Moore’s Moral Philosophy

First published Wed Jan 26, 2005; substantive revision Tue Jun 17, 2025

G.E. Moore’sPrincipia Ethica of 1903 is oftenconsidered a revolutionary work that set a new agenda for20^th-century ethics. This historical view is, however,somewhat overstated. In metaethics Moore’s non-naturalistrealism was close to that defended by Henry Sidgwick and other late19^th-century philosophers such as Hastings Rashdall, FranzBrentano, and J.M.E. McTaggart; in normative ethics his idealconsequentialism likewise echoed views of Rashdall, Brentano, andMcTaggart. ButPrincipia Ethica presented its views withunusual force and vigor. In particular, it made much more of thealleged errors of metaethical naturalism than Sidgwick or Rashdallhad, saying they vitiated most previous moral philosophy. For thisreason, Moore’s work had a disproportionate influence on20^th-century moral philosophy and remains the best-knownexpression of a general metaethical view also shared by later writerssuch as H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross, and C.D. Broad and, after a periodwhen it was largely dismissed, enjoying a revival today.

1. Non-naturalism and the Open-Question Argument

Moore’s metaethical non-naturalism comprised two main theses.One was the realist thesis that moral and more generally normativejudgements – like many of his contemporaries, Moore did notdistinguish the two – are true or false objectively, orindependently of any beliefs or attitudes we may have; there areobjective moral truths. The other was the autonomy-of-ethics thesisthat moral judgements aresui generis, neither reducible tonor derivable from non-moral, for example scientific or metaphysical,judgements; they express a distinctive kind of truth. While therealist thesis is shared with naturalist views, which take moraltruths to be equivalent to some non-moral ones, the autonomy-of-ethicsthesis separates his realism from any naturalist one and makes it anon-naturalist moral realism. And closely connected to hisnon-naturalism was the epistemological view that our knowledge ofmoral truths is intuitive, in the sense that it is not arrived at byinference from non-moral truths but rests on our recognizing certainmoral propositions, principally ones about what is intrinsically good,as self-evident, by a kind of direct or immediate insight. In thePreface toPrincipia Ethica he called any attempt to arguefor a proposition of this kind on the basis of other propositions asign of “confusion” (1903: ix/1993: 34).

Moore expressed the realist side of his non-naturalism by saying thatfundamental moral judgements ascribe the property of goodness orbadness to states of affairs, though especially inPrincipiaEthica he tended not to distinguish moral concepts and moralproperties. Like others of his time, he seems to have taken therealist view that moral judgements can be objectively true forgranted; he certainly did not defend it extensively againstanti-realist alternatives. Thus the first sentence ofPrincipiaEthica refers casually, and without any sense of controversy, tothe “truth” of some ethical judgements (1903: 1/1993: 53).In this he was doubtless influenced by the grammar of moraljudgements, which have a standard subject-predicate form, as in“x is good.” But it may also be relevant that, atleast in his early writings, the only version of subjectivism heappears to have been aware of was the naturalist view that to say“x is good” is to report some psychological factsuch as that you approve ofx or that most people in yoursociety do. In his 1912 bookEthics he argued, among otherthings, that this view does not allow for moral disagreement since,for example, my report that I approve ofx and your reportthat you disapprove of it can both be true and therefore do notconflict (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 reportfeelings and therefore can conflict despite not being capable of truth(Stevenson 1942). He initially conceded, surprisingly, thatStevenson’s anti-realist view had as good a claim as his own tobe true (1942: 544–45), but shortly after reverted to hisearlier non-naturalism, saying he could not imagine what had inducedhim to consider abandoning it (Ewing 1962: 251).

Especially inPrincipia Ethica, Moore spent much more timedefending his other non-naturalist thesis, about the autonomy ofethics, which he expressed by saying the concept or property ofgoodness – recall that he did not distinguish the two, orthought that what is true of one will be true of the other – issimple and unanalyzable, and in particular is unanalyzable innon-moral terms. This meant the property or goodness is“non-natural,” or distinct from any of the naturalproperties studied by science, though he also thought it distinct frommetaphysical properties such as those it is linked to in Idealistethical theories. Views that denied this thesis committed what hecalled “the naturalistic fallacy” (1903: 10/1993: 62),which he found in hedonists such as Jeremy Bentham, evolutionaryethicists such as Herbert Spencer, and metaphysical ethicists such asT.H. Green. His main argument against their view was what has come tobe known as the “open-question argument,” though heactually stated in two slightly different ways. Consider a particularnaturalist claim, such as that “x is good” isequivalent to “x is pleasant” or“x is pleasure.”If this claim were true, heargued, the judgement “Pleasure is good” would have thesame content as “Pleasure is pleasure,” yet surely someonewho asserts the former means to express more than that uninformativetautology; he means to say something substantive, or that can bedisputed. Alternatively, if this naturalist claim were true,“x is pleasant butx is not good” wouldbe self-contradictory. Once it was established thatx ispleasant, the question whether it is good would be closed, or notworth considering, whereas, he argued, it remains entirely open. Thesame argument can be mounted against any other naturalist proposal:even if we have determined that something is what we desire to desireor is highly evolved, the question whether it is good remains open, inthe sense of not being settled by the meaning of the word“good” or the content of the concept. (Moore actuallydenied that the kind of analysis he thought is impossible for“good” is of the meaning of a word; it is more of thecontent of a concept (1903: 6/1993: 58).) We can ask whether what wedesire to desire is good, and likewise for what is highly evolved,what is unified, or anything else (1903: 10–17/1993:62–69). Sidgwick had used one form of this argument againstnaturalist claims by Bentham and Spencer, but only in passing (1907:26n, 109); Moore developed it a greater length and made it central tohis metaethics. And though he applied it specifically to“good,” it can equally well be used about other moral ornormative concepts such as “ought,” “right,”and “duty.” Just as “it is pleasant, but is itgood?” is an open question, so is, for example, “itmaximizes pleasure, but is it right?”.

The open-question argument is Moore’s most famous contributionto moral philosophy and has been extensively discussed. It continuesto provide a foundation for some metaethical views but is dismissed ascrudely fallacious by others. In a never-completed Preface to aproposed second edition ofPrincipia Ethica Moore allowedthat his initial presentation of the argument had many flaws butthought its general thrust and conclusion were still correct (1993:2–27). Others have proposed more fundamental objections toit.

