## 1. Non-naturalism and the Open-Question Argument



Moore's non-naturalism comprised two main theses. One was the
realist thesis that moral and more generally normative judgements
- like many of his contemporaries, Moore did not distinguish the
two - are true or false objectively, or independently of any
beliefs or attitudes we may have. The other was the autonomy-of-ethics
thesis that moral judgements are *sui generis*, neither
reducible to nor derivable from non-moral, for example scientific or
metaphysical, judgements; they express a distinctive kind of objective
truth. Closely connected to his non-naturalism was the epistemological
view that our knowledge of moral truths is intuitive, in the sense
that it is not arrived at by inference from non-moral truths but rests
on our recognizing certain moral propositions as self-evident, by a
kind of direct or immediate insight.



Moore expressed the realist side of his non-naturalism by saying that
fundamental moral judgements ascribe the property of goodness or
badness to states of affairs, though especially in *Principia
Ethica* he tended not to distinguish moral concepts and moral
properties. Like others of his time, he seems to have taken the
realist view that moral judgements are objectively true for granted;
he certainly did not defend it extensively against anti-realist
alternatives. Thus the first sentence of *Principia Ethica*
refers casually, and without any sense of controversy, to the
"truth" of some ethical judgements (1903: 1/1993: 53). In
this he was doubtless influenced by the grammar of moral judgements,
which have a standard subject-predicate form, as in "*x*
is good." But it may also be relevant that, at least early on,
the only version of subjectivism he seems to have been aware of was
the naturalist view that to say "*x* is good" is to
report some psychological fact such as that you approve of *x*
or that most people in your society do. In his later book
*Ethics* he argued, among other things, that this view does not
allow for moral disagreement, since, for example, my report that I
approve of *x* and your report that you disapprove of it can
both be true (1912: 100-03/1947: 62-64/1965: 42-43).
Late in his life he encountered the non-cognitivist emotivism of C.L.
Stevenson, which says that moral judgements express rather than report
feelings and therefore can conflict (Stevenson 1942). He initially
conceded, surprisingly, that Stevenson's anti-realist view had
as good a claim as his own to be true (1942: 544-45), but
shortly after he reverted to his earlier non-naturalism, saying he
could not imagine what had induced him to consider abandoning it
(Ewing 1962: 251).



Especially in *Principia Ethica*, Moore spent much more time
defending his other non-naturalist thesis, about the autonomy of
ethics, which he expressed by saying the property of goodness is
simple and unanalyzable, and in particular unanalyzable in non-moral
terms. This meant the property is "non-natural," or
distinct from any of the natural properties studied by science, though
he also thought it distinct from metaphysical properties. Views that
denied this thesis committed what he called "the naturalistic
fallacy" (1903: 10/1993: 62), which he found in hedonists such
as Jeremy Bentham, evolutionary ethicists such as Herbert Spencer, and
metaphysical ethicists such as T.H. Green. His main argument against
their view was what has come to be known as the "open-question
argument," though he actually stated in two slightly different
ways. Consider a particular naturalist claim, such as that
"*x* is good" is equivalent to "*x* is
pleasant" or "*x* is pleasure."If this claim
were true, he argued, the judgement "Pleasure is good"
would be equivalent to "Pleasure is pleasure," yet surely
someone who asserts the former means to express more than that
uninformative tautology. Alternatively, if this naturalist claim were
true, "*x* is pleasant but *x* is not good"
would be self-contradictory. Once it was established that *x*
is pleasant, the question whetherit is good would then be
closed, or not worth considering, whereas, he argued, it remains open.
The same argument can be mounted against any other naturalist
proposal: even if we have determined that something is what we desire
to desire or is more evolved, the question whether it is good remains
open, in the sense of not being settled by the meaning of the word
"good." We can ask whether what we desire to desire is
good, and likewise for what is more evolved, more unified, or whatever
(1903: 10-17/1993: 62-69). Sidgwick had used one form of
this argument against Bentham and Spencer, but only in passing (1907:
26n, 109); Moore developed it a greater length and made it central to
his metaethics. And though he applied it specifically to
"good," it can equally well be used about other moral or
normative concepts such as "ought" and
"duty."



The open-question argument was extensively discussed in
20th-century metaethics and met with several objections.
One said the argument's persuasiveness depends on the
"paradox of analysis": that any definition of a concept
will, if it is successful, appear uninformative. If an analysis does
capture all its target concept's content, the sentence linking
the two will be a tautology; but this is hardly a reason to reject all
analyses (Langford 1942). Here it can be replied that in other cases
accepting a definition leads us to see that the sentence affirming it,
while initially seeming informative, in fact is not; thus "a
bachelor is an unmarried man" is not informative. This does not
happen, however, in the case of "good." Even if we agree
that only pleasure is good, no amount of reflection will make us think
"Pleasure is good" is equivalent to "Pleasure is
pleasure"; Ross, for one, gave this response (1930:
92-94). Another objection, made from the 1970s on and very
influential, says that while the open-question argument may show that
the concept "good" is distinct from any non-moral concept,
it cannot support a similar conclusion about the property of goodness.
(Recall that Moore tended not to distinguish concepts from
properties.) Empirical science, the objection runs, uncovers many
non-analytic property-identities, for example, that the property of
being water is identical to the property of being H2O even
though the concepts "water" and
"H2O" are distinct. By analogy, the property of
goodness could be identical to that of being pleasant even if
"good" and "pleasant" have different meanings
(e.g. Brink 1989: Ch. 6). Moore's mistake, then, was to think
that what may indeed hold for the concept "good" also
holds for the property of goodness. Again, however, it can be replied
that natural-kind properties such as being water have special features
that allow non-analytic identities but that aren't had by
ethical properties such as goodness, for which such identities are
impossible. More specifically, it can be argued, the property of being
water is the property of having that underlying structure, whichever
it is, the explains the behaviour of the stuff found in lakes, rivers,
and streams; when this structure turns out to be H2O, the
latter property "fills a gap" in the former and makes the
two identical (Parfit 2011, vol. 2: 298-303, 329-38; also
Gampel 1996). But this explanation does not extend to the case of
goodness, which is not a higher-level property with any gap that needs
filling. To be good is not to have whatever other property plays some
functional role; it is just to be good. It follows that if goodness is
analytically distinct from any natural property, it is metaphysically
distinct from it too.



