Russell’s Moral Philosophy

First published Mon Dec 17, 2007; substantive revision Tue May 4, 2021

Russell remains famous as a logician, a metaphysician, and as aphilosopher of mathematics, but in his own day he was also notoriousfor his social and political opinions. He wrote an immense amountabout practical ethics—women’s rights, marriage and morals, warand peace, and the vexed question of whether socialists should smokegood cigars. (They should.) And unlike present-day practical ethicists(with a few notable exceptions such as Peter Singer) he was widelyread by the non-philosophical public. (See for instance Phillips 2013,which details Russell’s successes as a popular moralist in the 1950s.)But though Russell was famous as a moralist and famous as aphilosopher, he does not have much of a reputation as amoralphilosopher in the more technical sense of the term. Until veryrecently, his contributions to what is nowadays known asethicaltheory—meta-ethics (the nature and justification, if any,of moral judgments) and normative ethics (what makes right acts rightetc)—were either unknown, disregarded or dismissed asunoriginal. Key texts on the history of twentieth centuryethics—Warnock’sEthics Since 1900 (1978), Urmson’sThe Emotivist Theory of Ethics (1968), Milller’sContemporary Metaethics: an Introduction (2013) andSchroeder’sNon-Cognitivism in Ethics (2010)—saynothing, or next to nothing, about Russell, at least in his capacityas a moral philosopher. It is only very recently—in the lastfifteen years or so—that ethical theorists have begun to payattention to him. (See Pigden 2003, 2007 and Potter 2006, thoughL.W. Aiken 1963 anticipated Potter and Pigden by about forty years.)Perhaps Russell would not have repined, since he professed himselfdissatisfied with what he hadsaid “on thephilosophical basis of ethics” (RoE:165/Papers 11: 310). But since he took an equally dim view ofwhat he hadread on that topic, the fact that he did notthink much of his own contributions does not mean that he thought themany worse than anybody else’s. In my view, they are often ratherbetter and deserve to be disinterred. But “disinterred” isthe word since some of his most original contributions were leftunpublished in his own lifetime and what hedid publish wasoften buried in publications ostensibly devoted to less theoreticaltopics. Thus Russell’s brilliant little paper “Is There anAbsolute Good”, which anticipates Mackie’s “The Refutationof Morals” by over twenty years, was delivered in 1922 at ameeting of the Apostles (an exclusive, prestigious but secretCambridge discussion group of which Moore, Russell, and Ramsey wereall members) and was not published until 1988. And Russell’s versionof emotivism (which anticipates Ayer’sLanguage, Truth andLogic (1936) by one year, and Stevenson’s “The EmotiveMeaning of Ethical Terms” (1937) by two) appeared towards theend of a popular book,Religion and Science (1935), whoseprincipal purpose was not to discuss the nature of moral judgments,but to do down religion in the name of science. However, Russell’sdissatisfaction with his writings on ethical theory did not extend tohis writings on social and political topics.

I have no difficulty in practical moral judgments, which I find I makeon a roughly hedonistic [i.e.,utilitarian] basis, but, whenit comes to the philosophy of moral judgments, I am impelled in twoopposite directions and remain perplexed. (RoE:165–6/Papers 11: 311)

His perplexity, however, was theoretical rather than practical. He waspretty clear about what we ought todo (work for worldgovernment, for example), but “perplexed” about what hemeant when he said that we ought to do it.

One point to stress, before we go on. Russell took a pride in hiswillingness to change his mind. Obstinacy in the face ofcounter-arguments was not, in his opinion, a virtue in ascientifically-minded philosopher. Unfortunately he overdid theopen-mindedness, abandoning good theories for worse ones in the faceof weak counter-arguments and sometimes forgetting some of his ownbest insights (a forgivable fault in given the fountain of good ideasthat seemed to be continually erupting in his head). Russell’s mentaldevelopment, therefore, is not always a stirring tale of intellectualprogress. His first thoughts are often better than his second thoughtsand his second thoughts better than his third thoughts. Thus theemotivism that was his dominant view in the latter part of his life isvulnerable to objections that he himself had raised in an earlierincarnation, as was the error theory that he briefly espoused in 1922.Nobody should be surprised, therefore, if I sometimes deploy anearlier Russell to criticize one of his later selves. Whitehead isreported to have said that Russell was a Platonic dialogue in himself,and in this temporally extended debate quite often it is one of theyounger Russells who wins the argument.

1. The Open Question Argument and its Aftermath: Moore’s Influence on Russell

Russell’s destiny as an ethical thinker was dominated by onebook—G.E. Moore’sPrincipia Ethica (1903). Before 1903,Russell devoted some of the energy that he could spare from GermanSocial Democracy, the foundations of mathematics and the philosophy ofLeibniz to working out a meta-ethic of his own. After 1903, he becamean enthusiastic but critical convert to the doctrines ofPrincipiaEthica (though there is some evidence that the conversion processmay have begun as early as 1897). Moore is famous for the claim, whichhe professes to prove by means of what has come to be known as theOpen Question Argument, that there is a “non-natural”property ofgoodness, not identical with or reducible to anyother property or assemblage of properties, and that what we ought todo is to maximize the good and minimize the bad. Russell subscribed tothis thesis—with certain important reservations—until1913. Thereafter he continued to believe thatif judgments aboutgood and bad are to be objectively true, non-natural propertiesof goodness and badness are required to make them true. It is justthat he ceased to believe that there are any such properties. Doesthis mean that judgments about good and evil are allfalse?Not necessarily (though Russell did subscribe to that view for a briefperiod during 1922). An alternative theory is that moral judgments areneither truenor false, since their role is not tostate facts or to describe the way the world is, but to expressemotions, desires or even commands. This (despite some waverings) wasRussell’s dominant view for the rest of his life, though it took himtwenty-two years to develop a well worked-out version of the theory.He tended to call it subjectivism or “the subjectivity of moralvalues” though it is nowadays known as non-cognitivism,expressivism or emotivism. He came to think that, despite theirindicative appearance, moral judgments—at least judgments aboutwhat is good or bad in itself—are really in the optative mood.(A sentence is in the optative mood if it expresses a wish or adesire.) What “X is good” means is “Wouldthat everyone desiredX!”. It therefore expresses, butdoes not describe, the speaker’s state of mind, specifically his orher desires, and as such can be neither truth nor false, anymore than“Oh to be in England now that April’s here!”. If I say“Oh to be in England now that April’s here!”, you caninfer that I desire to be in England now that April’s here (sinceabsent an intention to mislead, it is not the sort of thing I wouldsayunless I desired to be in England andthoughtthat April was here). But I am notstating that I desire tobe in England, since I am not stating anything at all (except perhapsthat April is here). (SeeRoE: 131–144/Religion andScience: ch. 9.) Although this was Russell’s dominant view from1913 until his death, he did not care for it very much.

I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity ofethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all thatis wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don’t like it. (RoE:165/Papers 11: 310–11)

It is not entirely clear what Russell took these overwhelmingarguments to be. But one of them seems to have proceeded from aMoorean premise. Russell took Moore to have refutednaturalism, the view that although there are moral truths,nothing metaphysically out of the ordinary is required tomake them true. Conversely Russell took Moore to have provedthatif there were to be moral truths about which things weregood or bad as ends rather than means, the truths in question wouldrequire spooky non-natural properties of goodness, badnessetc—quite unlike the “natural” properties posited byscience and commonsense—tomake them true. In thesupposed absence of such properties, he was driven to the conclusionthat moral judgments (at least judgments about goodness and badness)were eitherall false orneither truenorfalse. Thus Russell remained a renegade Moorean even after he hadceased to believe in the Moorean good. But if Moore was a decisiveinfluence on Russell, it seems that Russell was an important influenceon Moore. For Moore may have been driven to invent his most famousargument for a non-natural property of goodness—theOpen Question Argument—by the need to deal with a naturalistictheory of Russell’s.

