moral issues (like abortion, capital pun
ishment, and the treatment of animals), on the other. These considerations
might lead one to doubt the contemporary relevance of Moore's contri
bution to ethics. But such doubt would be misplaced.
To be sure, the historical impact of Moore's work in ethics is gener
ally understood to consist in the fact that it shaped the analytic character
of twentieth-century ethics and framed the metaethical disputes that
engaged philosophers for several decades but now seem slightly stale.
Because the philosophical climate Moore helped to create reinforced
the priority of issues of meaning, language, and justification, Moore's
own contribution to ethics came to be seen as residing solely in his
resistance to naturalism and in his thesis that "good" names a simple,
2 For an insightful review of current trends in metaethics, which sets them in the context
of the controversy that Principia Ethica initiated, see Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard,
and Peter Railton, "Toward Fin de siecle Ethics: Some Trends."