One such objection says the argument cannot establish a generalanti-naturalist conclusion since every version of it addresses justone naturalist view, such as the one equating “good” with“pleasant,” and so cannot rule out the possibility thatthere is some other natural property to which “good” isequivalent. Here it can be replied that the more successful versionsof the argument there are, and the more they involve the naturalproperties that figure in the leading ethical views, the morepersuasive it is. The argument is also more persuasive the more thesuccess of any particular version of it depends on a general sense ofa gap between the moral and non-moral than on any specific feature ofthe view being addressed. Another objection says the argument simplybegs the question against naturalism, since it assumes that a claimlike “pleasure is good” is not analytic or a tautologywhereas the naturalist thinks it is (Frankena 1939; also Sturgeon2003). Here Moore could and did say the claim does not looktautological, or at all like “pleasure is pleasure” oreven “a bachelor is an unmarried man.” It lookssubstantive and informative. But that leads to a further objection,based on the “paradox of analysis.” This is the paradoxthat if an analysis of a concept is successful it will beuninformative, since the content of the analysis will be identical tothat of the concept being analyzed, making the judgement that linksthe two a tautology (Langford 1942). If this is not a reason to rejectall analyses, as Moore himself did not reject them, it must bepossible for a concept to be one we use and in some sense understandbut whose content we are not fully or explicitly aware of, in whichcase an analysis can inform us of that content. But then, theobjection says, “good” may be a concept of this type, onewhose content is not fully transparent to us; though it is in factidentical to some natural concept this identity is not obvious and iseven something we would initially deny. Here again, though, a reply ispossible. It says that normally when we accept an analysis as correctwe come, eventually if not immediately, to see that the judgementaffirming it, while initially seeming substantive rather than aconceptual or analytic truth, is not in fact so. But this, the replygoes, does not happen with “good.” Even if we agree thatonly pleasure is good, no amount of reflection on the concepts“good” and “pleasant” will make us think“Pleasure is good” merely explicates the concept“good” or repeats its content (Ross 1930: 92–94), orstop us thinking that it is possible to dispute whether pleasure isgood (Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton 1992: 117).

Another objection, introduced in the 1970s and very influential sincethen, turns on Moore’s not distinguishing between concepts andproperties. The objection concedes that the open-question argumentshows that the concept “good” is distinct from any naturalconcept but denies that it follows that the property of goodness isdistinct from any natural property. Empirical science, it says,uncovers many non-analytic or non-conceptually-basedproperty-identities, for example, between water and H₂O.Thus the property of being water is identical to the property of beingH₂O even though the concepts “water” and“H₂O” are distinct and “water isH₂O” is not a tautology; its truth had to bediscovered experimentally. By analogy, the objection says, theproperty of goodness could be identical to that of being, say,pleasant even though the concepts “good” and“pleasant” are distinct. Moore’s erroneousassumption that what is true of the concept “good” mustalso be true of the property of goodness makes his argument invalid orineffective against naturalism as a metaphysical, rather than asemantic or conceptual, view. (e.g. Harman 1977: 19; Brink 1989: Ch.6; Sturgeon 2003). Again, however, replies to this objection arepossible. Thus it can be argued that natural-kind properties such asthat of being water have special features that allow non-analyticidentities but that are not had by ethical properties such asgoodness, for which similar identities are not possible; as one authorput it, “value is not like water” (Gampel 1996; also e.g.Vessel 2020). More specifically, it can be argued that the property ofbeing water is complex, or identified in a complex way: it is thatproperty, whichever it is, that has the further property of being whatexplains the behaviour of the stuff found in lakes, rivers, andstreams. When it turns out that being H₂O is what explainsthis behaviour, that property “fills a gap” in theproperty of being water and so makes the two identical (Parfit 2011,vol. 2: 298–303, 329–38). But nothing similar is possiblefor goodness, which is not a complex property with a gap that needsfilling. To be good is not to have whatever other property plays somefunctional role; it is just to be good, which means the analogy withwater fails. A related “moral twin earth” argument saysthat if what is good were determined in the same way as what is water,by seeing which property plays a certain explanatory role, then theclaim thatx is good, made in a possible world where oneproperty plays that role, would not contradict the claim thatx is not good made in a different world where a differentproperty plays that role. (This parallels the way the referent of“water” is different in worlds where different propertiesexplain the behaviour of the stuff in their lakes and rivers.)Intuitively, however, the two claims do contradict each other;speakers who make them in the two worlds are disagreeing (Horgan andTimmons 1991, 1992). If so, the property of goodness is again not likethat of being water and does not allow non-analyticproperty-identities; if the concept of of goodness is distinct fromany natural concept, that is indeed evidence that the property ofgoodness is likewise distinct from any natural property.

The extensive discussion of the open-question argument since Moore hasnot led to anything like a consensus on its merits. Some philosopherscontinue to deploy it while others think one or more of the aboveobjections decisively refute it. But the attention it continues toreceive, including from its critics, suggests to many that there issomething to the argument, that in the words of one article “itseems impossible to deny that Moore was on to something”(Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton 1992: 116).

It is worth noting, however, that Moore did not explain theopen-question argument in the way many later non-cognitivists, wholikewise endorsed the argument, would. Following Hume, they held thatmoral judgements are intrinsically motivating, so that sincerelyaccepting “x is good” requires a commitment or atleast some motivation to pursuex if that is possible (e.g.Hare 1952: 81–93; Hare 1963: 22–29). But then no analysisof “good” in purely natural terms can ever succeed, sinceit cannot capture the term’s action-guiding force; nor can anevaluative conclusion be validly inferred from premises none of whichhave that force. The non-cognitivists took this Humean explanation tosupport an anti-realist view on which moral judgements do not expersspropositions that can be true but do something like express attitudes,but it is also consistent with a version of non-naturalism that saysmoral truths, uniquely among truths, are intrinsically motivating.Whatever the explanation’s merits, however, it is not one Moorehimself gave. The question whether moral judgements are intrinsicallymotivating is not one on which he expressed clear views or which heapparently thought important. InPrincipia Ethica he remarkedin passing that we “hardly ever” think something goodwithout having some attitude of will towards it, but he denied thatthis is true universally (1903: 131, 135–36/1993: 181–82,186). Whether it is true universally, and what might follow if it is,is not something he seems to have thought worth considering further.So even if a claim about motivation gives a good or even the bestexplanation of the open-question argument, as many later philosophershave held, Moore’s own version of it was, at least as heexplicitly stated it, independent of that claim.