2. Desire, Motivation and the Open Question Argument: Did Russell Influence Moore?

2.1. The Open Question Argument versus the Barren Tautology Argument

“I certainly have been more influenced by [Russell] than anyother single philosopher” wrote Moore in his intellectualautobiography (Schilpp (ed.) 1942: 16). But Moore’s“Autobiography” suggests (without actually saying so) thatthis influence was mostly metaphysical. I shall argue that Russell hada considerable influence on Moore’sethical doctrines andthat some of Moore’s key ideas were developed in the course of ongoingdebates with Russell.

Moore’sPrincipia Ethica took a long time to finish. He had apretty good draft in 1898, but he did not publish it until 1903. Whythe long delay? One reason, I suspect, was that he had to deal with aproblem posed (perhaps unwittingly) by Russell.

It is not generally recognized thatPrincipia Ethica containstwo distinct arguments against the “NaturalisticFallacy”, the supposed intellectual error of identifyinggoodness with some other property (usually, though not necessarily, anaturalistic property). The first, which is derived fromSidgwick, and has a long philosophical pedigree, goes something likethis:

(1.1): For any naturalistic or metaphysical “X”, if“good” meant “X”, then (i)“X things are good” would be a barren tautology,equivalent to (ii) “X things areX” or (iii)“Good things are good”.
(1.2): For any naturalistic or metaphysical “X”, if(i) “X things are good” were a barren tautology, itwould not provide a reason for action (i.e., a reason to promoteX-ness).
(1.3): So for any naturalistic or metaphysical “X”,either (i) “X things are good” doesnot provide a reason for action (i.e., a reason to promoteX-ness),or “good” does not mean“X”.

To put the point another way:

(1.3′): For any naturalistic or metaphysical “X”,if (i) “X things are good” provides areason for action (that is, a reason to promoteX-ness),then “good” does not mean“X”.

Following Russell, I call this theBarren Tautology Argumentor BTA (RoE: 100/Papers 4: 572). The idea is that“good” cannot be synonymous with any naturalistic“X”, if “X things are good” issupposed to be a reason for action rather than a “barrentautology”. So for example, if “good” justmeans “pleasant” then “Pleasant things aregood” is a barren tautology (equivalent to “Pleasantthings are pleasant” or “Good things are good”) andcannot provide us with a reason for the pursuit of pleasure. Only if“goodness” and “pleasure” arenotsynonymous, can “Pleasant things are good” provide anintellectual incentive for the pursuit of pleasant things. Thisargument crops up atPE: §11 (though variants of itrecur throughout the first four chapters (PE: §§14,24 & 26):

WhenA says “Good means pleasant” andB says“Good means desired,” they may merely wish to assert thatmost people have used the word for what is pleasant and for what isdesired respectively. [But I do not think] that any exponent ofnaturalistic Ethics would be willing to allow that this was all hemeant. They are all so anxious to persuade us that what they call thegood is what we really ought to do. “Do, pray, act so, becausethe word ‘good’ is generally used to denote actions ofthis nature”: such, on this view, would be the substance oftheir teaching … But how perfectly absurd is the reason theywould give for it! “You are to do this, because most people usea certain word to denote conduct such as this.” “You areto say the thing which is not, because most people call itlying.” That is an argument just as good! …. When theysay “Pleasure is good,” we cannot believe that they merelymean “Pleasure is pleasure” and nothing more thanthat.

However Moore did not invent this argument. A.N. Prior, in hisLogic and the Basis of Ethics (1949: ch. IX), traces it backto Cudworth in the 17^th Century, though it doubtful whetherMoore was aware of this. (He does not seem to have been particularlywell read.) But it certainly occurs in Sidgwick, which is presumablywhere Moore got it from. The Barren Tautology Argument is to bedistinguished from the Open Question Argument proper (the OQA), whichMooredid invent, at least in its modern form. This occurs atPE: §13, a section that does not appear in the 1898draft. It can be stated thus:

(1.4): “AreX things good?” is a significant or openquestion for any naturalistic or metaphysical predicate“X” (whether simple or complex). [A question issignificant or open if an understanding of the language does notsuffice for an answer. Thus “Are bachelors unmarried?” isnot an Open Question.]
(1.5): If two expressions (whether simple or complex) are synonymous thisis evident on reflection to every competent speaker.
(1.6): The meaning of a predicate or property word is the property forwhich it stands. Thus if two predicates or property words havedistinct meanings, they name distinct properties.

From (1.4) and (1.5) it follows that

(1.7): “Good” is not synonymous with any naturalistic ormetaphysical predicate “X” (or“goodness” with any corresponding noun or noun-phrase“X-ness”).

If “good”were synonymous with some naturalisticpredicate “X”, then this would be obvious onreflection to every competent speaker. Hence there would besome question of the form “AreX thingsgood?” which wouldnot appear to be open to competentspeakers, since an understanding of the words involved would sufficefor an affirmative answer. Given (1.4), there is no such question;hence “good” is not synonymous with any naturalisticpredicate “X”.

From (1.6) and (1.7) it follows that

(1.8): Goodness is not identical with any natural or metaphysicalproperty ofX-ness.

This argument is wheeled on to discredit a particular naturalisticanalysis of “good”—“one of the more plausible,because one of the more complicated of suchdefinitions”—that “ good mean[s] … that whichwe desire to desire”. Where did Moore get this definition? Hedoes not say, crediting it, in effect, to Mr Nobody. But in fact theinventor of this plausible but fallacious definition was none otherthan the Hon. Bertrand Russell.

2.2. Wrestling With Desire: the Young Russell’s Adventures in Meta-Ethics

The desire-to-desire theory is the last in a sequence of threeattempts to provide a foundation for ethics by defining“good” in terms of desire. In the first, “Xis good” means “X will satisfy my desires”;in the second, it means “I wantX for its ownsake”; and in the third it means “X is what Idesire to desire” (RoE: chs. 7, 9 &10/Papers 1: nos. 36, 39 & 15).

“Ethical Axioms” (1894) was the last piece that Russellwrote for Sidgwick’s course on ethics (RoE:53–56/Papers 1: 226–228). Russell takes it as adatum that “we do make moral judgments” and that “weregard these, like judgments as to what is, as liable to truth andfalsehood”. We are “precluded from skepticism”(presumably the view that moral judgments are all false) “by themere fact we will and act”. (This is not a very convincingargument since I can desire something—and henceact—without thinking it good, as non-human animals presumablydo. The precondition of action isdesire, not desire trickedout in the vocabulary of good and evil.) Hence “some basis mustbe found for ethical judgments”, but “it is sufficientlyobvious that such a basis cannot be sought in any proposition aboutwhat is or has been”. Thus Russell has set himself a ratherdifficult problem, since it is not at all clear that therecan be any true propositions that are not, in some sense,propositions about what is, has been or will be. Perhaps what he hasin mind is a set of self-evident axioms about what ought to be or whatwe ought to do which do not admit of any further analysis. But herejects this option because “the Kantian maxim” (whateverthat is) is purely formal and because no “materialprecept” “has obtained the universal consent ofmoralists”. (It seems that a maxim cannot count as self-evidentunless it is evident to every qualified self.) Russell also rejectsthe view that moral judgments are “merely statements of apsychological state” (as, for example, that the speaker desiresthis or that) on the grounds that in that case “they could noterr (except by the speaker’s mistaking his own feelings)”. Heseems to think that it is a conceptual truth that moral judgments areliable to error. Finally he plumps for the view that “we maydefine the good as that which satisfies desire” (that is, thatwhat is good for each person is what will satisfy that person’sdesires). This allows for the possibility of error, for though weusually know what we want, we can be wrong about whether we will likeit when we get it. Russell hastens to explain that this definition isnot as sordid as it sounds. “Our duty will consist inself-realization, but self-realization may of course be best attainedby what is commonly called self-sacrifice.”