It is worth noting, however, that Moore did not explain his
open-question argument in the way many later non-cognitivists, who
likewise endorsed the argument, would. Following Hume, they held that
moral judgements are intrinsically motivating, so that sincerely
accepting "*x* is good" requires a commitment or at
least some motivation to pursue *x* if that is possible (e.e.
Hare 1952: 81-93; Hare 1963: 22-29). But then no analysis
of "good" in purely natural terms can succeed, since it
cannot capture the term's action-guiding force; nor can an
evaluative conclusion be validly inferred from premises none of which
have that force. Whatever the merits of this Humean explanation, Moore
himself did not give it. The question whether moral judgements are
intrinsically motivating is not one on which he expressed clear views
or which he apparently thought important. In *Principia Ethica*
he remarked in passing that we "hardly ever" think
something good without having some attitude of will towards it, but he
denied that this is true universally (1903: 131, 135-6/1993:
181-82, 186). Whether it is true universally, and what might
follow if it is, is not something he seems to have thought it worth
considering further.


## 2. Metaethical Innovations



The main elements of Moore's non-naturalism - moral
realism and the autonomy of ethics - had been defended earlier
by Sidgwick and others and were reasonably well known when Moore
wrote. This is reflected in the initial reviews of *Principia
Ethica*, many of which questioned its claims to metaethical
originality (see Welchman 1989). But Moore did add two metaethical
innovations. One was his view that the fundamental moral concept is
"good" (plus its contrary "bad"), which he
expressed by saying that goodness is simple and unanalyzable, even in
moral terms. This had not been Sidgwick's view. For him the
central moral concept was "ought," and he defined good in
terms of ought, more specifically, as what one ought to desire (1907:
112). *Principia Ethica* took the exactly opposite view,
defining ought in terms of good, so "one ought to do
*x*" literally means "*x* will produce the
most good possible" (1903: 25, 146-48/1993: 76-77,
196-98). But Moore was quickly persuaded by Bertrand Russell
that this view is vulnerable to his own open-question argument, since
in saying "one ought to do what will produce the most
good" we do not mean "what will produce the most good will
produce the most good" (Russell 1904: 330). In later work such
as *Ethics* he therefore held that ought is a distinct moral
property from good (1912: 173, 180-81/1947: 107-08,
112-13/1965: 73, 76-77; also 1942: 558-59), and in
an uncompleted Preface to a planned second edition of *Principia
Ethica* he allowed that it would not affect the essence of his
non-naturalism if good were defined in moral terms, say, as what one
ought to desire (1993: 5, 14-15). But he continued to prefer the
view that good is a simple concept, not definable in deontic terms
(1942: 574-77), and there was vigorous debate on this topic in
this general period, with Brentano, Broad, and A.C. Ewing defending
reductive analyses similar to Sidgwick's while Ross preferred a
non-reductive view like Moore's. On the Moorean view judgements
about the goodness of states of affairs are not shorthand for
judgements about how we ought or have reason to respond to those
states; they are independent judgements that explain, synthetically
but as following "from the very nature" of goodness, why
we ought so to respond.



Moore's second innovation was his view that the intrinsic value
of a state of affairs can depend only on its intrinsic properties,
ones it has apart from any relations to other states. Earlier writers
had distinguished between goodness as an end, which they also called
intrinsic or ultimate goodness, and goodness as a means, and had said
the former cannot rest just on a state's causally producing
goods external to itself. But they seemed to allow that goodness as an
end can depend on other relational properties; thus they talked as if
a belief's being true, which is necessary for its being
knowledge, can increase its value, while a pleasure's being that
of a bad person can make it worse. Moore did not explicitly state his
more restrictive view that intrinsic goodness can depend only on
intrinsic properties until "The Conception of Intrinsic
Value" of 1922, but it nonetheless guided *Principia
Ethica* at two points. One was the book's specific
formulation of its principle of organic unities, discussed below. The
other was its testing for a state's intrinsic value by the
"method of isolation," which involves asking whether a
universe containing only that state and no other would be good (1903:
91, 93, 95, 187-88, 208/1993: 142, 145, 147, 236-37, 256);
the point of this method is precisely to insulate judgements of
intrinsic value from facts about a state's external relations by
ensuring that there are none such. Moore's strict view was
shared by some later writers such as Ross (1930: 75), while others
argued that a better theory of value results if intrinsic goodness is
allowed to depend on some relational properties (e.g. Ewing 1947:
114). But Moore was the first to raise this issue clearly.



These two innovations, though not trivial, do not affect the core of a
non-naturalist metaethics. Some critics, however, charge that Moore
did change that view fundamentally, and for the worse. They say
Sidgwick's non-naturalism was comparatively modest, holding only
that there are truths about what people ought or have reason to do
that we can know by reflection. Moore, the objection runs,
supplemented this modest view with an extravagant metaphysics of
non-natural properties inhabiting a dubious supersensible realm and a
mysterious faculty of intuition that acquaints us with them. These
additions opened non-naturalism to entirely avoidable objections and
led, regrettably, to its widespread rejection by later philosophers
(e.g. Mackie 1976: 323; Shaver 2000: 263-65; Phillips 2011:
29-30).