2. Metaethical Innovations

The main elements of Moore’s non-naturalism – moralrealism and the autonomy of ethics – had been defended earlierby Sidgwick and others and were reasonably well known when Moorewrote. This is reflected in the initial reviews ofPrincipiaEthica and early responses to it, many of which questioned itsclaims to metaethical originality (see Welchman 1989). But Moore didadd two metaethical innovations. One was his view that the fundamentalmoral concept is “good” (plus its contrary“bad”), which he expressed by saying that goodness issimple and unanalyzable, even in moral terms. This had not beenSidgwick’s view. For him the central moral concept was“ought,” and he defined good in terms of ought, morespecifically as what one ought to desire (1907: 112).PrincipiaEthica took the exactly opposite view, defining ought in terms ofgood, so “one ought to dox” literally means“x will produce the most good possible” (1903:25, 146–48/1993: 76–77, 196–98); this reduced“ought” to “good.” But Moore was quicklypersuaded by Bertrand Russell that this view is vulnerable to his ownopen-question argument, since in saying “one ought to do whatwill produce the most good” we do not mean just “what willproduce the most good will produce the most good” (Russell 1904:330). In later work such asEthics he therefore held thatought is a distinct moral concept 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 plannedsecond edition ofPrincipia Ethica allowed that it would notaffect the essence of his non-naturalism if good were defined in moralterms, say, as what one ought to desire (1993: 5, 14–15). But hecontinued to prefer the view that good is a simple concept, notdefinable in terms of a deontic one like ought (1942: 574–77),and there was vigorous debate on this topic in this general period,with Brentano (1969), Broad (1930), and A.C. Ewing (1947) defendingreductive analyses similar to Sidgwick’s while Ross (1930)preferred a non-reductive view like Moore’s. On the Moorean viewjudgements about the goodness of states of affairs are not shorthandfor judgements about how we ought or have reason to respond to thosestates; they are independent judgements that explain, syntheticallybut as following “from the very nature” of goodness, whywe ought to respond in those ways.

Moore’s second innovation was his view that the intrinsic valueof a state of affairs can depend only on its intrinsic properties,ones it has apart from any relations to other states. Earlier writershad distinguished between goodness as an end, which they also calledintrinsic or ultimate goodness, and goodness as a means, and had saidthe former cannot rest just on a state’s causally producinggoods external to itself. But they seemed to allow that goodness as anend can depend on other relational properties; thus they talked as ifa belief’s being true, which is necessary for its beingknowledge, can increase its value, while a pleasure’s being thatof a bad person can make it worse. Moore did not explicitly state hismore restrictive view that intrinsic goodness can depend only onintrinsic properties until “The Conception of IntrinsicValue” of 1922 but it nonetheless guidedPrincipiaEthica at two points. One was the book’s specificformulation of its principle of organic unities, discussed below. Theother was its testing for a state’s intrinsic value by the“method of isolation,” which involves asking whether auniverse 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 ofintrinsic value from facts about a state’s external relations byensuring that there are none. Moore’s strict view was shared bysome later writers such as Ross (1930: 75), while others argued that abetter theory of value results if intrinsic goodness is allowed todepend on some relational properties (e.g. Ewing 1947: 114). But Moorewas the first to raise this issue clearly.

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

These charges can, however, be resisted.Principia Ethicaactually 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; inparticular, it said 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 is atleast possible to read them as suggesting a non-metaphysical moralrealism like those defended more recently by Thomas Nagel (1986), T.M.Scanlon (1998, 2014), and Derek Parfit (2011, vol. 2: 464–87 ).Nor did his explicit talk of properties mark a significant departurefrom Sidgwick. This is partly because he did not clearly distinguishconcepts and properties and partly because if Sidgwick thought peopleought to pursue pleasure, he would surely have to grant that pleasurehas the property of being something people ought to pursue. Thequestion is how ontologically robust Moore’s talk of a propertyof goodness was, and given his denial that such goodness“exists” the answer is uncertain; the distinction betweenmore and less metaphysical forms of non-naturalism is not one heclearly addressed. Nor would all present-day philosophers agree that,if his talk of the property was more metaphysical, it was thereforeproblematic; there have been vigorous recent defences of so-called“robust” moral realism (e.g. Enoch 2011).

Moore was, at least at times, similarly modest in his moralepistemology. Thus he said several times, as Sidgwick also had, thatby calling our knowledge of basic moral truths “intuitive”he meant only that it is not derived by inference from otherknowledge; in particular, he denied that moral intuition isinfallible, saying that in whatever way we can cognize a trueproposition, we can cognize a false one (1903: viii, x/1993: 34, 36).He did sometimes make unqualified assertions of self-evidence, as inhis claims inPrincipia Ethica that it is“obvious” that the chief intrinsic goods are aestheticappreciation and personal love (1903: 188/1993: 237) and inEthics that it is “self-evident” that what isright is always what most promotes the good (1912: 1809–81/1947:112–13/1965: 76–77). These assertions fit his claim, inthe Preface toPrincipia Ethica, that no other evidence for afundamental moral proposition can be given, and some critics havefound their baldness, especially given the abstract contents,troubling (e.g. MacIntyre 1981). But the contrast with earliernon-naturalists such as Sidgwick should again not be overdrawn.Sidgwick, too, gave most weight to intuitions about abstract moralprinciples (1907: 379–84), including one close to theconsequentialist principle Moore affirmed inEthics, andappealed to more concrete judgements only inad hominemarguments against opponents. And Moore often argued in more complexways than the claim in his Preface allowed. Later inPrincipiaEthica he defended his claim that beauty on its own is good byappealing to intuitions about a specific beautiful world, containingmountains, rivers, and sunsets (1903: 83–85/1993: 135–36),and criticized the view that only pleasure is good by arguing that itconflicts with several more concrete things we believe, such as thatthere are bad pleasures (1903: 95/1993:146–47) and that a lifeof 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). He likewiseinsisted, as Sidgwick also had, that before we make judgements ofself-evidence we need to make sure that the propositions we areconsidering are clear (1903: viii/1993: 34); failure to do so, heargued, explains many of the existing disagreements about ethics. Andhe took note of common opinions to the extent of trying to explainaway contrary views when he found them. Overall his approach toestablishing moral truths was close to Sidgwick’s, appealing tointuitive judgements that can be made at different levels ofgenerality and that have to be brought into a coherent whole, thoughwith the primary emphasis again on more abstract intuitions. This isnot to say his non-naturalism was beyond objection. Any such viewholds that there are truths independent of natural and logical onesand knowable by some non-empirical means, and many find this pair ofclaims dubious. But Moore’s version of the view was arguably nomore objectionable than others. If Sidgwick’s non-naturalism andmore recent ones like Nagel’s and Scanlon’s do not involvea problematic metaphysics and epistemology, neither did Moore’s;if Moore’s was hopelessly extravagant, so are those supposedlymore modest ones.