It is nice to know that no sordid or selfish consequences flow fromdefining the goodness in terms of the satisfaction of desire, but itis not at all clear that Russell has solved the problem that he hadset himself. For propositions about what will satisfy desire arepropositions about whatwill satisfy desire—that is,propositions about whatwill be. Underlying Russell’sargument is his evident desire to forge a conceptual connectionbetween moral belief and action. The theory must (help) explain thefact that weoften do what we believe to be our duty andusually pursue and promote what we believe to be good. This,not the thesis that we arenecessarily motivated by our moralbeliefs, is the premise of Hume’s famous Motivation Argument atTreatise, 3.1.1:

And this is confirmed by common experience, which informs us that menareoften governed by their duties, and are deterred fromsome actions by the opinion of injustice, and impelled toothers by that of obligation [my italics].

(See D.D. Raphael (ed.) 1991The British Moralists[henceforwardBM: §489].) Russell appears to havethought that a theory that left “good” and“ought” undefined would not meet this constraint. But if“good” meanswhat procures satisfaction, then wehave the beginnings of such an explanation. For we usually desire thatour desires be satisfied, and hence we have a reason to pursue andpromote the good.

This theory soon ceased to satisfy, and Russell reverted to theproblem in “Are All Desires Equally Moral?”, a paper hecomposed in about 1896 (RoE: 68–70/Papers 1:242–44). “The Good, for me, at any moment”, hedeclares, “is what I want” not what will satisfy my wants,since we desire the objects that will satisfy desire and not,“except derivatively”, that those desires should besatisfied. (This last point is distinctly dubious. Isn’t Reid’s desirefor our good-on-the-whole in part a second order desire that at leastsome of our first-order desires should be satisfied? [SeeThomas Reid, 1788,Essays on the Active Powers of Man,excerpted inBM: §§ 861–865.] And did notRussell himself believe that this desire was not only real but oftenunduly predominant in civilized persons, so much so that most of whatwe do is done for the sake of something else not because we have aspontaneous, first-order desire to do it? See for instance his 1894paper “Cleopatra or Maggie Tulliver” [RoE:57–67,Papers 1: 92–98] though the theme isrepeated in subsequent writings such asThe Principles of SocialReconstruction, first published in 1916.) Thus “X isgood”, means “I wantX”, a particularly crudekind of subjectivism that goes back to Hobbes (“whatsoever isthe object of any man’s appetite or desire; that is it which he forhis part callethgood”,BM: §25). Thistheory maintains the link between moral belief and action (naturallywe pursue and promote the things that we want!) though it a) reducesmoral judgments to “statements of a psychological state”and b) violates the requirement that statements about what ought to beshould have nothing to do with what is, since, on this theory, mymoral judgments reduce to statements about whatis going oninside my head. The theory as stated is a littletoo crudefor Russell however, since it precludes the possibility of moralerror. After all, it is difficult to be wrong about what we want. Thetheory has the further unhappy consequence that we cannot desire whatwe believe to be bad, let alone whatis bad, since from thevery fact that I desire something, it follows that for me, at least,it is good. All desires are equally moral since they are all desiresfor the good.

Russell tries to sidestep these problems by distinguishing between“primary desires, for ends, andsecondarydesires, for means”. The good for each person is what he desiresfor its own sake and generally speaking he cannot be mistaken aboutthis. But hecan be mistaken about whether a givenobject is themeans to what he ultimately desires.Furthermore, if heis mistaken, his secondary desires may beimmoral. As Russell realizes, this leads to the “Socratic maximthat no man sins wittingly” since nobody can desire what hebelieves to be bad. But an agent can both desire the bad and have baddesires, since his secondary desires may be inimical to his ultimateends. Unfortunately this amendment cannot save the theory. Accordingto Russell’s theory, insome cases at any rate“X is good”, means “I wantX for itsown sake”, and such judgments are relatively immune from error.Furthermore, people do seem to desire what they believe to be bad (the“Socratic maxim” is not known as the “SocraticParadox” for nothing!) and we commonly think that desires forends, as well as desires for means, can be bad. Finally, the theory,even in its amended form, reduces moral judgments to statements of apsychological state. Thus the theory violates Russell’s theoreticalconstraints and is inconsistent with the way we usually talk.

What about the desire-to-desire theory? If “X isgood” means “I desire to desireX” then thereis a conceptual connection, though, as Lewis notes, an“iffy” one, between moral belief and action (Lewis 1989:116/72). I will pursue and promote what I believe to be good in so faras I desire what I desire to desire. Moral judgments “likejudgments as to what is, [are] liable to truth and falsehood”,though notvery liable to falsehood, since it is difficult,but not impossible, to be mistaken about what we desire to desire. (Imight be persuaded, especially under moral pressure, that I desire todesire something when in fact I do not.) But it is possible both todesire the bad (to desire what I desirenot to desire) and tohave bad desires (to have desires which I desire to desire not todesire). Self-conscious depravity is thus a real possibility and theSocratic paradox is dismissed. For like an unhappy junkie, I can acton desires which I desire not to desire. But it is not possible todesire to desire the bad since what we desire to desire isautomatically good. Furthermore, moral judgments are reduced tostatements of a psychological state, so much so that ethics becomes abranch of empirical psychology. The axioms of ethics, in so far asthere are such things, are concerned with what is, since our desires,including our second-order desires are original existents.

Thus Russell was trying in the 1890s to devise a theory that wouldmeet six constraints:

(2.1): Moral judgments, “like judgments as to what is”, musthave a truth-value.
(2.2): Moral judgments must be liable to error (two constraints thatRussell tends to confuse).
(2.3): There must be a conceptual connection (possibly an iffy one)between moral belief and motivation [a rather weak form ofmotivational internalism].
(2.4): It must be possible to desire the bad and to have baddesires.
(2.5): Moral judgments must not reduce to “statements of apsychological state”.
(2.6): The basis for moral judgments cannot be sought in any propositionabout what is, has been or will be.

The last condition, which amounts to the denial of naturalism, goesback to a paper that Russell wrote for Sidgwick in 1893, “TheRelation of What Ought to be to What Is, Has Been or Will Be”(RoE: 37–40/Papers 1: 213–214). Russellobserves that “from the point of view of formal logic” itis impossible to derive an Ought from an Is. This leads him to theconclusion that “some one or more propositions ethical in formmust be regarded as axiomatic unless [and this is a big‘unless’] such propositions are materially equivalent tosome assertion about what is, has been or will be”. By“materially equivalent” he seems to mean “mean thesame as”. Thus morality might not hang from the skyhook ofintuited axioms if moral judgments meant the same as natural judgmentsof some kind. But he goes on to argue against this possibility, thatis, to argue that what Moore was to call naturalism isfalse.Nor is it odd that he should have anticipated Moore, since Sidgwick,who was their teacher, anticipated them both.

However this provides Russell with a sextet of constraints that cannotbe jointly met. For example, it is hard to see how conditions (2.1)and (2.3) can be realized without analyzing “good” or“ought” in terms of desire or some such psychologicalstate. Yet to do so violates conditions (2.5) and (2.6). Thus it comesas no surprise that the theories which Russell managed to come up withall fail to meet his constraints. The first (“X isgood” means “X will satisfy my desires”)meets conditions (2.1) (since what we want may not satisfy us once weget it). It also meets condition (2.4) (just about) since it ispossible to want things that will not, in fact, satisfy us. But itdoesn’t meet (2.5), since “X is good” reduces to astatement about afuture psychological state; andafortiori it fails to meet condition (2.6). The second theory(“X is good” means “I wantX for itsown sake”) fares far worse. It meets condition (2.1) but not(2.2), (2.3) but not (2.4), and fails (2.5) and (2.6) altogether. Asfor the third (“X is good” means “X iswhat I desire to desire”), it meets (2.1), struggles to meet(2.2), meets (2.3) and (2.4) but fails both (2.5) and (2.6).