These charges are, however, hard to sustain. *Principia Ethica*
actually downplayed the metaphysical side of its non-naturalism,
saying that goodness has "being" but does not
"exist", as numbers, too, have being but do not exist; in
particular, goodness does not exist in any "supersensible
reality," because there is no such reality (1903: 110-12,
123-25/1993: 161-63, 174-76). What exactly Moore
meant by these claims is unclear, but it's at least possible to
read them as suggesting a non-metaphysical moral realism like those
defended more recently by Nagel (1986), Scanlon (1998, 2014), and
Parfit (2011, vol. 2: 464-87 ). Nor did his explicit talk of
properties mark a significant departure from Sidgwick. This is partly
because he did not clearly distinguish concepts and properties, and
partly because if Sidgwick thought people ought to pursue pleasure, he
would surely have to grant that pleasure has the property of being
something people ought to pursue. The question is how ontologically
robust Moore's talk of a property of goodness was, and given his
denial that such goodness exists the answer is uncertain. The
distinction between more and less metaphysical forms of non-naturalism
is not one he clearly addressed.



Moore was similarly modest in his moral epistemology, saying several
times, as Sidgwick also had, that by calling our knowledge of basic
moral truths "intuitive" he meant only that it is not
derived by inference from other knowledge; he likewise denied that
moral intuition is infallible, saying that in whatever way we can
cognize a true proposition, we can cognize a false one (1903: viii.
x/1993: 34, 36). He did sometimes make bald assertions of
self-evidence, as in his claim in *Principia Ethica* that it is
"obvious" that the chief intrinsic goods are aesthetic
appreciation and personal love (1903: 188/1993: 237) or in
*Ethics* that it is "self-evident" that what is
right is always what most promotes the good (1912: 1809-81/1947:
112-13/1965: 76-77), and some critics have found this
baldness troubling. But the contrast with earlier non-naturalists such
as Sidgwick should again not be overdrawn. Sidgwick arguably, too,
gave most weight to intuitions about abstract moral principles (1907:
379-84), including one close to that which Moore cited in
*Ethics*, and appealed to more concrete judgements only in
*ad hominem* arguments against opponents. And Moore often
argued in more complex ways. In *Principia Ethica* he defended
his claim that beauty on its own is good by appealing to intuitions
about a specific beautiful world, containing mountains, rivers, and
sunsets (1903: 83-85/1993: 135-36), and criticized the
view that only pleasure is good by arguing that it conflicts with
several concrete things we believe, such as that there are bad
pleasures (1903: 95/1993:146-47) and that a life of intensely
pleasurable but illusory experiences would not be best (1903:
197-98/1993: 246-47; compare 1912: 52-53,
237-39/1947: 34, 146-47/1965: 22, 102). Moore likewise
insisted that before we make judgements of self-evidence we must make
sure that the propositions we are considering are clear (1903:
viii/1993: 34); failure to do so, he argued, explains many of the
existing disagreements about ethics. And he took note of common
opinions to the extent of trying to explain away contrary views when
he found them. Overall his approach to establishing moral truths was
close to Sidgwick's, appealing to intuitive judgements that can
be made at different levels of generality and that must be brought
into a coherent whole, though with the primary emphasis on abstract
judgements. This is not to say his non-naturalism was beyond
objection. Any such view holds that there are truths independent of
natural and logical ones and knowable by some non-empirical means, and
many find this pair of claims problematic. But Moore's version
of the view was arguably no more objectionable than others. If
Sidgwick's non-naturalism did not involve a problematic
metaphysics and epistemology, neither did Moore's; if
Moore's was hopelessly extravagant, so was a supposedly more
modest one like Sidgwick's.



A final important feature of Moore's metaethics was its
reductionism about normative concepts. Like Sidgwick, the Moore of
*Principia Ethica* held that there is just one basic normative
concept, though he thought it was good rather than ought; like Ross,
the later Moore held that there are just two. But this conceptual
reductionism, which was common throughout the period from Sidgwick to
Ross, Broad, and Ewing, contrasts with the plurality of concepts
recognized in much present-day ethics. First, Moore and his
contemporaries took as basic only the "thin" concepts good
and ought rather than "thick" moral concepts such as
courage and generosity; the latter, they held, combined a thin concept
with some more or less determinate descriptive content. They were also
reductive about the thin concepts. They did not distinguish between
moral oughts and prudential or rational ones, holding that there is
only the single, moral ought; this is why for them egoism was a view
about morality, not a challenge to it from outside the moral realm.
Nor did they recognize different types of value. For them goodness was
a property only of states of affairs and not, as some Kantians hold,
of persons and other objects. They likewise did not accept the late
20th-century idea that there is a distinct concept of
"well-being," or of what is "good for" a
person; instead, they often defined a person's good as what is
simply good and located in his life (e.g. Sidgwick 1907: 112; Moore
1903: 98-99/1993: 150-51). Nor did they distinguish
between moral and non-moral goodness, holding that the former is just
ordinary goodness when possessed by certain objects, such as traits of
character (e.g. Ross 1930: 155). The result was that all normative
judgements can be expressed using at most the two concepts
"good" and "ought," which are therefore the
only ones one needed. To some this conclusion will mean that Moore and
his contemporaries ignored important conceptual distinctions; to
others it will mean they avoided pointless conceptual debates. But it
did free them to discuss substantive questions about what is in fact
good and right. On this topic Moore's views, though not entirely
novel, were again both striking and strikingly stated.


