The Routledge Guidebook to Moore's Principia Ethica

Susana Nuccetelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000453409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica is a landmark publication in twentieth-century moral philosophy. Through focusing on the origin and evolution of his main doctrines, this guidebook makes it clear that Moore was an innovator whose provocative take on traditional philosophical problems ignited heated debates among philosophers. Principia Ethica is an important text for those attempting to understand and engage with some major philosophical debates in ethics today.

The Routledge Guidebook to Moore's Principia Ethica provides a comprehensive introduction to this historic text, examining key Moorean themes including:

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• ethical non-naturalism
• the naturalistic fallacy
• the Open Question Argument
• moral ontology and epistemology
• ideal utilitarianism
• vindictive punishment and organicity
• moral intuition for epistemic justification in ethics
• theory of value

Ideal for anyone wanting to understand and gain perspective on Moore's seminal work, the book is essential reading for students of moral philosophy, metaethics, normative ethics, philosophical analysis, and related fields.

1 LIFE AND WORK With Gary Seay

DOI: 10.4324/9780429275975-1

1.1 Growing up

A profoundly influential figure in twentieth-century British philosophy was the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore. Born in 1873 to a comfortably middle-class family, George Edward Moore was the fifth of eight children, four boys and four girls. Since he apparently disliked the name ‘George Edward,’ most of his contemporaries called him ‘G. E. Moore’ or simply ‘Moore.’¹ His father Daniel and his paternal grandfather were both physicians. His mother, Henrietta Sturge Moore, came from a family of some prominence among Britain’s Quakers. In his autobiography (A: 4–5), Moore tells us that she became estranged from the Society of Friends because of the denomination’s disapproval of marriage between first cousins, which Henrietta and Daniel were. As a result, she attended Baptist meetings, twice every Sunday, with the whole Moore family in tow. Henrietta had some personal wealth that would later provide Moore with a convenient inheritance during a period he spent away from Cambridge between 1904 and 1911. This allowed him to continue his scholarly work while he had no teaching post.

But it was not only medical science and religion that were esteemed in the Moore household. The arts were also among things held in high regard. Moore himself cultivated singing and the piano. His eldest brother, Thomas Sturge Moore, grew up to become a celebrated poet, a friend of Yeats. He illustrated the first editions of Yeats’s poems, and discussed with him the merits of G. E. Moore’s early philosophical works in letters that are now in print (Bridge 1953).

Shortly before Moore’s birth, his father retired from his medical practice. The family then moved to Upper Norwood in the southern suburbs of London so that the boys might receive an education at nearby Dulwich College, a recently improved boarding school that had a growing reputation among London’s upper middle class, a group whose social status and political influence were on the rise. At age 8, Moore began as a day boy at Dulwich. According to his own recollections (A: 5), there he learned some mathematics as well as French and German. But above all, he developed an abiding interest in the classics curriculum that led him to spend most of these formative years translating English prose and verse into ancient Greek and Latin. During his last year at Dulwich, he took private music lessons from one of his teachers, E. D. Rendall. He learned organ as well as harmony and was able to sing Lieder by Schubert and Brahms, accompanying himself on the piano. He continued playing music and singing in social gatherings until late in life.²

While still at school, Moore suffered an embarrassment that might have affected his later views on religion and definitely left him uneasy when thinking about it in retrospect (A: 10–11). It came as a result of an episode he describes as “one of the most painful continued mental conflicts” he had ever faced. At around age 12, he was drawn into an ultra-evangelical Christian sect. One summer, while vacationing at a seaside resort with his family, he felt duty-bound to act on this newly acquired religious conviction by proselytizing for the group. He distributed its religious tracts, pressing leaflets into the hands of total strangers. This activity Moore felt embarrassing, especially in light of the presence at that very resort of two boys from Dulwich whom he admired. After about two years, Moore gave up his Protestant fundamentalism, and eventually religious belief altogether, embracing an agnosticism that remained his view for the rest of his life. In later years he was consistently skeptical about the existence of God. Tom Regan, in Chapter 2 of Bloomsbury’s Prophet (Regan 1986), speculates that Moore was never comfortable with his agnosticism because it fueled for him a special concern about the grounds of morality. But it is far from clear that Moore’s writings on the foundations of morality or religion support this speculation. Early in his career, Moore appeared quite comfortable with boldly declaring that his agnosticism about the existence of God rested on certain ontological and pragmatic considerations, including the lack of sound contrary reason or evidence. Accordingly, he wrote:

It surely might be better to give up the search for a God whose existence is and remains undemonstrable, and to divert the feelings which the religious wish to spend on him, towards those of our own kind, who though perhaps less good than we can imagine God to be, are worthy of all the affections that we can feel; and whose help and sympathy are much more certainly real. We might perhaps with advantage worship the real creature a little more, and his hypothetical Creator a good deal less.