A final important feature of Moore’s metaethics was itsreductionism about the normative concepts. Like Sidgwick, the Moore ofPrincipia Ethica thought there is just one basic normativeconcept, though for him it was good rather than ought; like Ross, thelater Moore held that there are just those two. But this conceptualreductionism, which was common throughout the period from Sidgwick toRoss, Broad, and Ewing, contrasts with the plurality of conceptsrecognized in much present-day moral philosophy. First, Moore and hiscontemporaries took as basic only the “thin” concepts goodand ought rather than “thick” moral concepts such ascourage and generosity; the latter, they held, combine a thin conceptwith some more or less determinate descriptive content and so aresecondary. They were also reductive about the thin concepts. They didnot distinguish between moral oughts and prudential or rational ones,holding that there is only a single ought that they called“moral”; this is why for them egoism was a view aboutmorality, not a challenge to it from outside the moral realm. Nor didthey recognize different types of value. For them goodness was aproperty only of states of affairs and not, as some Kantians hold, ofpersons or other objects. They likewise did not accept the late20^th-century idea that there is a distinct evaluativeconcept of “well-being,” or of what is “goodfor” a person; instead, they often gave “good for” a“locative” analysis, as what is simply good and located ina given person’s life, thereby reducing it to “good”(e.g. Sidgwick 1907: 112; Moore 1903: 98–99/1993: 150–51).Nor did they see any fundamental distinction between moral andnon-moral goodness, holding that the former is just ordinary goodnesswhen possessed by certain objects such as traits of character (e.g.Ross 1930: 155). The result was that all normative judgements can beexpressed using at most the two concepts “good” and“ought,” which are therefore the only ones thesejudgements need. To some this conclusion will mean that Moore and hiscontemporaries ignored important conceptual distinctions; to others itwill mean they avoided pointless conceptual fiddling. But it did freethem to discuss substantive questions about what is in fact good andright. 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 wasimpersonal consequentialism, the view that what is right is alwayswhat produces the greatest total good impartially considered, orcounting all people’s goods equally. The other was the ideal orperfectionist thesis that what is good is not only or primarilypleasure or the satisfaction of desires but certain states whose valueis independent of people’s attitudes to them. Moore recognizedseveral such states, but inPrincipia Ethica famously said“by far the most valuable things…are certain states ofconsciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures ofhuman intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects” (1903:188/1993: 237). According to his ideal consequentialism, what is rightis in large part what most promotes loving personal relationships andaesthetic appreciation for all persons everywhere.

Principia Ethica took the consequentialist part of this viewto be analytically true, since it defined the right as what mostpromotes the good. But once Moore abandoned this definition, he had totreat the consequentialist principle as synthetic and did so inEthics, where he allowed that deontological views that saysome acts that maximize the good are wrong are coherent. But eventhere he did not argue at length for consequentialism, simplyannouncing that it is self-evident (1912: 180–81/1947:112–13/1965: 76–77). This in part reflected a commonassumption of his time, when a majority of moral philosophers acceptedsome form of consequentialism. But it may also be relevant that theonly alternative to consequentialism he seems to have considered wasan absolute deontology like Kant’s, which says that some actssuch 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 moderatedeontology such as would later be developed by Ross (1930) and Broad(1930), in which deontological prohibitions against killing and lyingoften outweigh considerations of good consequences but can themselvesbe outweighed if enough good is at stake. It is not clear whatMoore’s response to such a moderate deontology would havebeen.

Principia Ethica also took the impartialism of its view to beanalytic, and in particular claimed that ethical or rational egoism,which says that each person should pursue only his own good, isself-contradictory. (Despite his interest in personal love, Moorenever considered the intermediate view that Broad (1971) would callself-referential altruism, according to which each person should caremore about, and do more to promote, the good of those who are close tohim such as his family and friends.) Sidgwick had claimed that if arational egoist confines himself to saying that each person’spleasure is good for him, in the sense of good relative to him or fromhis point of view, he cannot be argued out of his position (1907:420–21). But Moore argued that the concept of agent-relativegoodness invoked here is unintelligible (1903: 97–102/1993:148–53), and that conclusion does follow from his view thatgoodness is simple and unanalyzable. If goodness is a simple property,how can a state such as a given person’s pleasure have thisproperty “from one point of view” but not “fromanother”? (Compare squareness. An object cannot be square fromone point of view but not from another; it either is square or isnot.) All that talk of the good “for” a person can pickout, he urged, is what is simply good and located in that person; andsimple goodness gives everyone equally reason to pursue it. InEthics Moore abandoned this argument, saying that egoismcannot be proven false by any argument, even though he thought itsfalsity is self-evident (1912: 228–32/1947: 141–43/1965:98–100). But it is not clear how he could make this concessionif he still held, as he preferred to, that goodness is a simpleproperty. Perhaps he was tacitly allowing, as he would in theuncompleted draft Preface toPrincipia Ethica (1993: 5,14–15), that it would not centrally damage his position if goodwere analyzed in terms of ought, as it had been by Sidgwick. There isno contradiction in saying that what each person ought to desire isdifferent, say, is just his own pleasure. But if all oughts derivefrom 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 assessindividual acts for their specific consequences; instead, we shouldfollow certain general moral rules, such as “Do not kill”and “Keep promises,” which are such that adhering to themwill most promote the good overall or through time. This policy willsometimes lead us not to do the act with the best individual outcome,but given our general propensity to error the policy’sconsequences will be better in the long run than if we tried to assessacts one by one; however well-meaning, the latter attempt will becounterproductive (1903: 149–70/1993: 198–219. Thisindirect consequentialism had again been defended earlier, by Sidgwickand John Stuart Mill, but Moore gave it a very conservative form,urging adherence to the rules even in the face of apparentlycompelling evidence that breaking them now would be optimific.Principia Ethica also made the surprising claim that therelevant rules will be the same given any commonly accepted theory ofthe good, for example, given either hedonism or Moore’s ownideal theory (1903: 158/1993: 207). This claim of extensionalequivalence for different consequentialist views was not new; T.H.Green, F.H. Bradley, and McTaggart had all suggested that hedonism andideal consequentialism have similar practical implications. But Moorewas surely expressing the more plausible view when inEthicshe doubted that pleasure and his ideal values always go together(1912: 234–39/1947: 144–47/1965: 100–02), and evenwhen he accepted the equivalence claim he remained intenselyinterested in what he called “the primary ethical question ofwhat is good in itself” (1903: 158, 26, 77/1993: 207, 78, 128).Like Green, Bradley, and McTaggart, he thought the centralphilosophical question is whatexplains why good things aregood, i.e., which of their propertiesmake them good. Thatwas the subject of his most brilliant and original piece of ethicalwriting, Chapter 6 ofPrincipia Ethica on “TheIdeal.”