## 3. Impersonal Consequentialism



Moore's normative view again comprised two main theses. One was
impersonal consequentialism, the view that what is right is always
what produces the greatest total good impartially considered, or
counting all goods equally. The other was the ideal or perfectionist
thesis that what is good is not only or primarily pleasure or the
satisfaction of desires but certain states whose value is independent
of people's attitudes to them. Moore recognized several such
states, but in *Principia Ethica* he famously said that
"by far the most valuable things...are certain states of
consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of
human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects" (1903:
188/1993: 237). According to his ideal consequentialism, what is right
is in large part what most promotes loving personal relationships and
aesthetic appreciation for all persons everywhere.



*Principia Ethica* took the consequentialist part of this view
to be analytically true, since it defined the right as what most
promotes the good. But once Moore abandoned this definition, he had to
treat the consequentialist principle as synthetic and he did so in
*Ethics*, which allowed that deontological views that say some
acts that maximize the good are wrong are coherent. But even there he
did not argue at length for consequentialism, simply announcing that
it is self-evident (1912: 180-81/1947: 112-13/1965:
76-77). This in part reflected a common assumption of his time,
when a majority of moral philosophers accepted some form of
consequentialism. But it may also be relevant that the only
alternative he seems to have considered was an absolute deontology
like Kant's, which says that some acts such as killing and lying
are wrong no matter what their consequences (1903: 106/1993: 157;
1912: 175-81/1947: 109-13/1965: 74-77). His major
ethical works did not consider a moderate deontology such as would
later be developed by Ross (1930), in which deontological prohibitions
against killing and lying often outweigh considerations of good
consequences but can themselves be outweighed if enough good is at
stake. It is not clear what Moore's response to such a moderate
deontology would have been.



*Principia Ethica* also took the impartialism of its view to be
analytic, and in particular claimed that ethical or rational egoism,
which says each person should pursue only his own good, is
self-contradictory. (Despite his interest in personal love, Moore
never considered the intermediate view that Broad (1971)) would call
self-referential altruism, according to which each person should care
more about the good of those close to him, such as his family and
friends.) Sidgwick had claimed that if a rational egoist confines
himself to saying that each person's pleasure is good for him,
or from his point of view, he cannot be argued out of his position
(1907: 420-21). But Moore argued that the concept of
agent-relative goodness invoked here is unintelligible (1903:
97-102/1993: 148-53), and that conclusion does follow from
his view that goodness is simple and unanalyzable. If goodness is a
simple property, how can a state such as person *A*'s
pleasure have this property "from one point of view" but
not "from another"? (Compare squareness. An object cannot
be square from one point of view but not from another; it either is
square or is not.) All that talk of the good "for" a
person can pick out, he urged, is what is simply good and located in
that person; and simple goodness gives everyone equally reason to
pursue it. In *Ethics* Moore abandoned this argument, saying
that egoism cannot be proven false by any argument, even though he
thought its falsity is self-evident (1912: 228-32/1947:
141-43/1965: 98-100). But it is not clear how he could
make this concession if he still held, as he preferred to, that
goodness is a simple property. Perhaps he was tacitly allowing, as he
would in the uncompleted draft Preface to *Principia Ethica*
(1993: 5, 14-15), that it would not centrally damage his
position if good were analyzed in terms of ought, as it had been by
Sidgwick. There is no contradiction in saying that what each person
ought to desire is different, say, just his own pleasure. But if all
oughts derive from a simple property of goodness, as Moore always
preferred to hold, all oughts must be impartial.



In applying this view, Moore gave it the form of what today is called
"indirect" or "two-level" (Hare 1981)
consequentialism. In deciding how to act, we should not try to assess
individual acts for their specific consequences; instead, we should
follow certain general moral rules, such as "Do not kill"
and "Keep promises," which are such that adhering to them
will most promote the good through time. This policy will sometimes
lead us not to do the act with the best individual outcome, but given
our general propensity to error the policy's consequences will
be better in the long run than trying to assess acts one by one;
however well-meaning, the latter attempt will be counterproductive
(1903: 149-70/1993: 198-219. This indirect
consequentialism had again been defended earlier, by Sidgwick and John
Stuart Mill, but Moore gave it a very conservative form, urging
adherence to the rules even in the face of apparently compelling
evidence that breaking them now would be optimific. *Principia
Ethica* made the surprising claim that the relevant rules will be
the same given any commonly accepted theory of the good, for example,
given either hedonism or Moore's own ideal theory (1903:
158/1993: 207). This claim of extensional equivalence for different
consequentialist views was not new; T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, and
McTaggart had all suggested that hedonism and ideal consequentialism
have similar practical implications. But Moore was surely expressing
the more plausible view when in *Ethics* he doubted that
pleasure and ideal values always go together (1912: 234-39/1947:
144-47/1965: 100-02), and even when he accepted the
equivalence claim he remained intensely interested in what he called
"the primary ethical question of what is good in itself"
(1903: 158, 26, 77/1993: 207, 78, 128). Like Green, Bradley, and
McTaggart, he thought the central philosophical question is what
*explains* why good things are good, i.e., which of their
properties *make* them good. That was the subject of his most
brilliant piece of ethical writing, Chapter 6 of *Principia
Ethica* on "The Ideal."