(Moore 1901: 98)

In a 1955 letter to E. M. Forster, written just three years before his death, Moore still appeared resolutely agnostic. On his view, one or the other of these propositions must be true: either “there is no God,” or “it is extremely doubtful whether there is any [God].”³

1.2 Early years at Cambridge

From classics to philosophy

Among Moore’s teachers at Dulwich, he acknowledged especially the influence of A. H. Gilkes, the headmaster, and W. T. Lendrum, who later became a Fellow at Caius College, Cambridge. The study of Greek and Latin was at the time Moore’s exclusive intellectual concern, since he “had no particular preference for anything else” (A: 5). Aware of Moore’s talent for classics, Gilkes and Lendrum supported his application for a Major Entrance Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. In the fall of 1892, Moore began his undergraduate study there, directing his efforts toward the completion of Part I of the Classical Tripos. He soon discovered that most of what was expected of him during this first year he had already studied at Dulwich.

But something was new: his intellectual and social circles had begun to expand, and with it he had begun to develop a growing new interest in philosophical problems – something he had not recalled happening before, not even while reading Plato’s Protagoras as part of his instruction in classics. According to Moore’s own, probably exaggerated, recollection in his autobiography, until his second year at Cambridge in 1893, he hardly knew “that there was such a subject as philosophy” (ibid.: 13). Crucial to his new interest in the discipline were some friendships Moore established with undergraduates and tutors in the Moral Sciences Tripos, the center of philosophical study at Cambridge at the time. That year Moore made two acquaintances who were to be most influential in the promotion of this new intellectual interest. One was undergraduate Bertrand Russell, one year Moore’s senior but two years ahead of him at the university. Russell was about to leave Cambridge after completion of Part II of the Moral Sciences Tripos. The other was John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, a young neo-Hegelian instructor who had been appointed to teach the history of modern philosophy for the Moral Sciences Tripos.

Conversations with them led Moore to some problems of philosophical method and substance that would become central to his thinking from then on. He later described them as problems facing neither ordinary nor scientific thinking but only philosophical thinking:

[They are] first, the problem of trying to get really clear as to what on earth a given philosopher meant by something which he said, and secondly, the problem of discovering what really satisfactory reasons there are for supposing that what he meant was true, or alternatively, was false.

(ibid.: 14)

McTaggart’s punctilious regard for conceptual clarity and reasoned argument might have encouraged Moore’s own detailed attention to matters of philosophical method. On consideration later, Moore said that what most impressed him about McTaggart’s lectures was not his interpretation of Hegel, which he considered clearer than the original, though probably not faithful to it. It was instead that McTaggart seemed to Moore “immensely clever and immensely quick in argument” (ibid.: 18).

By 1894 (his third year at Cambridge), Moore was spending more time talking with philosophically-minded peers and tutors. Following what he recalls as Russell’s advice (ibid.: 16), he decided to add the Moral Sciences Tripos to his undergraduate studies in Classics. Eventually he completed it, obtaining a First Class with a mark of distinction. At the same time he was preparing for the Greek philosophy section of the Classical Tripos Part II, which he completed in the same month with a Second Class.

In this period, Moore was focused primarily on developing his philosophical acumen under the guidance of his tutors. His autobiography acknowledges a debt to McTaggart’s lectures on Hegel, James Ward’s guidance on books to read and his lectures on all areas of philosophy except ethics, G. F. Stout’s lectures on the history of modern philosophy, and Henry Jackson’s lectures on Plato and Aristotle (ibid.: 16–19). The influence of Henry Sidgwick appears not to have originated in his lectures, which Moore’s autobiography describes as dull and consisting of Sidgwick reading his papers to students. But in his writings, especially in The Methods of Ethics, Sidgwick developed some ethical doctrines that impacted Moore in a number of ways about which we’ll have something to say later.⁴

The Cambridge Conversazione Society

Each of Moore’s tutors, as well as fellow undergraduates such as Russell, were members of ‘the Cambridge Conversazione Society,’ a semi-secret fraternal circle that met periodically to debate short papers written by members. Commonly known to its members as ‘the Society,’ the group originally had only twelve members, and for that reason outsiders who knew of their existence dubbed them ‘the Apostles,’ a term still in use for members today. In its heyday (roughly between the 1890s and the beginning of World War I), the Society managed to enlist some very talented Cambridge men by means of a highly selective process of election. Discussions in the meetings of the Society played a crucial role in Moore’s development of some of his characteristic philosophical traits.⁵ At the time he began to show an interest in philosophy, the Society had enlisted, besides his tutors and other lecturers, many undergraduates who went on to occupy distinguished positions in Britain’s public service, journalism, education, and culture.