4. The Ideal

One of this chapter’s larger aims was to defend value-pluralism,the view that there is not just one ultimate good, as hedonism forexample holds, but several such goods. Moore thought one bar to apluralist view is the naturalistic fallacy. He assumed, notimplausibly, that philosophers who treat goodness as identical to somenatural property will usually make this a simple single property, suchas just pleasure or just evolutionary fitness, rather than a complexdisjunctive property such aspleasure-or-evolutionary-fitness-or-knowledge. But then a naturalistview pushes us toward value-monism, or the view that only one kind ofstate is good (1903: 20; 1993: 72). Once we reject naturalism,however, we can see what Moore thought is self-evident: that there areirreducibly many kinds of good. Another bar to value-pluralism isexcessive demands for unity or system in ethics. Sidgwick had usedsuch demands to argue that only pleasure can be good, since no theorywith a plurality of ultimate values can justify a determinate schemefor weighing them against each other (1907: 406). But Moore, agreeinghere 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, anadequate theory must recognize that plurality.

According to a famous part ofPrincipia Ethica, one of thosegoods is the existence of beauty, independent of any awareness of it.Arguing against Sidgwick’s view that all goods must be states ofconsciousness (1907: 113–15), Moore asked readers to imagine abeautiful world with no minds in it: is this world’s existencenot better, he asked, than that of an ugly world (1903:83–85/1993: 135–36)? His affirmative answer to thisquestion was one of the most contested of the book’s claims inthe years after its publication (Welchman 1989; Jones 1906) andanticipated some strands in present-day environmental ethics, whichlikewise hold that there can be value in features of the naturalenvironment apart from any awareness of them. But he did not insist onthis answer. Later inPrincipia Ethica he said that beauty onits own at most has little and may have no value (1903: 202, 203/1993:250, 251), and in his later bookEthics he implicitly deniedthat beauty on its own has value. There he held, as Sidgwick had, thatall intrinsic goods involve some state of consciousness and perhapseven of pleasure (1912: 239–41, 249/1947: 147–49,153/1965: 103–04, 107). His first book, however, had defendedthe contrary, more radical view.

Moore also gave some weight to the hedonic states of pleasure andpain. He thought the former a very minor good, saying pleasure on itsown at most has limited and may have no value, but he thought pain avery great evil, which there is a serious duty to prevent (1903:212–13, 222–23/1993: 260–61, 270–71) His viewtherefore involved a value-asymmetry, with pain a much greater evilthan pleasure is a good. This had not been the traditional view; mosthedonists had held that a pleasure of a given intensity is exactly asgood as a pain of the same intensity is evil (e.g. Sidgwick 1907:413). But Moore thought it intuitively compelling that the pain isworse, as some later writers have also held (e.g. Mayerfeld 1999, Ch.6); if that makes the theory of value less systematic, he said, somuch the worse for system.

While many ideal consequentialists have treated knowledge asintrinsically good, in some cases even supremely so,PrincipiaEthica did not, saying knowledge is a necessary component of thelarger good of appreciating existing beauty but has little or no valuein itself (1903: 199/1993: 248). AgainEthics may havereversed this view, citing knowledge several times as one ideal goodthat may be added to the hedonists’ good of pleasure (1912: 237,247/1947 146, 152/1965: 102, 106). But Moore never saw any intrinsicvalue in achievement, for example in business or politics, or indeedin any active changing of the world. As John Maynard Keynes said, hischief goods were states of mind that “were not associated withaction or achievement or with consequence. They consisted in timeless,passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattachedto ‘before and after’” (Keynes 1949: 83).

The first of these goods was the appreciation of beauty, which forMoore combined the cognition or awareness of beautiful qualities withan appropriately positive emotion toward them, such as enjoyment oradmiration. We listen to music, for example, hear beautiful qualitiesin it, and are pleased by or admire those qualities. But the valuehere is entirely contemplative; Moore saw no separate worth in whatthe romantics had especially valued, the active creation of beauty(Baldwin 1993, xxiv). He might say that an artist has to understandand love his work’s beauty if he is to create it, and perhaps todo so more than someone who merely enjoys it, but the value in hiswork is still not distinctively creative rather than contemplative. Incharacterizing the good of aesthetic appreciation Moore gave a furtherreductive analysis, this time of beauty as “that of which theadmiring contemplation is good in itself” (1903:201–02/1993: 249–50). Beauty too, then, is not a distinctevauative concept but analyzable in terms of goodness. He did notnotice, however, that this definition seems again open to anopen-question objection, since it reduces the claim that it is good tocontemplate beauty to the near-tautology that it is good tocontemplate that which it is good to contemplate.

Though Moore inPrincipia Ethica thought beauty good initself, he did not insist on this view when valuing the appreciationof beauty; the latter might be good even if the former was not. But hestill thought the real existence of beauty makes a significantdifference to the value there is. More specifically, he thought theadmiring contemplation of beauty that actually exists and causes yourcontemplation is significantly better than an otherwise similarcontemplation of merely imagined beauty, and better by more than canbe attributed to the existence of the beauty on its own. This viewinvolved an application of his “principle of organicunities,” which is one of his main contributions to ethics andsays the value of a whole need not equal the sum of the values itsparts would have on their own (1903: 27–29/1993: 78–80).If statex on its own has valuea and statey on its own has valueb, the whole formed bycombining them by relationR need not have valuea +b; it may have more than that value and it may have less.This principle had been accepted by Idealists such as Bradley, whogave it a characteristically anti-theoretical formulation. They heldthat ifx andy combine to form the wholex-R-y, their values, like their very identities, aredissolved in that larger whole, whose value therefore cannot becomputed from the values of its parts. It was Moore’scontribution to accept the principle in a way that rejected thisanti-theoretical reading and allowed computation, though the exact wayit did so depended on his strict view that intrinsic value can dependonly on intrinsic properties.