Interestingly if Russell abandoned (2.1) and (2.2) and adopted anon-cognitive theory he would have been able to arrive at a theorywhich would have satisfied the last four constraints. Take Russell’sown brand of emotivism (“X is good” means“Would that everyone desiredX!”), which he did notdevelop until 1935 (RoE: 131–144/Religion andScience, ch. IX). This meets condition (2.3), since if I say thatX is good, and if am sincere in my ethical pronouncements, thenI desire that everyone (including myself) should desireX—a second order desire that is usually (but not always)accompanied by a first-order desire forX itself. Thus if I“believe” (note the scare quotes!) thatX is good,I am likely to pursue or promote it. The theory meets condition (2.4)too, since I can desire things, from chocolate to crack, that I desirenobody (including myself) to desire. It meets condition (2.5) as well,since good-judgments, so far from being statements of a psychologicalstate, are not statements at all but optatives. For much the samereason it meets condition (2.6): “X is good”, isnot equivalent to a proposition about what is, has been or will be,because it is not equivalent to any proposition whatsoever. But ofcourse the standard objection to non-cognitivist theories is preciselythat they violate conditions (2.1) and (2.2). They treat utteranceswhich are commonly regarded as true or false as lacking in truth-value(at least with respect to their primary meanings) and they immunizemoral judgments from error by depriving them of the possibility offalsehood.

Now I don’t say that Russell’s six constraints are correct (they can’tbe since they are inconsistent), nor that Russell’s meta-ethicaltheories are right (which at most one of them can be since they, too,are inconsistent). But I do say that the constraints areplausible and that it is a desideratum in a meta-ethicaltheory that it meet as many as possible. Russell demonstrates hisphilosophical acumen by making the attempt.

In 1897, Russell decided in effect, to sacrifice conditions (2.5)(2.6), and perhaps (2.2) to conditions (2.1), (2.3) and (2.4). In thatyear he read a paper to the Cambridge Apostles “Is Ethics aBranch of Empirical Psychology” in which he defined goodness asthat which we desire to desire. (RoE:71–78/Papers I: 100–104). Moral judgments (atleast judgments about goodness) reduce to “statements of apsychological state” since to say something is good is to saythat “we” desire to desire it, a statement well within thefrontiers of psychology (whether “we” refers to thecommunity at large or to the speaker whoever he or she may be). And ofcourse, if judgments about goodness reduce to “statements of apsychological state”, they clearly reduce to statements about“what is, has been or will be”, since whether“we” desire to desire something is determined by whateveris the case in “our” minds. Are moral judgmentsliable to error? Only in so far as we can be mistaken about what wedesire to desire, which is, perhaps, not very far. On the plus side,moral judgments will be true or false, and will have a conceptualconnection (albeit an iffy one) to our actions and passions. Assumingthat (at least sometimes) I actually desire what I desire to desire,the fact that (for me)X is good means that (at leastsometimes) I will have a desire to pursue or promoteX.Finally, it is perfectly possible to have bad or even evil desires,namely the desires I desirenot to desire, thus solving aproblem with Russell’s previous attempts at a desire-based ethic (seeRoE: ch. 9/Papers I: ch. 39). Thus the answerRussell provides to his own question (“Is Ethics a Branch ofEmpirical Psychology?”) is a clear, but reluctant,yes.

2.3. Why the Open Question Argument?

Now why should this theory pose a problem for Moore? Because thetime-honored Barren Tautology argument does not work against it.Remember, the conclusion of the Barren Tautology Argument is this:

(1.3′): For any naturalistic or metaphysical “X”,if (i) “X things are good”, provides areason for action (that is, a reason to promoteX-ness),then “good” does not mean“X”.

By substitution this gives us:

(1.3″): If (i′) “Things which we desire to desire aregood”, provides a reason for action (that is, a reason topromote what we desire to desire),then “good”does not mean “what we desire to desire”.

But the point of defining goodness in terms of what we desire todesire isnot to give us a reason to pursue or promote whatwe desire to desire—rather, it is supposed toexplainwhy something’s being goodgives us a reason (or at least, amotive), to pursue or promote it. Russell is notadvocatingthe pursuit of what we desire to desire: he is trying to provide ananalysis of “good” which helps to make sense of the factthat we tend to pursue and promote (what we believe to be) goodthings. (We do it because to be good justis to be somethingwhich we desire to desire, and hence something which, sometimes at anyrate, we will actually desire.) In other words, (i′)“Things which we desire to desire are good” ismeant to be a barren tautology—barren in terms ofpractical consequences, that is, though, hopefully, philosophicallyilluminating. It doesnot provide (and is not intended toprovide) a reason for action. But in that case, the antecedent of(1.3″)—that the belief that “Things which we desireto desire are good”, provides a reason for action—isfalse, so far as Russell’s analysis is concerned. Thus even if theconditional (1.3″) is true, it does not support theconsequent—that “good” does not mean “what wedesire to desire”. The Barren Tautology Argument is thereforeimpotent against the desire-to-desire theory.

Nor is this all. The Barren Tautology Argument fails against othertheories whose aim is to explicate the appeal of goodness rather thanto advocate the pursuit of some alleged good thing. For instance, if“good” means “what we are ideally inclined toapprove of”, then “What we are ideally inclined to approveof is good” will be a barren tautology. But since people likeHume, who propound such definitions, don’t intend them to be anythingelse, they are not compelled to the conclusion that such definitionsare false. Thusif naturalism was to be defeated (which wasclearly Moore’s project) anew argument had to be invented.And it is significant, I think, that Moore did not publishPrincipia Ethica until he had invented just such anargument.

The Open Question Argument proper does not terminate in a conditionalbut a categorical. It starts with the assumption that “AreX things good?” is a significant or open question for anynaturalistic or metaphysical predicate “X”. It isnot a tautology, barren or otherwise, thatwhat we desire todesire is good, and the proof of this is that competent speakerscan sensibly wonder whether or not it is true. Indeed, according toMoore, “any one can easily convince himself by inspection”that the predicate “good” “is positively differentfrom the notion of ‘desiring to desire’”. If wegrant Moore’s first implicit assumption—that if two expressionsare synonymous this is evident on reflection to every competentspeaker—we can derive the consequence that “good”does notmean “what we desire to desire”. And ifwe grant his second implicit assumption—that if two predicatesor property words have distinct meanings they name distinctproperties—then we can derive the conclusion that he reallywants, namely that goodness is notidentical with what wedesire to desire. And by parity or reasoning we can do the same forany naturalistic property whatsoever.

Now Moore’s twin assumptions have subsequently fallen upon hard times.The first leads straight to the Paradox of Analysis (see Langford1942), whilst the second would exclude synthetic identities such aswater is H₂O. Butif they were correct,the OQA would indeed dispose of the desire-to-desire theory along withkindred theories such as Hume’s. It is notable that David Lewis, whorevived Russell’s theory in 1989 (without realizing it was Russell’s),explicitly affirms what Moore implicitly denies—that there canbeunobvious analytic truths; that is, truthsnotevident to every competent speaker (see Lewis 1989 and Pigden 2007).But if Moore were correct and there were no such things, thennaturalistic analyses of the moral concepts such as Russell’s would bein big trouble. The BTA only works againstsome naturalisticanalyses of “good”, namely those that define“good” in terms of some property that the theorist wishesto promote. The OQA, if it works at all, works against them all. Itseems very likely that what prompted Moore to invent his philosophicalweapon of mass destruction was the desire-to-desire theory of BertrandRussell.

Then why didn’t Moore say so—or at least, why didn’t heattribute the desire-to-desire definition to its original inventor?Because Russell propounded his definition at a meeting of theApostles, a supposedly secret society. The rather priggish Moore tookthe code of secrecy very seriously and used to fuss about discussingthe doings of the Apostles by postcard in case they were read intransit. (The slightly less priggish Russell had to reassure him thatonly college porters were likely to read them and only initiates wouldunderstand.) To have attributed the desire-to-desire theory to anApostolic paper of Russell’s would have broken the code of silence (acode designed to promote the unfettered exchange of honestopinion).