Although since its founding the Society maintained rules of secrecy, a great deal of information about its practices during the years of Moore’s active membership is now available from a number of sources. Among them are archival materials kept at Cambridge, the private correspondence of members, and memoirs published by some of the Apostles themselves (e.g., Russell’s memoirs (Russell 1951a) and his autobiography (Russell 1951b)) or left for publication by their heirs (e.g., Sidgwick’s memoir, posthumously published by his brother Arthur, himself an Apostle, and his wife Eleanor Mildred, based on Henry’s notes and correspondence (Sidgwick 1906)). But Moore honored the rule of secrecy, as can be inferred from the fact that his autobiography never mentions the Society by name. At most, we might infer that he is referring to the Apostles when, after having acknowledged his philosophical debt to Russell, he reports “during part of these years I had a good deal of discussion with Russell, and I also learned a good deal from discussion with other friends. To mention one particular instance, the whole plan of the last chapter of Principia was first formed in a conversation with a friend” (A: 25, our emphasis).⁶

But from Russell’s memoirs and autobiography we learn a lot more, including that the Society had a firm rule prescribing that, in its philosophical debates, “there were to be no taboos, no limitations, nothing considered shocking, no barriers to absolute freedom of speculation.” As he recalls, “[w]e discussed all manner of things, no doubt with a certain immaturity, but with a detachment and interest scarcely possible in later life.”⁷ Generally consistent with Russell’s recollections, Sidgwick also notes that “the pursuit of truth with absolute devotion” was central to that group of “intimate friends” from whom “absolute candour” in philosophical debates was expected. He adds,

[T]ruth as we saw it then and there was what we had to embrace and maintain, and there were no propositions so well established that an Apostle had not the right to deny or question, if he did so sincerely and not from mere love of paradox. The gravest subjects were continually debated, but gravity of treatment, as I have said, was not imposed, though sincerity was …

(Sidgwick 1906: 34–35)

Based on textual evidence of this sort, Paul Levy (1979), W. C. Lubenow (1998) and other historians of the period converge in describing the Society, at the time Moore was elected to it, as a group of intellectually outstanding men, counting among them one or two undergraduates from each year at Cambridge, mostly from the colleges of Trinity and King’s. They tended to have the socioeconomic background of a professional middle class whose influence in British intellectual and public life was growing rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth century. Compared with earlier Apostles, these were more distinguished, and at least at some point in their lives less sympathetic to religion, when not openly hostile to it, as illustrated by the agnosticism or open atheism of Apostolic philosophers such as McTaggart, Moore, Russell, Sidgwick, Stout, and Ward.⁸ The Apostles’ interest was chiefly that of engaging in reasoned debates to get closer to the truth about questions concerning a wide variety of philosophical questions, from the existence of God and the possibility of immortality to the unreality of time or space and many more.

The list of notable philosophers who had joined the Society in Moore’s time, besides those already mentioned, must also include Alfred North Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Among other eminent Apostles of the period were the poet Rupert Brooke, the novelist E. M. Forster, and mathematician G. H. Hardy. Flourishing in London in roughly the same period was the Bloomsbury circle, which, in addition to some Apostles such as economist John Maynard Keynes, public servant/editor/publisher Leonard Woolf, and biographer Lytton Strachey, included novelist Virginia Woolf and art critic Clive Bell, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Life and work: With Gary Seay
• 2 Principia Ethica in its context: With Gary Seay
• 3 Philosophy of Ethics
• 4 Moral language and thought
• 5 The Open Question Argument: With Gary Seay
• 6 The naturalistic fallacy: With Gary Seay
• 7 Moral knowledge
• 8 Moral properties and truths
• 9 Intrinsic value
• 10 Moral obligation
• 11 Normative ethics and theory of value
• Epilogue: the legacy of G. E. Moore and Principia Ethica
• Bibliography
• Index