This strict view implies that whenx andy enterinto the relationR that constitutes the wholex-R-y, their own values cannot be changed by that relation.Thus Moore said, “The part of a valuable whole retains exactlythe same value when it is, as when it is not, a part of thatwhole” (1903: 30/1993: 81). Any additional value in the wholex-R-y must therefore be attributed to the whole as an entitydistinct from its parts, and with the relation between those partsinternal to it. Moore called this additional value the value of awhole “as a whole,” and said it needed to be added to thevalue in the parts to arrive at the whole’s overall value, orits value “on the whole” (1903: 214–16/1993:263–64). Thus, ifx andy have valuesa andb on their own, and the wholex-R-yhas valuec “as a whole,” the value ofx-R-y “on the whole” isa +b +c. (The value of the whole is therefore not equal to the sumof the values of its parts, but it is equal to a sum of which thosevalues are constituents.) This “holistic” formulation ofthe principle of organic unities is not the only one possible. Wecould relax the conditions on a thing’s intrinsic value so itcan be affected by its external relations and say that whenxandy enter into a whole their own values change, so that,for example,x’s value becomesa +c.This “variability” formulation of the principle can alwaysreach the same final conclusion as the holistic one, since whateverpositive or negative value the latter finds in the whole as a wholethe former can add to one or other of the parts. But the twoformulations locate the additional value in different places, andsometimes one and sometimes the other gives what seems the intuitivelybetter explanation of an organic value (Hurka 1998). Moore, however,was forced by his strict view of intrinsic goodness to use only theholistic formulation. In the aesthetic case, he held that the admiringcontemplation of beauty considered apart from the existence of itsobject always has the same (moderate) valuea, while theexistence of beauty always has the same (minimal or zero) valueb. But when the two are combined so a person admiringlycontemplates beauty that exists and causes his contemplation, theresulting whole has the significant additional valuec as awhole, resulting in an overall value ofa + b + c. Theexistence of the beauty is therefore necessary for the significantvaluec, but that value is not intrinsic to it, belonginginstead to the larger whole of which it is a 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 withoutconsciousness and, more specifically, without pleasure, and hadconcluded that pleasure must therefore be the only ultimate good(1907: 113, 399–401). GivenPrincipia Ethica’sview about the value of beauty, Moore in that book rejected thepremise of Sidgwick’s argument, but he also argued that, evengranting this premise, Sidgwick’s conclusion does not follow. Itmay be that pleasure is a necessary condition for any value, but thatonce pleasure is present, other states such as the awareness of beautyor personal love increase the value of the resulting whole even thoughon their own they have no worth; they can be necessary for an organicvalue but of no value themselves (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 aboutdesert. Moore endorsed the retributive view that when a person ismorally vicious it is good if he is punished, and he expressed thisview by saying that although the person’s vice is bad and hissuffering pain is bad, the combination of vice and pain in the samelife is good as a whole, and sufficiently good to make the situationon the whole better than if there was vice and no pain, i.e. if therewas vice and no punishment for it (1903: 214–15/1993:263–64). This is in fact a point where Moore’s holisticformulation of the principle is positively appealing. The alternativevariability view must say that when a person is vicious, his sufferingpain switches from being purely bad to being purely good. But thisimplies that the morally appropriate response to deserved suffering issimply positive, for example simple joy, which does not seem right;the better response mixes satisfaction that justice is being done withsorrow at the infliction of pain, as a holistic view of desert, onwhich the pain remains bad, implies.

Moore’s other chief good, that of personal love, also involvedadmiring contemplation, but now of objects, namely persons, withqualities that are not just beautiful but also intrinsically good(1903: 203/1993: 251). Since for Moore the main intrinsic goods weremental qualities, such love involved primarily the admiringcontemplation of another’s good states of mind. In socharacterizing love Moore was applying one of four recursiveprinciples he used to generate higher-level intrinsic goods and evilsfrom an initial base-set of goods and evils. The first of theseprinciples says that if statex is intrinsically good, thenadmiringly contemplating, or loving,x for itself is alsointrinsically good (1903: 203–04, 217/1993: 251–53, 265).Thus, if personA’s admiringly contemplating beauty isgood, personB’s admiringly contemplatingA’s admiring contemplation is a further good, as isC’s admiringB’s admiring, and so on. Asecond principle says that ifx is intrinsically evil, hatingx for itself is intrinsically good (1903: 217/1993 265);thus,B’s feeling compassionate pain atA’s pain is good. And two final principles say thatloving for itself what is evil, as in sadistic pleasure inanother’s pain, and hating for itself what is good, as inenvious pain at his pleasure, are evil (1903: 208–10,211–12/1993: 257–58, 259–60). Though Moore statedthese four principles separately, they all make morally appropriateattitudes to intrinsic goods and evils, ones whose orientation, eitherpositive or negative, matches their objects’ values, additionalsuch goods and morally inappropriate attitudes additional evils. Theprinciples were not unique to him; they had been defended earlier byRashdall (1885; 1907) and Brentano (1969) and would be defended laterby Ross (1930, 1939). But Moore’s formulation was in tworespects distinctive. Rashdall and Ross called the higher-level valuesthey generated virtues and vices, as it is indeed plausible to do;surely benevolence and compassion are virtuous and sadism is vicious.But Moore preferred to define the virtues instrumentally, as traitsthat cause goods and prevent evils, and said that as such they lackintrinsic worth (1903: 172–77/1993: 220–26). Rashdall andespecially Ross also held that virtue is the greatest intrinsic goodand vice the greatest evil. In contrast, Moore argued that the valueof an appropriate or inappropriate attitude is often less than thevalue of its object; thus compassion for another’s pain, thoughgood, is less good than the pain is evil, so the combination of oneperson’s pain and another’s compassion for it has onbalance negative value. “We have no reason,” he wrote,“to maintain the paradox that an ideal world would be one inwhich vice and suffering must exist in order that it may contain thegoods consisting in the appropriate emotion towards them. … wecannot admit the actual validity of any of the arguments commonly usedin Theodicies; no such argument succeeds in justifying the fact thatthere does exist even the smallest of the many evils which this worldcontains” (1903: 220/1993: 268). The attitudes that others wouldcall virtuous and held are supremely good had in this way for Moore asecondary status, or less value than the other goods and evils theyare directed at.

