- Length
- 288 pagesBaldwin, Principia Ethica, Cambridge, revised edition 1993
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Principia Ethica
The book that made metaethics a subject by arguing that everyone had been answering the wrong question. Its central argument was accepted for a generation, doubted by its own author within twenty years, and is still the first thing taught in the field.
- Date
- 1903
- Author
- G. E. Moore
- Region
- Cambridge
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
- Years back to what it answers
- 114 years
Dominated British moral philosophy for thirty years, was received by the Bloomsbury group as a manifesto, and is now read chiefly for the argument its author later doubted.
What the book says
A book arguing that moral philosophy had been asking a confused question and that almost every answer given was therefore wrong in the same way. Moore's claim is that good is a simple, indefinable property - simple in the way yellow is simple, so that it can be recognised but not analysed into parts. Every attempt to define it by identifying it with something else therefore commits what he calls the naturalistic fallacy: whether good is pleasure, or what we desire, or what is more evolved, or what God commands, the definition can always be tested by asking whether the substitute is itself good, and that question always remains open. If good simply meant pleasant, asking whether pleasure is good would be like asking whether pleasure is pleasant, which nobody finds worth asking. From this he concludes that ethics cannot be reduced to psychology, biology or theology, and that fundamental moral truths are known by a kind of direct recognition. The last chapter names what has intrinsic value, and the answer is narrower than the machinery suggests: personal affection and the appreciation of beauty, by an immense margin, are the best things there are.
What it argues
That good names a simple non-natural property, and that the first task of ethics is to keep the question of what is good separate from every question about what things are like. The open question argument is the instrument: for any proposed definition, it remains intelligible to ask whether the thing so defined is good, and that intelligibility shows the definition has not captured the meaning. Moore takes this to establish that goodness is not any natural property, and therefore that ethics cannot be derived from any science. Knowledge of what is good must then be a matter of direct recognition, which he calls intuition and is careful to say is not a special faculty but simply the fact that some propositions cannot be proved from others.
What it answered
The naturalistic ethics of the nineteenth century - Bentham and Mill on pleasure, Spencer on evolution, and the theological accounts that identify the good with divine command. His target is not their conclusions but the shared assumption that goodness is the kind of thing a definition could capture. He is also, less explicitly, answering the idealism that dominated Cambridge and Oxford when he was a student; the break with Bradley that he and Russell made together is the founding gesture of analytic philosophy in Britain, and this book is its ethical half.
How it argues
By analysis, in short numbered sections, with a scrupulousness that is either exemplary or maddening depending on the reader. Moore's method is to fix a question precisely, distinguish it from adjacent questions, and refuse to move on until the distinction is secure - which is where his enormous influence on the style of British philosophy comes from. The prose is plain to the point of flatness and the argument is repeated many times over. The final chapter, on what has value, abandons the machinery entirely and is written with unexpected warmth.
The moment
Cambridge at the turn of the century, with Moore and Russell in revolt against the British idealists. Moore was twenty-nine, a fellow of Trinity, and part of the Apostles, whose younger members - Keynes, Strachey, Woolf, Forster - took the last chapter as a charter for a life organised around friendship and art. Keynes wrote later that they had accepted Moore's religion and discarded his morals, which is a fair summary of what Bloomsbury did with the book.
How it travelled
By setting a style. The naturalistic fallacy became a standard move, taught to every student, and the open question argument shaped three decades of British ethics; the emotivists of the 1930s accepted Moore's conclusion that good is indefinable and drew a different consequence, that moral statements do not describe anything at all. The book also had an unusual second life outside philosophy through Bloomsbury. Its academic standing fell sharply after mid-century as the argument came to look question-begging, and it is now read as a landmark rather than as a position.
The strongest objection
That the open question argument assumes what it sets out to prove. If a proposed definition is correct but not obvious - as definitions in any subject may be - then a competent speaker could perfectly well find the question open while the identity holds, exactly as someone might intelligibly ask whether water is H2O. So the openness of the question shows only that the definition is not transparent to reflection, not that it is false. Frankena named the fallacy charge itself a fallacy in 1939, and the objection has been standard since. Moore himself came to agree: in a preface he began in 1922 and never finished, he wrote that the book was full of confusions and that the central argument does not work.
Why read it
The first chapter, which is where the argument is, and the last, which is where the sensibility is - and the two together are a strange and revealing combination. It is easy reading, unusually so for a founding text, and the unfinished 1922 preface printed in the Cambridge edition is worth the price on its own.
- First printed
- 1903
- First in English
- 1903
- Digitised
- Yes
Baldwin's 1993 Cambridge edition prints the unfinished 1922 preface in which Moore concedes that the book is full of confusions and mistakes, and that the open question argument as stated does not work.
Written in English. The 1903 text is public domain.
Where it stands
Historical as a doctrine and permanently installed as a starting point. Non-naturalism has serious contemporary defenders, but very few of them rest on the open question argument; the book's real survival is that the distinction it drew, between the meaning of moral terms and the facts about what is good, defined metaethics as a field.
The passage
good is good, and that is the end of the matter
Principia Ethica, chapter I. Public domain, and Moore's own words.
Contested
Whether the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy at all, and whether Moore's own examples are fair to Mill, have been argued since the 1930s. Whether non-naturalism can be held without the intuitionist epistemology Moore attached to it is a live question with contemporary defenders on both sides. And how far the last chapter's list of intrinsic goods follows from anything in the preceding argument, rather than expressing the tastes of a particular Cambridge generation, is a fair question that the book does not answer.