There is an irony in this episode. The last page of the paper,“Is Ethics a Branch of Empirical Psychology?” is markedwith a query in Russell’s hand “Shall we spell {Good/good}with”, to which Moore replies “Good =good”—which looks like a succinct formulation of hisfamous no-definition definition of “good” (“If I amasked ‘How is good to be defined?’ my answer is that itcannot be defined and that is all I have to say about it.”PE: 58). If I am right, Russell’s desire-to-desire theoryposed a problem for Moore which it took him five years to solve. But,given the annotation, it seems that the debate on Russell’s paperbegan a process of conversion that led Russell himself to accept thedoctrines of Moore’sPrincipia Ethica.

3. Sidgwick’s Problem and the Rejection of Idealism

“We called him ‘old Sidg’ and regarded him as merelyout of date” (My Philosophical Development: 30). Sosaid Russell of his teacher, the great Victorian moral philosopher,Henry Sidgwick (though he later thought that he and his contemporaries“did not give [Sidgwick] nearly as much respect as hedeserved”). But though Russell may have regarded Sidgwick as anold fogey, he set the agenda for a lot of Russell’s work on ethics inthe 1890s. For Russell was much exercised by a problem that alsobothered Sidgwick: the Dualism of Practical Reason. (See Sidgwick1907: 496–516; see also Schulz 2004: ch. 4, in which it becomesabundantly clear how very preoccupied Sidgwick was with this problem.)According to Sidgwick, it is rational to do what is morally right (bymaximizing pleasurable consciousness on the part of all sentientbeings) and rational to do what is prudentially right (by maximizingpleasurable consciousness on the part of oneself), but, when the twocome into conflict, the one does not seem to be any more rational thanthe other. If God exists, then He can ensure that it will pay in thelong term to promote the public interest, by rewarding the righteousin the life to come. What is morally right will coincide with what isprudentially right, and that, consequently, is what Practical Reasonwill command. But if, as Sidgwick was reluctantly inclined to think,there is no God, what is morally right and what is prudentially rightwill sometimes come apart, and Practical Reason will speak with adivided voice. If it does not always pay to be good, then it is notclear that is more rational to be good than to be bad, a conclusionthat Sidgwick found deeply disturbing. The rather priggish youngRussell was bothered by the problem too (a solution, he said, would be“a real solid addition to my happiness”) because, likeSidgwick, he did not believe in God. But as a fashionable youngphilosopher of the 1890s he did believe in something that he thoughtwould do nearly as well, namely, the Absolute. For at this time,Russell, like most of his philosophical contemporaries in theEnglish-speaking world, was a neo-Hegelian or Absolute Idealist.Though we mayseem to be living in a material world and to bematerial boys and girls, this is an Appearance only. Reality, theAbsolute, is basically mental, a sort of timeless and harmonious groupmind of which our separate selves are (perhaps delusory) aspects. AsBradley put it,

the Absolute is one system, and … its contents are nothing butsentient experience. It will hence be a single and all-inclusiveexperience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord. For itcannot be less than appearance, and hence no feeling or thought, ofany kind, can fall outside its limits. (1930 [1893]: 129)

(We stress that it is hard to present this doctrine concisely withoutgross caricature.) But there was a crucial difference betweenMcTaggart and Bradley, the two leading idealists of Russell’s day.McTaggart believed in personal immortality and claimed the harmonythat already exists timelessly (so to speak) “must some daybecome explicit” (McTaggart 1996 [1893]: 210–211). Bradleydid not.

At first Russell was an adherent of McTaggart. This afforded him aneat solution to Sidgwick’s problem. The happy day when the harmonybecomes explicit can be promoted or retarded by human action. If Ibenefit myself at your expense not only am I doing down a self withwhom I am, in Reality, intimately linked—I am putting off theday when the harmony that Really Is becomes apparent. And since thisharmony will be supremely pleasurable I am harming myself into thebargain. Hence morality and self-interest coincide and PracticalReason is reunited with itself (Russell, 1893, “On theFoundations of Ethics”,RoE:37–40/Papers 1: 206–211). This illustrates thepoint made by a number of unkind critics, that in the late19^th century Absolute Idealism functioned as a sort ofmethadone program for high-minded Victorian intellectuals, providingthem with moral uplift as they struggled to get off the hard stuff ofofficial Christianity. (See Stove 1991: chs. 5 & 6; Allard 2003and, in more restrained language, Griffin 2003b: pp. 85–88.)Before long however, Russell moved over to Bradley’s camp and ceasedto believe that the timelessly existing harmony would become manifestin time. Nevertheless, since we are all aspects of the Absolute, asort of timeless super-self, there is essentially the same objectionto indulging my desires at your expense as there is to indulging oneof my own passions at the expense of others which are inconsistentwith it. I am hurting, if not myself, at least a larger whole of whichwe are both parts (Russell, 1894, “Cleopatra or MaggieTulliver”,RoE: 57–67/Papers I:92–8). But before long even this solution ceased to satisfy. Ina paper not published until 1957, “Seems Madam? Nay ItIs”, Russell argued (as he put it to Moore) that “for allpurposes that are notpurely intellectual, the world ofAppearance is the real world”. In particular, the hypothesisthat there is a timeless and harmonious Reality provides noconsolation for our present pains since it is a Reality that we neverget to experience. If “the world of daily life remains whollyunaffected by [Reality], and goes on its way just as if there were noworld of Reality at all”, and if this world of Reality is aworld that we not onlydo not butcannot experience(since experience is necessarily temporal), how can its allegedexistence afford us any consolation for what seems to be (andthereforeis) evil in the world of Appearance? (Russell,1897, “Seems, Madam? Nay, It Is”,RoE:79–86/Papers 1: 105–111/Why I am Not aChristian: 75–82).

Now this argument has an interesting corollary which Russell does notexplicitly draw. It may be that in Reality the pains I inflict on youaffect me—or at least a larger mind-like thing in which we bothparticipate—but if I neverexperience those effects,how can this give me a motive to do or forbear if my interestsconflict with yours? How can the fact that you and I are in Realityone (or at least part of one) give me a reason to look out for you, ifthis oneness is something I never experience? If Absolute Idealism canprovide no consolation for life’s disasters—which is whatRussell is explicitly arguing—then it seems that it cannotsupply me with a reason not to visit those disasters on you, if doingso is likely to benefit me. It may be that I suffer in a metaphysicalsort of way when I profit at your expence, but if this suffering issomething I neverfeel (since I am effectively confined tothe world of Appearance) why should this bother me? Thus the Dualismof Practical Reason reasserts itself. Sometimes what is morally rightis at odds with what is prudentially right and when it is, there seemsno reason to prefer the one to the other.

Whether Russell realized this is not entirely clear. What is clear isthat “Seems, Madam? Nay, It Is” marks the beginning of theend for Russell’s Absolute Idealism. Once he realized that

for all purposes that are notpurely intellectual [includingperhaps the purpose of providing moral uplift] the world of Appearanceis the real world,

Russell came to feel that the world of Reality was no use for purelyintellectual purposes either and soon resolved to do without it. A big“R” Reality, that could neither console us for life’stroubles nor reconcile Duty and Interest, was a big “R”Reality that might as well not exist. The methadone of AbsoluteIdealism having failed, Russell was forced to accept appearances atface value.

But what about the problem of the Dualism of Practical Reason? Inlater life, Russell ceased to worry about it perhaps because herealized that it is a problem that cannot be resolved. The Cosmos ofDuty really is a Chaos (as Sidgwick rather colorfully put it). Dutyand Interestcan come into conflict, and when they do, thereis no decisive reason for preferring the one to the other. All you cando is to try to instill moral and altruistic motivations, which iswhat Russell tried to do with his children. But when they askedwhy they should care about other people (as his daughter Katedefiantly did) his response was rather lame.

Kate:
“I don’t want to! Why should I?”
Russell:
“Because more people will be happier if you do than if youdon’t.”
Kate:
“So what? I don’t care about other people.”
Russell:
“You should.”
Kate:
“But why?”
Russell:
“Because more people will be happier if you do than if youdon’t.” (RoE: 16; Tait 1975: 185)

This isn’t much of an answer, but since the Cosmos of Duty really is aChaos, it was perhaps the best that Russell could do.