The recursive principles are clearly relevant to personal love, whosecore involves positive concern for another’s good. ButMoore’s particular application of the principles led to acuriously restricted picture of what love is. First, as in theaesthetic case, he took the main valuable attitude to becontemplative, involving the admiration of another’s alreadyexisting good qualities rather than any active engagement with them.This applied even to the love of another’s physical beauty.Though he thought this is a central part of love (1903:203–04/1993: 252), he took it to involve mere passive admirationof the other’s beauty, as it were from the other side of theroom. There was no desire to possess or interact physically with aloved one’s beauty, that is, no active eroticism. He actuallyheld that sexual arousal, and especially arousal by another’sarousal, involves love of the ugly or evil and so is evil (1903:209–10/1993: 257–58). The same point applied moregenerally: the loving attitude was one of appreciating goods inanother’s life rather than of acting to produce or help herachieve them. One did not do anything for or with a loved one; onesimply admired her. (In an 1899 paper presented to the Apostlessociety at Cambridge he had said, “Love of others is a thing ofvery great value, and it may be very strong although it does not leadto any action. There is, indeed, no reason why it should”(quoted in Levy 1979: 203).Though for him personal love was anadditional good to aesthetic appreciation, he characterized it in anessentially aesthetic way. Moreover, his list of the goods one is toappreciate or applaud in a loved one was also truncated. It did notinclude pleasure or happiness, since that was not a significant good;it was not part of love as he understood it to want or be pleased by aloved one’s pleasure though it was part to be pained by herpain. Nor was it part to care about her knowledge or achievement.Instead, the central focus of love was the other’s admiringcontemplation of beauty (1903: 204/1993: 252–53), as if thesupreme expression of love were “What excellent taste inpictures you have.” But that had to be the primary focus ifaesthetic appreciation was his one principal intrinsic good besideslove. Finally, Moore took the qualities one appreciates in a loved oneto be simply and therefore impartially good. This meant his accounthad no room for the special attachment to or heightened concern for anindividual that many take to be essential to personal love. If I lovea friend for qualitiesx,y, andz, and anew person comes along with the same qualities to a slightly higherdegree, then, on Moore’s view, I should admire the newperson’s qualities more and therefore love them more; I shouldtrade up to a better object of love whenever one is available. This isstarkly at odds with the loyalty, or attachment to an individual as anindividual, that many think essential to love and that is recognizedin Broad’s self-referential altruism; it is a strangelyimpersonal view of personal love. None of this means that a moreadequate account of love cannot be constructed with the same basicstructure as Moore’s; it can. It will hold that personal loveinvolves a wider range of positive attitudes to goods in a lovedone’s life, including actively promoting as well as passivelyadmiring them; will recognize a wider range of such goods, includingthe loved one’s happiness, knowledge, and achievement ratherthan just her aesthetic awareness; and will take goods in her life tohave greater value from your point of view than do the similar goodsof strangers, so loving them is more appropriate and thereforeintrinsically better. But Moore was prevented from giving this accountby other features of his view, such as his general emphasis oncontemplative forms of love, his restricted list of initial goods, andhis strict impartialism about value.

5. Influence

Despite not always containing entirely new ideas, Moore’sethical writings, and especiallyPrincipia Ethica, wereextremely influential, both outside and within philosophy. Outsidephilosophy one influence was through the literary and artistic figuresin the Bloomsbury Group, such as Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Leonardand Virginia Woolf, several of whom had come to know Moore whilemembers with him of the exclusive Apostles society at Cambridge. Theywere most impressed by the last chapter ofPrincipia Ethica,whose identification of aesthetic appreciation and personal love asthe highest goods very much fit their own predilections. Keynes saidthe book’s publication was for them “the opening of a newheaven on a new earth” and that its theory of the good becamefor a time their “religion” (1949: 82) Many of them– the gay men in particular – sexualized Moore’saccount of love, adding an erotic element not present in hisformulations. But according to Keynes (though Leonard Woolf (1960:146–49) disagreed), they tended to ignore the impartialconsequentialism within which he embedded those goods, concentratingon pursuing them just in their own lives rather than encouraging theirwider spread in society. The novels of E.M. Forster, another Apostle,contain several figures representing Moorean ideas, for example theSchlegel sisters inHowards End (Sidorsky 2007). An importantelement inPrincipia Ethica’s extra-philosophicalappeal was its brash iconoclasm, its claiming, however inaccurately,to sweep away all past moral philosophy. This tone entirely fit itstime, when the death of Queen Victoria had led many in Britain tothink a new, more progressive age was dawning.

The book’s influence within philosophy was even greater. On thenormative side, views close to its ideal consequentialism remainedprominent and even dominant, at least in Britain, until the 1930s,though it is hard to know how far this is attributable to Moorehimself since similar views had been accepted before him, for exampleby Rashdall and McTaggart and, with a difference in style, by Greenand Bradley. In metaethics his non-naturalism likewise remaineddominant for several decades, though here Moore played a larger role,especially for later writers, in part because of his generalphilosophical eminence and in part because of the vigor with which hepresented the view. By talking explicitly of non-natural properties heat least seemed to give non-naturalism a more robust metaphysical sidethan predecessors such as Sidgwick had, and he defended the view moreemphatically, in particular by putting more weight on theopen-question argument. When Sidgwick noticed Bentham or Spencerequating goodness with a natural property such as pleasure, he thoughtit a minor slip that ought in charity to be ignored; Moore thought ita decisive error that vitiated that philosopher’s entire system.By so emphasizing the two elements of non-naturalism – itsrealism and its commitment to the autonomy of ethics – Moorehelped initiate an oft-remarked sequence of developments in20^th-century metaethics (see Warnock 1967; Hudson 1970;Sinclair 2018a).

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 itsmoral realism, holding instead that there are no facts other thannatural ones and no modes of knowing other than the empirical and thestrictly logical. They therefore developed various versions ofnon-cognitivism, which hold that moral judgements are not true orfalse but either express attitudes, as in emotivism (Ayer 1936;Stevenson 1944), or issue something like imperatives, as inprescriptivism (Hare 1952; Hare 1963). Unlike the subjectivenaturalism Moore criticized inEthics, these views allowmoral disagreement, since attitudes and imperatives can oppose eachother, for example as positive versus negative. They also, their laterdefenders held, give a better explanation of the open-questionargument, since they find a distinctive emotive or action-guidingforce in moral concepts and judgements that is not present innon-moral ones; that is why, they said, the normative is neitherreducible to nor derivable from the non-normative. Non-cognitivism canalso explain, some said, why morality matters to us as it does.Non-naturalism implies that moral judgements concern a mysterious typeof property, but why should facts about that property be important tous or influence our behavior? If moral judgements express deep-seatedattitudes, however, the question answers itself.