## 4. The Ideal



One of this chapter's larger aims was to defend value-pluralism,
the view that there are many ultimate goods. Moore thought one bar to
this view is the naturalistic fallacy. He assumed, plausibly, that
philosophers who treat goodness as identical to some natural property
will usually make this a simple property, such as just pleasure or
just evolutionary fitness, rather than a disjunctive property such as
pleasure-or-evolutionary-fitness-or-knowledge. But then any naturalist
view pushes us toward value-monism, or toward the view that only one
kind of state is good (1903: 20; 1993: 72). Once we reject naturalism,
however, we can see what Moore thought is self-evident: that there are
irreducibly many goods. Another bar to value-pluralism is excessive
demands for unity or system in ethics. Sidgwick had used such demands
to argue that only pleasure can be good, since no theory with a
plurality of ultimate values can justify a determinate scheme for
weighing them against each other (1907: 406). But Moore, agreeing here
with Rashdall, Ross, and others, said that "to search for
'unity' and 'system,' at the expense of truth,
is not, I take it, the proper business of philosophy" (1903:
222/1993: 270). If intuition reveals a plurality of ultimate goods, an
adequate theory must recognize that plurality.



According to a famous part of *Principia Ethica*, one of those
goods is the existence of beauty. Arguing against Sidgwick's
view that all goods must be states of consciousness (1907:
113-15), Moore asked readers to imagine a beautiful world with
no minds in it: is this world's existence not better than that
of a horribly ugly world (1903: 83-85/1993: 135-36)? In
answering yes, he anticipated some strands in present-day
environmental ethics, which likewise hold that there can be value in
features of the natural environment apart from any awareness of them.
But he did not insist on this view. Later in *Principia Ethica*
he said that beauty on its own at most has little and may have no
value (1903: 202, 203/1993: 250, 251), and in *Ethics* he
implicitly denied that beauty on its own has value. There he held, as
Sidgwick had, that all intrinsic goods involve some state of
consciousness and perhaps even of pleasure (1912: 239-41,
249/1947: 147-49, 153/1965: 103-04, 107). But his first
book had defended the contrary view.



Moore also gave some weight to the hedonic states of pleasure and
pain. He thought the former a very minor good, saying pleasure on its
own at most has limited and may have no value, but he thought pain a
very great evil, which there is a serious duty to prevent (1903:
212-13, 222-23/1993: 260-61, 270-71) His view
therefore involved a value-asymmetry, with pain a much greater evil
than pleasure is a good. This had not been the traditional view; most
hedonists had held that a pleasure of a given intensity is exactly as
good as a pain of the same intensity is evil (e.g. Sidgwick 1907:
413). But Moore thought it intuitively compelling that the pain is
worse; if that makes the theory of value less systematic, so much the
worse for system.



While many ideal consequentialists have treated knowledge as
intrinsically good, in some cases supremely so, *Principia
Ethica* did not, saying knowledge is a necessary component of the
larger good of appreciating existing beauty but has little or no value
in itself (1903: 199/1993: 248). Again *Ethics* may have
reversed this view, citing knowledge several times as one ideal good
that may be added to the hedonists' good of pleasure (1912: 237,
247/1947 146, 152/1965: 102, 106). But Moore never saw any intrinsic
value in achievement, for example in business or politics, or indeed
in any active changing of the world. As John Maynard Keynes said, his
chief goods were states of mind that "were not associated with
action or achievement or with consequence. They consisted in timeless,
passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached
to 'before and after'" (Keynes 1949: 83).



The first of these goods was the appreciation of beauty, which for
Moore combined the cognition of beautiful qualities with an
appropriately positive emotion toward them, such as enjoyment or
admiration. We listen to music, for example, hear beautiful qualities
in it, and are pleased by or admire those qualities. But the value
here is entirely contemplative; Moore saw no separate worth in what
the romantics had especially valued, the active creation of beauty. He
might say that an artist must understand and love his work's
beauty if he is to create it, perhaps even more than someone who
merely enjoys it, but the value in his work is still not distinctively
creative. In characterizing this good Moore gave a further reductive
analysis, this time of beauty as "that of which the admiring
contemplation is good in itself" (1903: 201-02/1993:
249-50). Beauty too, then, was not a distinct normative concept
but analyzable in terms of goodness. He did not notice, however, that
this definition seems again to open him to an open-question argument,
since it reduces the claim that it is good to contemplate beauty to
the near-tautology that it is good to contemplate what it is good to
contemplate.



Though Moore in *Principia Ethica* thought beauty good in
itself, he did not insist on this view when valuing the appreciation
of beauty; the latter might be good even if the former was not. But he
still thought the existence of beauty makes a significant difference
to value. More specifically, he thought the admiring contemplation of
beauty that actually exists and causes your contemplation is
significantly better than an otherwise similar contemplation of merely
imagined beauty, and better by more than can be attributed to the
existence of the beauty on its own. This view involved an application
of his "principle of organic unities," which is one of his
main contributions and says the value of a whole need not equal the
sum of the values its parts would have on their own (1903:
27-29/1993: 78-80). If state *x* on its own has
value *a* and state *y* on its own has value *b*,
the whole combining them by relation *R* need not have value
*a* + *b*; it may have more and it may have less. This
principle had been accepted by Idealists such as Bradley, who gave it
a characteristically anti-theoretical formulation. They held that if
*x* and *y* combine to form the whole *x-R-y*,
their values, like their very identities, are dissolved in that larger
whole, whose value cannot be computed from the values of its parts. It
was Moore's contribution to accept the principle in a way that
rejected this anti-theoretical interpretation and allowed computation,
though exactly how it did so depended on his strict view that
intrinsic value can depend only on intrinsic properties.