4. Russell versus Moore: Two Kinds of Consequentialism

Although Russell became a convert to the doctrines ofPrincipiaEthica, he disagreed with Moore on two important points. Russell,like Moore was what is nowadays known as a consequentialist. Hebelieved that the rightness or otherwise of an act is “in someway, dependent on consequences”. But for the young Moore, it is“demonstrably certain” (!) that “I am morally boundto perform this action” isidentical [that issynonymous] with the assertion “This action will produce thegreatest amount of possible good in the Universe” (PE:ch. 5, §89). Thus it isanalytic that the right thing todo is the action that will,actually produce the bestconsequences. But in Russell’s view this claim is neither analytic nortrue. Moore’s own Open Question Argument can be deployed to prove thatit is not analytic, and a little critical reflection reveals that itis not true.

It is held [by Moore] that what we ought to do is that action, amongall that are possible, which will produce the best results on thewhole; and this is regarded as constituting a definition ofought. I hold that this is not a definition, but asignificant proposition, and in fact a false one. (RoE:101/Papers 4: 573)

It is a “significant” or non-analytic proposition becausea competent speaker can believe thatX is the act that willproduce the best consequences without believing that she ought to doit. If the two propositions “X is the act available to methat will produce the best consequences” and “I ought todoX” werereally synonymous, then a competentspeaker could not believe the one whilst remaining in doubt about theother. Since this is perfectly possible (as is shown by the fact that“Ought I to do what will have the best results?” is anobstinately open question for competent speakers of English) the twoclaims are not synonymous. (W.D. Ross developed a similar line ofargument inThe Right and the Good (1930) but it was Russellwho convinced Moore that he was wrong. See Moore 1942: 558).

But the fact that these claims are not synonymous does not show thatit isfalse thatI ought to do that act which will, infact, produce the best consequences. The latter claim could besynthetic (or, as Russell would have it, “significant”)but true. Why does Russell think it false? Russell raises theadhominem objection that Moore’s thesis is flatly inconsistent withthe moral conservatism that he goes on to embrace. According to Moore,although “there are cases where [an established moral] ruleshould be broken”, since “in some cases the neglect of anestablished moral rule will be the best course of actionpossible”, nevertheless, “we can never know what thosecases are, and ought, therefore, never to break it”(PE: §99). “The individual, therefore, can beconfidently recommendedalways to conform to rules which aregenerally useful and generally practiced.” But if we ought toperform the best action possible, what this implies is that there aresome cases (though we can never know which) where we ought to do whatit is not the case that we ought to do. Moore could avoid thiscontradiction by adopting the view that what we ought to do is thataction whichwe have reason to believe will produce the bestconsequences. As Russell himself put it, Moore’s moral conservatism“implies that we ought to do what we have reason tothink will have the best results, rather than what reallywill have the best results” [my italics]—since,in any given instance, we may have reason tothink that theconventionally right act will have the best consequences even thoughwe know that this won’t always be the case.

But Russell did not reject Moore’s brand of consequentialism becauseit was inconsistent with his moral conservatism, since healso rejected Moore’s moral conservatism. As he informedMoore by letter, he regarded his views on Practical Ethics as“unduly Conservative and anti-reforming”. However, anybodywho thinks that there aresome actions which we ought to doeven though, as a matter of fact they won’t have the best consequencesmust, reject Moore’s view. And it is precisely because he believesthis that Russell rejects Moore’s brand of consequentialism.“Some people”, says Russell, “whom I refrain fromnaming, might with advantage to the world have been strangled ininfancy; but we cannot blame the good women who brought them up forhaving omitted this precaution.” So if Stalin’s mother (say) didthe right thing innot strangling him at birth, then itfollows that the right thing to do is not always the act with the bestactual consequences. Russell admits that his view is not withoutparadox, since if it sometimes right to do what is actuallydisastrous, it follows that it can sometimes be “a pity [that] aman did his duty”, a thesis which Moore regards as “acontradiction in terms”. But paradoxical as this may seem, it isonly a contradiction on the assumption that “the rightaction” simplymeans “the action with the bestactual consequences”, an assumption which Moore’s own OpenQuestion Argument proves to be false. Moore’s view, by contrast, iscontradictory however “right” and “ought” areto be defined, since it implies that we sometimes ought to performacts which (since they are not optimific) it is not the case that weought to perform.

Russell’s criticisms can be summed up as follows:

It is false that “I am morally bound/I ought/it is right forme to perform this action” issynonymous with theassertion “This action will produce the greatest amount ofpossible good in the Universe”, since the Open Question Argumentcan be deployedmutatis mutandis to prove otherwise.
Moore subscribes to three theses that are flat-out contradictory:
1. We ought to perform those acts that will in fact produce the bestconsequences.
2. Following established rules does not always result in acts thatproduce the best consequences.
3. We ought to follow the established rules.
These three theses jointly imply that we sometimes ought to do thingsthat it is not the case that we ought to do. Russell gently points outthis contradiction and suggests, in effect, that Moore could resolveit by modifying (1) to (1′).
1′.
We ought to perform those acts which it is reasonable tobelieve will produce the best consequences.
The “good women” who brought up the likes of Hitlerand Stalin cannot be blamed for not strangling them in infancy. Thissuggests that it was right of them to refrain even though the actualconsequences of their acts of forbearance turned out to be horrendous.Thus the right thing to do is not that act which willactually produce the best consequences but that act which itisreasonable to believe will produce the bestconsequences.

Moore accepted argument A (see his “Reply to My Critics”:558), and in his later bookEthics (1912) he treatsconsequentialism as a synthetic thesis.

It is, I think, quite plain that the meaning of the two words[“expedience” and “duty”] isnot thesame; for if it were, then it would be a mere tautology to say that itis always our duty to do what will have the best possibleconsequences. Our theory does not, therefore, do away with thedistinction between themeaning of the two words“duty” and “expediency”; it only implies thatboth will always apply to the same actions. (Ethics: 89)

He also seems to have accepted Russell’sad hominem argumentB—that, given the fairly obvious fact that doing the done thingdoes not always produce the best results, his actualist brand ofconsequentialism is inconsistent with his moral conservatism. However,he did not resolve the problem by modifying thesis (1) as Russell, ineffect, recommended—instead he resolved it by dropping thesis(3). InPrincipia, moral conservatism had been“confidently recommended” to the conscientious“individual”. By the time Moore came to writeEthics in 1912 it had simply disappeared, leaving the puzzled“individual” bereft of practical guidance. What ought theindividual to do, when, as is usually the case, she cannot determine,which of the available acts will have the best total consequences?Moore does not say, thereby sacrificing helpfulness to theoreticalconsistency.

5. Politics, Consequentialism and the Need for Skepticism

Dry and abstract as these disputes may seem, they are not devoid ofpractical import. A common complaint against consequentialism is thatit encourages the consequentialist to do evil that good may come. Ifthe goods to be achieved or the evils to be averted are sufficientlylarge, it may be not only permissible butobligatory totorture prisoners, execute hostages or to massacre civilians—solong as there is no other, less costly, way to achieve the goods oravert the evils. This is not only objectionable in itself—itencourages ruthless types to commit horrors in the here and now forthe sake of some imagined utopia, whilst pretending to themselves andothers that they are actuated by the highest motives. Becauseinprinciple consequentialism licenses doing evil that good maycome,in practice it encourages fanatics to do evil even whenthe good to come is highly unlikely. In his “Newly DiscoveredMaxims of la Rochefoucauld”, Russell remarks that “thepurpose of morality is to allow people to inflict suffering withoutcompunction” (Fact and Fiction: 184). Andconsequentialist moralities have enabled some of their devotees toinflict a great deal of suffering, not only without compunction, butoften with an insufferable air of moral smugness.