A later reaction, starting around the mid-century, rejected bothnon-naturalism and non-cognitivism and explored versions ofnaturalism, including a neo-Aristotelian one that grounds all ethicaldemands in a conception of human flourishing, or of the development ofa human nature understood in quasi-biological terms, that included thestandard moral virtues as constituents (Anscombe 1958; Foot 2001);this view implicitly denies the autonomy of ethics. It sometimes wentwith another movement that began around mid-century, that of rejectingthe very idea of a concept or property of the (simply) intrinsicallygood that, though hardly unique to Moore – since it goes back toPlato – was especially associated with him. Here one claim wasthat predicative uses of “good,” as in Moore’s“aesthetic appreciation is good,” are ungrammatical, sincethe only legitimate uses of the term in English are at leastimplicitly attributive, attaching “good” to some sortalterm as in “good knife,” “good liar,” and,most relevantly to the neo-Aristotelian view, “good humanbeing” (Geach 1956; also Thomson 1997, Thomson 2003). But,though initially made at the high-water mark of ordinary-languagephilosophy, this claim about English grammar seems plainly false: thelanguage has always allowed free-standing predicative uses of“good,” from the King James translation of Genesis –“God saw the light, that it was good” (cited in Butchvarov1989: 17) – to everyday phrases such as “It is good that…” Moore’s moral philosophy cannot credibly bedismissed as resting on a crude linguistic error (see e.g. Pigden1990; Zimmerman 1999; Kraut 2011: 173–83; Cosker-Rowland 2016;Tucker 2018). Moreover a view centred on the attributive use of“good” has to explain why “good human being”or “good person” has ethical implications, ones about howwe should act, that “good knife” and especially“good liar” do not. It cannot say, as a Moorean would,that the things that make you a good human being, such as benevolentdesires and feelings, are simply intrinsically good while those thatmake for a good knife or good liar are not. But what then can itsay?

A related claim rejected Moore’s “(simply) good” infavour of “good for,” not in the agent-relative senseSidgwick used to formulate egoism but in a different one associatedwith “well-being” or “prudential value” andalso intended to supplant his “good.” Its proponents mightgrant that talk of the simply good is perfectly grammatical but arguethat it makes no useful contribution to ethical thought, which goesbetter with “good for” as its only evaluative concept(Kraut 2011). The resulting view may be another version ofneo-Aristotelianism (Kraut 2007) but then it can be asked, among otherthings, how it can compare the good-fors of different species orexplain why, if you can either save a human’s life or save acat, you should save the human. It cannot say, as a Moorean would,that the human has capacities whose development is simply better thanthat of the cat’s, but then, again, what can it say? A lessradical view accepts “simply good” but says it cannot bethe only evaluative concept, as in Moore, but needs to be supplementedby “good for.” We should indeed promote what is simplyintrinsically good, but that is largely or even exclusively what isgood for, or constitutes the well-being of, human and other sentientbeings (e.g. Sumner 1996). Here a view sympathetic to Moore can askwhat substantive contribution “good for” makes to thisview: if the states of a person we are to promote are, ultimately,simply good, what exactly is added by saying they are also good forhim? Especially recently, there have been several more generaldefences of Moore’s “(simply) good” against thesupposedly distinct “good for” concept, often withendorsement of his own locative analysis of “good for” as“good and located in the life of” (e.g. Regan 2004;Fletcher 2012; McDaniel 2014; Hurka 2021).

Another later reaction, sometimes associated with the firstneo-Aristotelian view and like it influenced by Wittgenstein, rejectedthe calculating side of Moore’s consequentialism, whichidentifies right and wrong acts by adding up the goods and evils intheir consequences. Moral judgements, some argued, cannot be codifiedor theorized in this way but instead call for ethically trained andsensitive insight into particular situations as particular (e.g.McDowell 1979); this view also rejected more sytematized versions ofdeontology such as those of Kant and Ross. Even apart from thisanti-theory view there was, in many circles, skepticism about thesupposed extravagance and dogmatism of Moore’s substantiveclaims about the good – such as his specific valuings ofaesthetic appreciation and personal love – and a preference forthe allegedly more modest view that what is good in people’slives is just the fulfilment of whatever desires they have. By the1960s, it seems fair to say, many of Moore’s views were thoughtdeeply problematic and his moral philosophy as a whole was not anespecially live option. It was still thought important to readPrincipia Ethica, or at least its first chapter, as havinginitiated the sequence of developments that led to the then-currentviews. But from the standpoint of many of those views Moore’sgeneral approach to ethics was at key points misguided.

Fifty-plus years later the philosophical climate is more favorable toMoore. A number of philosophers now defend metaethical non-naturalism(e.g. Shafer-Landau 2003; Huemer 2006), either in versions they sayare ontologically minimalist (Nagel 1986; Scanlon 1998, 2014; Parfit2011, vol. 2: 464–87) or in ones they present as more robust(Enoch 2011), but all embracing some account of normative truth thatseparates it from non-normative, for example scientific, truth. Inaddition, and of necessity, these current versions of non-naturalismshare something close to Moore’s moral epistemology, his viewthat normative truths are known by a kind of direct insight orintuition, though the present-day views are often more explicitlyfallibilist and coherentist than his sometimes appeared to be (e.g.Audi 2004). Still, for many philosophers Moore’s version ofnon-naturalist realism remains the best-known or canonical one.Moreover, as noted above, there has been increasing pushback to theclaim that talk of the “simply good,” as against“goodF or good for,” is somehow problematic, ormore acceptance of Moore’s conceptual framework. In normativeethics, too, there is increasing sympathy for accounts of the goodwith an ideal or perfectionist content and admiration for particularfeatures of Moore’s own account, such as his valuing of personallove, his recursive principles (Hurka 2001), and his principle oforganic unities. Moorean ideas still have many rivals, including manythat reject, for example, his consequentialism and impartialism. Andoften what present-day philosophers take from Moore is just anindividual idea or argument rather than his theory as a whole (Regan2003 is an exception). But whereas in the early 20th centuryMoore’s approach to ethics, and especially to metaethics, wasdominant, at least in British moral philosophy, and whereas in themid-century it was commonly dismissed, it today represents, at severalpoints, a live contributor to ongoing ethical debates.

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Ethics, 113/3 (2003): special volume for the centenary ofPrincipia Ethica.
Journal of Value Inquiry, 37/3 (2003): special volume forthe centenary ofPrincipia Ethica.
Southern Journal of Philosophy, 41 (2003) Supplement:special volume for the centenary ofPrincipia Ethica.

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