This view implies that when *x* and *y* enter into the
relation *R* that constitute the whole *x-R-y*, their
own values cannot be changed by those relations. Moore recognized
this, saying, "The part of a valuable whole retains exactly the
same value when it is, as when it is not, a part of that whole"
(1903: 30/1993: 81). Any additional value in the whole *x-R-y*
must therefore be attributed to it as an entity distinct from its
parts, and with the relations between those parts internal to it.
Moore called this additional value the value of a whole "as a
whole," and said it needed to be added to the value in the parts
to arrive at the whole's value "on the whole" (1903:
214-16/1993: 263-64). Thus, if *x* and *y*
have values *a* and *b* on their own, and *x-R-y*
has value *c* "as a whole," the value of
*x-R-y* "on the whole" is *a* + *b* +
*c*. (The value of the whole is therefore not equal to the sum
of the values of its parts, but is equal to a sum of which those
values are constituents.) This "holistic" formulation of
the principle of organic unities is not the only possible one. We
could relax the conditions on intrinsic value so it can be affected by
external relations and say that when *x* and *y* enter
into a whole their own values change, so that, say, *x*'s
value becomes *a* + *c*. This "variability"
formulation can always reach the same final conclusions as the
holistic one, since whatever positive or negative value the latter
finds in the whole as a whole the former can add to one or other of
the parts. But the two formulations locate the additional value in
different places, and sometimes one and sometimes the other gives what
seems the intuitively better explanation of an organic value (Hurka
1998). Moore, however, was forced by his strict view of intrinsic
goodness to use only the holistic formulation. In the aesthetic case,
he held that the admiring contemplation of beauty considered apart
from the existence of its object always has the same (moderate) value
*a*, while the existence of beauty always has the same
(minimal) value *b*. But when the two are combined so a person
admiringly contemplates beauty that exists and causes his
contemplation, the resulting whole has the significant additional
value *c* as a whole. The existence of the beauty is therefore
necessary for the significant value *c*, but that value is not
intrinsic to it, belonging instead to the larger whole of which it is
part.



Moore made several other uses of the principle of organic unities,
including in response to an argument of Sidgwick's for hedonism.
Sidgwick had claimed that there would be no value in a world without
consciousness and, more specifically, pleasure, and had concluded that
pleasure must therefore be the only good (1907: 113, 399-401).
Given *Principia Ethica*'s view about the value of
beauty, Moore there rejected the premise of Sidgwick's argument,
but he also argued that, even granting this premise, Sidgwick's
conclusion does not follow. It may be that pleasure is a necessary
condition for any value, but that once pleasure is present, other
states such as the awareness of beauty or personal love increase the
value of the resulting whole even though alone they have no worth
(1903: 92-94/1993: 144-45; also 1912: 240-46/1947:
148-51/1965: 103-06). And of course this was precisely his
later view. Another application of the principle was in explicating
claims about desert. Moore endorsed the retributive view that when a
person is morally vicious it is good if he is punished, and he
expressed this view by saying that although the person's vice is
bad and his suffering pain is bad, the combination of vice and pain in
the same life is good as a whole, and sufficiently so to make the
situation on the whole better than if there were vice and no pain
(1903: 214-15/1993: 263-64). This is in fact a point where
Moore's holistic formulation of the principle is positively
appealing. The alternative variability view must say that when a
person is vicious, his suffering pain switches from being purely bad
to being purely good. But this implies that the morally appropriate
response to deserved suffering is simply positive, for example simple
joy, which does not seem right; the better response mixes satisfaction
that justice is being done with sorrow at the infliction of pain, as
Moore's holistic view implies.



Moore's other chief good of personal love also involved admiring
contemplation, but now of objects, namely persons, that are not just
beautiful but also intrinsically good (1903: 203/1993: 251). Since for
Moore the main intrinsic goods were mental qualities, such love
involved primarily the admiring contemplation of another's good
states of mind. In so characterizing love Moore was applying one of
four recursive principles he used to generate higher-level intrinsic
goods and evils from an initial base-set of goods and evils. The first
principle says that if state *x* is intrinsically good,
admiringly contemplating, or loving, *x* for itself is also
intrinsically good (1903: 203-04, 217/1993: 251-53, 265).
Thus, if person *A*'s admiringly contemplating beauty is
good, person *B*'s admiringly contemplating
*A*'s admiration is a further good, as is
*C*'s admiration of *B*'s admiration, and so
on. A second principle says that if *x* is intrinsically evil,
hating *x* for itself is intrinsically good (1903: 217/1993
265); thus, *B*'s feeling compassionate pain at
*A*'s pain is good. And two final principles say that
loving for itself what is evil, as in sadistic pleasure in
another's pain, and hating for itself what is good, as in
envious pain at his pleasure, are evil (1903: 208-10,
211-12/1993: 257-58, 259-60). Though Moore stated
these four principles separately, they all make morally appropriate
attitudes to intrinsic goods and evils, ones whose orientation matches
their objects' values, additional such goods and morally
inappropriate attitudes additional evils. The principles were by no
means unique to him; they had been defended earlier by Rashdall and
Brentano and would be defended later by Ross. But Moore's
formulation was in two respects distinctive. Rashdall and Ross called
the higher-level values they generated virtues and vices, as it is
indeed plausible to do; surely benevolence and compassion are virtuous
and sadism vicious. But Moore preferred to define the virtues
instrumentally, as traits that cause goods and prevent evils, and said
that as such they lack intrinsic worth (1903: 172-77/1993:
220-26). Rashdall and especially Ross also held that virtue is
the greatest intrinsic good and vice the greatest evil. In contrast,
Moore suggested that the value of an appropriate or inappropriate
attitude is often less than the value of its object; thus compassion
for another's pain, though good, is not as good as the pain is
evil, so the combination of one person's pain and
another's compassion for it has on balance negative value.
"We have no reason," he wrote, "to maintain the
paradox that an ideal world would be one in which vice and suffering
must exist in order that it may contain the goods consisting in the
appropriate emotion towards them. ... we cannot admit the actual
validity of any of the arguments commonly used in Theodicies; no such
argument succeeds in justifying the fact that there does exist even
the smallest of the many evils which this world contains" (1903:
220/1993: 268)