By adoptingexpected utility as the criterion of right actionRussell goes some way towards meeting these objections. In practicewhen people propose to perpetrate horrors for the sake of some greatergood, the horrors are usually certain and the greater good is highlyspeculative. In weighing up the options, the good to be achieved bysome tough course of action must be multiplied by the probability ofachieving it, which is always a fraction of one, and often a rathersmall fraction at that. So although doing evil that good may come isnot excludedin principle, the expected utility theorist isfar less likely to do it in practice—at least if he or she isintellectually honest. The classless society (let us suppose) would bea very good thing, but I am probably not justified in shooting thehostages to bring it about. For I can be certain that if I shoot them,the hostages will be dead, whereas the probability that shooting themwill bring about the classless society is very low. Moreover there islikely to be an as-good-or-better chance that I can bring about theclassless societywithout shooting the hostages. Thus even ifthe classless society would be supremely good, the expected utilitytheorist will not be justified in shooting the hostages to bring itabout. The expected utility theorist may be obliged to do evil thatgood may come, but only if the good is large, highly likely given theevil, and most unlikelywithout the evil. These conditionsare seldom met.

Thus Russell could use the criterion ofexpected utilityagainst warmongers and enthusiasts for revolutionary violence whoemployed utilitarian patterns of reasoning to inflict sufferingwithout compunction. It was (for example) one of his chief weapons inhis polemics against the Bolsheviks during the 1920s. As he wrote in areview of Bukharin’sHistorical Materialism,

we do not know enough about the laws of social phenomena to be able topredict the future with any certainty, even in its broadest outlines… For this reason, it is unwise to adopt any policy involvinggreat immediate suffering for the sake of even a great gain in thedistant future, because the gain may never be realized (RoE:203/Papers 9: 371).

Thus despite the desirability of socialism (in Russell’s eyes at anyrate) the Bolshevik program had to be rejectedfor utilitarian orconsequentialist reasons. (See alsoThe Practice and Theoryof Bolshevism, particularly Part II. ch.iv.) The Bolshevik“habit of militant certainty about doubtful matters”(Practice and Theory: xi) was not only irrational, butdangerous, since it led to pointless suffering. Hence“The Need for Political Skepticism”, the title of one ofRussell’s essays, and a major theme in his moral and political writing(Sceptical Essays: ch. 11). Dogmatism leads to cruelty sinceit encourages people to overestimate the likelihood that theirobjectives will be realized and hence to exaggerate the expectedutility of persecuting policies. Scepticism (or“fallibilism” as we would nowadays tend to say) is theantidote. Hence the maxim that Russell puts into the mouth of laRochefoucauld: “It does not matter what you believe, so long asyou don’t altogether believe it” (Fact and Fiction:185).

6. Consequentialism, Emotivism and Moral Reform

The criterion of expected utility had another advantage for Russell.It allowed him to recommend a less “conservative andanti-reforming” version of Moore’s principle that “theindividual can be confidently recommended … to conform to ruleswhich are generally useful and generally practiced.” Russell wasan act-consequentialist rather than a rule-consequentialist. An act isright if the expected consequences of performing it are as good orbetter than any other. It is not right because it conforms to somerule, even a rule that it is generally useful to obey. Nevertheless,rules are necessary because we do not have world enough and time tocalculate the consequences of every act.

I think that, speaking philosophically, all acts ought to be judged bytheir effects; but as this is difficult and uncertain and takes time,it is desirable, in practice, that some kinds of acts should becondemned and others praised without waiting to investigateconsequences. I should say, therefore, with the utilitarians, that theright act, in any given circumstances, is that which, on the data,will probably produce the greatest balance of good over evil of allthe acts that are possible; but that the performance of such acts maybe promoted by the existence of a moral code. (RoE:216/Power: 168)

Thus Russell believed that it is generally right to obey“generally useful” rules, though these are “rules ofthumb” and there may be circumstances in which it is right (thatisobligatory) to break them.

Even the best moral rules, however, will havesomeexceptions, since no class of actionsalways has bad [orgood!] results. (RoE: 137/Religion and Science:227–8)

But though Russell thought it is generally right to obey generallyuseful rules, he also thought that many of the rules that are“generally practiced” arenot “generallyuseful”. Sometimes they derive from bygone superstitions andsometimes they foster the interests of the powerful at other peoplesexpense.

Primitive ethics …select certain modes of behavior for censure[or praise] for reasons which are lost in anthropological obscurity.(Education and the Social Order: 23)

However,

one of the purposes—usually in large part unconscious—of atraditional morality is to make the existing social system work. Itachieves this purpose, when it is successful, both more cheaply andmore effectively than a police force does … The most obviousexample … is the inculcation of obedience. It is (or ratherwas) the duty of children to submit to parents, wives to husbands,servants to masters, subjects to princes, and (in religious matters)laymen to priests. (RoE: 207/Power: 157)

Thus Russell was inclined to agree with Plato’s Thrasymachus, at leastto the extent that whatpasses for justice isoften[to] the advantage of the stronger [that is the ruling caste, class orgender]. Russell was opposed both to power-moralities (codes designedto bolster the interests of exploitative elites) and to the senselessand often pernicious remnants of defunct superstitions.

An ethic not derived from superstition must decide first upon the kindof social effects which it desires to achieve and the social effectswhich it desires to avoid. It must then decide, as far as knowledgepermits, what acts will promote the desired consequences: these actsit will praise, while those acts having a contrary tendency it willcondemn. (Education and the Social Order: 73)

It was Russell’s mission as a practical moralist, a social reformerand a popular sage to promote a humane and non-superstitious ethic.This was partly a matter of preaching and partly a matter of argument:preaching as regards ends and argument as regards means.

In the latter, and more preachy, part of his career, it was Russell’sdominant view that judgments about what things are good or bad as endsdo not have a truth-value. To say that it is a good thing “thatthe individual, like Leibniz’s monads should mirror the world”(Education and the Social Order: 10) is to say something like“Would that everyone desired that the individual, like one ofLeibniz’s monads, should mirror the world!” Since this isneither true nor false, it cannot be rationally argued for. The bestwe can do is to remove objections and present the end in a favorablelight. Russell was perfectly clear about this.

Why [should the individual mirror the world]? I cannot say why, exceptthat knowledge and comprehensiveness appear to me glorious attributesin virtue of which I prefer Newton to an oyster. The man who holdsconcentrated within his own mind, as within acamera obscura,the depths of space, the evolution of the sun and its planets, thegeological ages of the earth, and the brief history of humanity,appears to me to be doing what is distinctively human and what addsmost to the diversified spectacle of nature.

This is eloquent stuff (and too me, at least, convincing) but ithardly constitutes an argument. And this Russell freely admitted.

Ultimate values are not matters as to which argument is possible. If aman maintains that misery is desirable and that it would be a goodthing if everybody always had a violent toothache, we may disagreewith him, and we may laugh at him if we catch him going to thedentist, but we cannot prove that he is mistaken as we could if hesaid that iron is lighter than water … As to ultimate values,men may agree or disagree, they may fight with guns or with ballotpapers but they cannot reason logically. (Education and the SocialOrder: 136)

This is rather disconcerting, especially if we replace the comicexamples that Russell employs inEducation and the SocialOrder (he imagines a prophet “who advance[s] the theorythat happiness should be confined to those whose first names beginwith Z”) with the real-life moral elitists and chauvinists thathe discusses in other works of the 1930s and 1940s. Nietzsche and theNazis really did believe that the sufferings of some people were notsignificant evils (herd-men in the case of Nietzsche, Jews, Slavs andGypsies in the case of the Nazis) and it was Russell’s thesis that norational argument could be advanced against them.

