George Edward Moore (4 November 1873 – 24 October 1958) was an English philosopher who, alongside Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege, was an initiator of analytic philosophy. He and Russell began de-emphasising the idealism which was then prevalent among British philosophers and became known for advocating common-sense concepts and contributing to ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. He was said to have had an "exceptional personality and moral character". Ray Monk dubbed him "the most revered philosopher of his era".
As Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, he influenced but abstained from the Bloomsbury Group, an informal set of intellectuals. He edited the journal Mind. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles from 1894 to 1901, a fellow of the British Academy from 1918, and was chairman of the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club in 1912–1944. A humanist, he presided over the British Ethical Union (now Humanists UK) in 1935–1936.
Life
left|thumb|Moore, 1903
George Edward Moore was born in Upper Norwood, in south-east London, on 4 November 1873, the middle child of seven of Daniel Moore, a medical doctor, and Henrietta Sturge. His grandfather was the author George Moore. His eldest brother was Thomas Sturge Moore, a poet, writer and engraver.
He was educated at Dulwich College and, in 1892, began attending Trinity College, Cambridge, to learn classics and moral sciences. His tripos results were a double first. He became a Fellow of Trinity in 1898 and was later University of Cambridge Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic from 1925 to 1939.
Moore is known best now for defending ethical non-naturalism, his emphasis on common sense for philosophical method, and the paradox that bears his name. He was admired by and influenced by other philosophers and some of the Bloomsbury Group. But unlike his colleague and admirer Bertrand Russell, who for some years thought Moore fulfilled his "ideal of genius", he is mostly unknown presently except among academic philosophers. Moore's essays are known for their clarity and circumspection of writing style and methodical and patient treatment of philosophical problems. He was critical of modern philosophy for lack of progress, which he saw as a stark contrast to the dramatic advances in the natural sciences since the Renaissance. Among Moore's most famous works are his Principia Ethica, and his essays, "The Refutation of Idealism", "A Defence of Common Sense", and "A Proof of the External World".
Moore was an important and admired member of the secretive Cambridge Apostles, a discussion group drawn from the British intellectual elite. At the time another member, 22-year-old Bertrand Russell, wrote "I almost worship him as if he were a god. I have never felt such an extravagant admiration for anybody",
In 1914 Moore traveled to Norway to visit Wittgenstein, here he took a series of notes later published as Notes dictated to G.E. Moore in Norway. From 1918 to 1919, Moore was chairman of the Aristotelian Society, a group committed to the systematic study of philosophy, its historical development and its methods and problems. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1951. This was awarded to him at Buckingham Palace by King George VI. After a conversation with the King, he returned to his wife who was awaiting Moore back in the car and told her "Do you know that the King had never heard of Wittgenstein!". The title of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was adopted at the suggestion of Moore, taking the title from Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).
Moore died in England in the Evelyn Nursing Home on 24 October 1958. He was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium on 28 October 1958 and his ashes interred at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in the city. His wife, Dorothy Ely (1892–1977), was buried there. Together, they had two sons, the poet Nicholas Moore and the composer Timothy Moore.
Philosophy
Ethics
thumb|right|The title page of Principia Ethica
His influential work Principia Ethica is one of the main inspirations of the reaction against ethical naturalism (see ethical non-naturalism) and is partly responsible for the twentieth-century concern with metaethics.
Naturalistic fallacy
Moore asserted that philosophical arguments can suffer from a confusion between the use of a term in a particular argument and the definition of that term (in all arguments). He named this confusion the naturalistic fallacy. For example, an ethical argument may claim that if an item has certain properties, then that item is 'good.' A hedonist may argue that 'pleasant' items are 'good' items. Other theorists may argue that 'complex' things are 'good' things. Moore contends that, even if such arguments are correct, they do not provide definitions for the term 'good'. The property of 'goodness' cannot be defined. It can only be shown and grasped. Any attempt to define it (X is good if it has property Y) will simply shift the problem (Why is Y-ness good in the first place?).
Open-question argument
Moore's argument for the indefinability of 'good' (and thus for the fallaciousness in the "naturalistic fallacy") is often termed the open-question argument; it is presented in §13 of Principia Ethica. The argument concerns the nature of statements such as "Anything that is pleasant is also good" and the possibility of asking questions such as "Is it good that x is pleasant?". According to Moore, these questions are open and these statements are significant; and they will remain so no matter what is substituted for "pleasure". Moore concludes from this that any analysis of value is bound to fail. In other words, if value could be analysed, then such questions and statements would be trivial and obvious. Since they are anything but trivial and obvious, value must be indefinable.
Critics of Moore's arguments sometimes claim that he is appealing to general puzzles concerning analysis (cf. the paradox of analysis), rather than revealing anything special about value. The argument clearly depends on the assumption that if 'good' were definable, it would be an analytic truth about 'good', an assumption that many contemporary moral realists like Richard Boyd and Peter Railton reject. Other responses appeal to the Fregean distinction between sense and reference, allowing that value concepts are special and sui generis, but insisting that value properties are nothing but natural properties (this strategy is similar to that taken by non-reductive materialists in philosophy of mind).
Good as indefinable
Moore contended that goodness cannot be analysed in terms of any other property. In Principia Ethica, he writes:
: It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not "other," but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. (Principia, § 10 ¶ 3)
Therefore, we cannot define 'good' by explaining it in other words. We can only indicate a thing or an action and say "That is good." Similarly, we cannot describe to a person born totally blind exactly what yellow is. We can only show a sighted person a piece of yellow paper or a yellow scrap of cloth and say "That is yellow."
Good as a non-natural property
In addition to categorising 'good' as indefinable, Moore also emphasised that it is a non-natural property. This means that it cannot be empirically or scientifically tested or verifiedit is not analysable by "natural science".
Moral knowledge
Moore argued that, once arguments based on the naturalistic fallacy had been discarded, questions of intrinsic goodness could be settled only by appeal to what he (following Sidgwick) termed "moral intuitions": self-evident propositions which recommend themselves to moral thought, but which are not susceptible to either direct proof or disproof (Principia, § 45). As a result of his opinion, he has often been described by later writers as an advocate of ethical intuitionism. Moore, however, wished to distinguish his opinions from the opinions usually described as "Intuitionist" when Principia Ethica was written:
Moore distinguished his view from the opinion of deontological intuitionists, who claimed that "intuitions" could determine questions about what actions are right or required by duty. Moore, as a consequentialist, argued that "duties" and moral rules could be determined by investigating the effects of particular actions or kinds of actions (Principia, § 89), and so were matters for empirical investigation rather than direct objects of intuition (Principia, § 90). According to Moore, "intuitions" revealed not the rightness or wrongness of specific actions, but only what items were good in themselves, as ends to be pursued.
Right action, duty and virtue
Moore holds that are those producing the most good. The difficulty with this is that the consequences of most actions are too complex for us to properly take into account, especially the long-term consequences. Because of this, Moore suggests that the definition of duty is limited to what generally produces better results than probable alternatives in a comparatively near future. Whether a given rule of action is also a duty depends to some extent on the conditions of the corresponding society but duties agree mostly with what common-sense recommends.