The recursive principles are clearly relevant to personal love, whose
core involves positive concern for another's good. But
Moore's particular application of the principles led to a
curiously restricted picture of what love is. First, as in the
aesthetic case, he took the main valuable attitude to be
contemplative, involving the admiration of another's already
existing good qualities rather than any active engagement with them.
This applied even to the love of another's physical beauty.
Though he thought this a central part of love (1903:
203-04/1993: 252), he took it to involve mere passive admiration
of another's beauty, as it were from the other side of the room.
There was no desire to possess or interact physically with the
other's beauty, that is, no active eroticism; he actually held
that sexual arousal, and especially arousal by another's
arousal, involves love of the ugly or evil and so is evil (1903:
209-10/1993: 257-58). The same point applied more
generally: the loving attitude was one of appreciating goods in
another's life rather than of acting to produce or to help her
achieve them. One did not do anything for or with a loved one; one
simply admired her. (In an 1899 paper presented to the Apostles
society at Cambridge he had said, "Love of others is a thing of
very great value, and it may be very strong although it does not lead
to any action. There is, indeed, no reason why it should"
(quoted in Levy 1979: 203).Though he presented personal love as an
additional good to aesthetic appreciation, he characterized it in an
essentially aesthetic way. Moreover, his list of the goods one is to
appreciate or comment in a loved one was also truncated. It did not
include pleasure or happiness, since that was not a significant good,
nor even knowledge or achievement. Instead, it centered on the
other's admiring contemplation of beauty (1903: 204/1993:
252-53), as if the supreme expression of love were "What
excellent taste in pictures you have." Finally, he took the
qualities one appreciates in a loved one to be simply and therefore
impartially good. This meant his account had no room for the special
attachment to or heightened concern for an individual that many take
to be central to personal love. If I love a friend for qualities
*x*, *y*, and *z*, and a new person comes along
with the same qualities to a slightly higher degree, then, on
Moore's theory, I should admire the new person's qualities
more and therefore love them more; I should trade up to a better
beloved. This is at odds with the loyalty, or attachment to
individuals, that many think essential to love. This is not to say
that a more adequate account of love cannot be constructed with the
same basic structure as Moore's; it can. It will hold that
personal love involves a wider range of positive attitudes, including
actively promoting as well as contemplating, to a wider range of
goods, including happiness, knowledge, and achievement, where those
goods in a loved one's life have greater value from a
lover's point of view than do the similar states of strangers,
which makes loving them more appropriate and therefore intrinsically
better. But Moore was prevented from giving this account by other
features of his view, such as his general emphasis on contemplative
forms of love, his restricted list of initial goods, and his strict
impartialism about value.


## 5. Influence



Despite not always containing entirely new ideas, Moore's
ethical writings, and especially *Principia Ethica*, were
extremely influential, both outside and within philosophy. Outside
philosophy one influence was through the literary and artistic figures
in the Bloomsbury Group, such as Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Leonard
and Virginia Woolf, several of whom had come to know Moore while
members with him of the Apostles. They were most impressed by the last
chapter of *Principia Ethica*, whose identification of
aesthetic appreciation and personal love as the highest goods very
much fit their predilections. Keynes said the book's publication
was for them "the opening of a new heaven on a new earth"
and its theory of the good became for a time their
"religion" (1949: 82) Many of them - the gay men in
particular - sexualized Moore's account of love, adding an
erotic element not present in his formulations. But according to
Keynes (though Leonard Woolf (1960: 146-49) disagreed), they
tended to ignore the impartial consequentialism within which he
embedded those goods, concentrating on pursuing them just within their
own lives rather than encouraging their wider spread in society. The
novels of E.M. Forster, another Cambridge Apostle, contain several
figures representing Moorean ideas, for example the Schlegel sisters
in *Howards End* (Sidorsky 2007). An important element in
*Principia Ethica*'s extra-philosophical appeal was its
brash iconoclasm, its claiming, however inaccurately, to sweep away
all past moral philosophy. This tone entirely fit its time, when the
death of Queen Victoria had led many in Britain to think a new, more
progressive age was dawning.



The book's influence within philosophy was even greater. On the
normative side, views close to its ideal consequentialism remained
prominent and even dominant, at least in Britain, until the 1930s,
though it is hard to know how far this is attributable to Moore
himself since similar views had been widely accepted before him. In
metaethics his non-naturalism likewise remained dominant for several
decades, though here Moore played a larger role, especially for later
writers, in part because of his general philosophical eminence and in
part because of the vigor with which he presented the view. By talking
explicitly of non-natural properties he at least seemed to give
non-naturalism a more robust metaphysical side than predecessors such
as Sidgwick had, and he defended the view more emphatically, in
particular by putting more weight on the open-question argument. When
Sidgwick noticed Bentham or Spencer equating goodness with a natural
property such as pleasure, he thought it a minor slip that ought in
charity to be ignored; Moore deemed it a decisive error that vitiated
the philosopher's entire system. By so emphasizing the two
elements of non-naturalism - its realism and its commitment to
the autonomy of ethics - Moore helped initiate a sequence of
developments in 20th-century metaethics.



The first reaction to non-naturalism, other than simple acceptance,
came from philosophers who endorsed the autonomy of ethics but,
sometimes under the influence of logical positivism, rejected its
moral realism, holding instead that there are no facts other than
natural ones and no modes of knowing other than the empirical and the
strictly logical. They therefore developed various versions of
non-cognitivism, which hold that moral judgements are not true or
false but express attitudes, as in emotivism (Ayer 1936; Stevenson
1944), or issue something like imperatives, as in prescriptivism (Hare
1952; Hare 1963). Unlike the subjective naturalism Moore criticized in
*Ethics*, these views allow moral disagreement, since attitudes
and imperatives can oppose each other, for example positive versus
negative. They also, their later proponents held, give a better
explanation of the open-question argument, since they find a
distinctive emotive or action-guiding force in moral concepts and
judgements that is not present in non-moral ones; that is why, it was
said, the moral is neither reducible to nor derivable from the
non-moral. Non-cognitivism can also explain, some said, why morality
matters to us as it does. Non-naturalism implies that moral judgements
concern a mysterious type of property, but why should facts about that
property be important to us or influence our behavior? If moral
judgements express deep-seated attitudes, however, the question
answers itself.



A later reaction, starting around the mid-century, rejected both
non-naturalism and non-cognitivism and explored versions of
naturalism, including a neo-Aristotelian version that grounds all
ethical demands in a conception of human flourishing, or of the
development of a human nature understood in quasi-biological terms
(Anscombe 1958; Foot 2001); this view implicitly denies the autonomy
of ethics. Here a specifically ant-Moorean claim was that predicative
uses of "good," as in Moore's "aesthetic
appreciation is good," are ungrammatical, since the only
legitimate uses of the word in English are attributive, as in
"good knife," "good pickpocket," and, most
relevantly to the neo-Aristotelian view, "good human
being" (Geach 1956; also Thomson 1997). But, despite being made
at the high-water mark of ordinary-language philosophy, this claim
about English grammar seems plainly false: the language has always
allowed predicative uses of "good," from the King James
translation of Genesis - "God saw the light, that it was
good" (cited in Butchvarov 1989: 17) - to everyday phrases
such as "It is good that ..." Moore's moral
philosophy cannot credibly be dismissed as resting on a crude
linguistic error (see also e.g. Pigden 1990; Zimmerman 1999; Kraut
2011: 173-83). One strand in this later reaction, like others
influenced by Wittgenstein, rejected the calculating side of
Moore's consequentialism, which identifies right and wrong acts
by adding up the goods and evils in their consequences. Moral
judgements, some argued, can't be codified or theorized in this
way but instead call for ethically trained and sensitive insight into
particular situations as particular (e.g. McDowell 1979). Even apart
from that there was, in many circles, skepticism about the supposed
extravagance and dogmatism of Moore's substantive claims about
the good - such as his specific valuing of aesthetic
appreciation and personal love - and a preference for the
allegedly more modest view that what is good in people's lives
is just the fulfilment of whatever desires they have. By the 1960s, it
seems fair to say, many of Moore's views were thought deeply
problematic and his moral philosophy as a whole was not considered an
especially live option. It was still thought important to read
*Principia Ethica*, or at least its first chapter, as having
initiated the sequence of developments that led to the then-current
views. But from the standpoint of many of those views, Moore's
general approach to ethics was at key points misguided.



Fifty-plus years later the philosophical climate is more favorable to
Moore. A number of philosophers now defend metaethical non-naturalism
(e.g. Shafer-Landau 2003; Huemer 2006), either in versions they say
are ontologically minimalist (Nagel 1986; Scanlon 1998, 2014; Parfit
2011, vol. 2: 464-87) or in ones they present as more robust
(Enoch 2011), but all embracing some account of normative truth that
separates it sharply from non-normative, for example scientific,
truth. In addition, and of necessity, these current versions of
non-naturalism share something close to Moore's moral
epistemology, his view that normative truths are known by a kind of
direct insight or intuition, though the present-day views are often
more explicitly fallibilist and coherentist than his sometimes
appeared to be. Still, for many philosophers, Moore's version of
non-naturalist realism remains the best-known or canonical one. In
normative ethics, too, there is increasing sympathy for accounts of
the good with an ideal or perfectionist content and admiration for
particular features of Moore's own account, such as his valuing
of personal love, his recursive principles (Hurka 2001) and his
principle of organic unities. Moorean ideas are by no means the only
ones alive in present-day moral philosophy; there are many
alternatives, including many that reject, for example, his
consequentialism and impartialism. One especially relevant strand in
the recent literature, dating from the 1980s, says ethics needs the
non-Moorean concept of "good for" mentioned above, which
is associated with "well-being" and "prudential
value" and also distinct from the agent-relative goodness
Sidgwick used to state egoism. Here one view proposes to use this
alternative concept in addition to the Moorean "good," so
what is simply good is wholly or at least largely what is good
"for" individuals (e.g. Sumner 1996). Another, more
radical view wants "good for" to entirely replace
Moore's "good," so the former is the only ethically
significant evaluative concept (e.g. Kraut 2007; Kraut 2011). (The
argument here is not, as in Geach, that the Moorean "good"
is ungrammatical; it is that, though linguistically unimpeachable, it
makes no useful contribution to ethical thought.) But there have also
been defences, against these views, of Moore's "simply
good" and his reductive or "locative" account of
"good for" (e.g. McDaniel 2014; Rowland 2016; Tucker 2018;
Hurka 2021). Often what present-day philosophers take from Moore is
just an individual idea or argument rather than his theory as a whole
(Regan 2003 is an exception). But whereas in the early 20th century
Moore's approach to ethics, and especially his metaethics, was
dominant, at least in British moral philosophy, and whereas in the
mid-century it was widely dismissed, it now represents, at several
points, a valuable contributor to many lively ongoing debates.