Let us consider two theories as to the good. One says, likeChristianity, Kant, and democracy: whatever the good may be, any oneman’s enjoyment of it has the same value as any other man’s. The othersays: there is a certain sub-class of mankind—white men,Germans, gentiles, or what not—whose good or evil alone countsin an estimation of ends; other men are only to be considered as means… When [irrelevant] arguments are swept away, there remains, sofar as I can see, nothing to be said except for each party to expressmoral disapproval of the other. Those who reject this conclusionadvance no argument against it except that it is unpleasant.(“Reply to Criticisms”RoE: 146–147/Papers11: 48–49)

But unpleasant as this conclusion may be, it does not imply that thosewith a humane and egalitarian conception of the good should give uppreaching on its behalf. On the contrary, such preaching becomesimperative, especially for those with rhetorical gifts. Which is whyRussell devoted so much time and effort to this activity.

According to me, the person who judges thatA is good iswishing others to feel certain desires. He will therefore, if nothindered by other activities, try to rouse these desires in otherpeople if he thinks he knows how to do so. This is the purpose ofpreaching, and it was my purpose in the various books in which I haveexpressed ethical opinions. The art of presenting one’s desirespersuasively is totally different from that of logical demonstration,but it is equally legitimate. (“Reply to Criticisms”RoE: 149/Papers 11: 51)

Persuasion as regards ends may be a non-rational process, but thatdoes not mean that it is irrational, let alonewrong, toengage in it.

When it comes to means however, rational argument becomes a genuinepossibility. It might seem otherwise since judgments about what isright or what ought to be done—which for Russell are essentiallyconcerned with means—would appear to be as incapable of truth asjudgments about what is good and bad. In Russell’s view, “therightact, in any given circumstances, is that which, on thedata, will probably produce the greatest balance of good overevil” and the rightrule orpolicy is likewisethe one that can be expected to produce the best effects. That is,“X is right” isassertible (roughly, asensible thing to say) whenX can be expected to lead to thebest results. But if “Y is good”, is really in theoptative mood, amounting to the exclamation “Would that everyonedesiredY!”, then “X is right” wouldappear to be optative too, since it comes down to something like“X leads to more of what [would that everyonedesired!]”. Here, the clause in square brackets, which isobviously in the optative mood, infects the entire sentence with itsoptative character. “X leads to more of what [would thateveryone desired!]”, in so far as it can be made sense of, doesnot seem to be the kind of thing that could be true or false.

However, Russell believed that judgments about what is right or whatought to be donecan be given an analysis which gives them asort of ersatz objectivity and hence the possibility of truth. IfDmitri has a reasonably determinate conception of the good, that is, acoherent set of opinions about which things are good and which bad,then although Dmitri’s opinionsthemselves are neither truenor false—since, despite appearances they are not reallyopinions at all but optative expressions of Dmitri’s desires—itcan nevertheless be true or false thatX is good in Dmitri’sopinion, that is, good-according-to-Dmitri. “Oh to be inEngland, now that April’s here!” is neither true nor false, butif I say it sincerely, it will in fact be true that I desire to be inEngland. Similarly, if Dmitri says that “Bungy-jumping isgood” what he says won’t be true, since really it is in theoptative mood, but if he says it sincerely, it will be true thatBungy-jumping is good-in-Dmitri’s-opinion, orgood-according-to-Dmitri. Thus although there are no facts of thematter about which things are good or bad, thereare facts ofthe matter about which things arebelieved by this or thatperson to be good or bad. Furthermore—and this is the crucialpoint—there are facts of the matter about whether a given actionor a given policy is likely to promote what somebody-or-otherbelieves to be good. Since Hitler believed that victory overBritain would be good, there was a fact of the matter about whetherbombing London as opposed to bombing the RAF’s airfields would belikely bring about the states of affairs that he desired. As it turnedout, the policy he pursued did not produce results that werebest-according-to-Hitler. Hence if Hitler had adopted aconsequentialist reading of “ought”, and had indexed it tohis own requirements, “I ought to bomb London” (as said byHitler) would have beenfalse. And its truth or its falsehoodwould have been a factually arguable question.

Now, suppose wedefine the right act with respect toB, not as “that which, on the data, will probably producethe greatest balance of good over evil” but as “thatwhich, on the data, will probably produce the greatest balance of whatB believes to be good over whatB believes to beevil”. The right rule of policy with respect toB willcorrespondingly be defined as the rule or policy that will probably,in the appropriate circumstances, produce the greatest balance of whatB believes to be good over whatB believes to beevil. Then, so long asB has a reasonably coherent set ofideals, the claim that a given act or policy is right or wrong withrespect toB will usually have a determinate truth-value.Claims of the form “X is right wrt toB”will be either true or false, so long as the person (or group ofpersons) designated byB has a clear and consistent set ofvalues. There will thus be a fact of the matter about whetherXis right wrt toB which can be the subject of rational enquiry.And if “B” stands in forus (whoever“we” may be) and ifwe share a reasonablycoherent set of ideals, then there will be a fact of the matter aboutwhetherX is right or wrong with respect to our ideals. Thus ifthere is agreement with respect to ideals and if we adopt aconsequentialist conception of rightness, indexed, not to whatis good, but to what webelieve to be good, then wecan have a rational debate—maybe even a scientificenquiry—about the rights and wrongs of actions, rules orpolicies, or at least about their rightness or wrongness with respectto us.

The framing of moral rules, so long as the ultimate Good is supposedknown, [Russell should have said ‘supposed agreed’] is amatter for science. For example: should capital punishment beinflicted for theft, or only for murder, or not at all? JeremyBentham, who considered pleasure to be the Good, devoted himself toworking out what criminal code would most promote pleasure, andconcluded that it ought to be much less severe than that prevailing inhis day. All this, except the proposition that pleasure is the Good,comes within the sphere of science. (RoE:137–138/Religion and Science: 228–229)

Once the ends have been agreed, we can have a rational debate aboutthe code most likely to promote those ends. In some cases, suchquestions can be resolved by scientific enquiry, or at any rate bystatistics. But (with one or two exceptions) rational argument is onlyreally possible when we take the ends as read and confine ourattention to the means.

We are now in a position to understand Russell’s general strategy as apolemicist for moral reform and its relation to his emotivistmeta-ethic.

He dismisses supposed duties that cannot be given aconsequentialist justification as the products of bygone superstitionsor, in some cases, the ideological props to predatory elites.
He uses non-rational methods to preach the goodness of someends—a life inspired by love and guided by knowledge, mirroringthe cosmos like one of Leibniz’s monads etc.—and the evil ofothers. This is essentially a process of getting his readers to sharehis desires.
He then argues for his revised code of conduct as likely topromote those ends. Here there can be truth and falsehood andconsequently rational argument, but only because “ought”and “right” have been given a consequentialist reading andindexed to the ends that Russell desires to promote.

7. Russell’s Ideal: the Influence of Spinoza

Before going on to discuss Russell’s meta-ethic in more detail, it isworth pausing for a moment to consider his ideal. For although Russellclaimed to make his “practical moral judgments” on a“roughly hedonistic basis” (RoE:165–6/Papers 11: 311), he was far from being an out-andout hedonist. He was, as we have seen, a utilitarian of sorts, whobelieved that the right thing to do is the action that, on theavailable evidence, seems likely to produce the best balance of goodover evil consequences. Since we cannot perform the requisitecalculations in every case, we need codes of conduct, though theseshould be taken with a pinch of salt and reassessed from time to timein the light of new information. This is sensible and humane, butperhaps a little pedestrian. However Russell’s conception of thegood—the end to be promoted—is a bit more interesting. Tobegin with, although he valued human happiness, he did not see this incrudely hedonistic terms. However pleasurable the life of a pig maybe, Russell would not have preferred the life of a pig to that of ahuman being. Russell also valuedpassion and a life whichallowed for spontaneous (but “creative”) impulses. Theseviews distinguish him from the classical utilitarians who he otherwiseadmired. However, the really distinctive features of Russell’s ethicwere derived from Spinoza (1632–1677), who remained aphilosophical hero even though Russell rejected most of hismetaphysics as set out (rather confusingly) in hisEthics of1677. There was something about Spinoza’s attitude to life thatRussell regarded as profoundly right. Kenneth Blackwell calls this“the ethic of impersonal self-enlargement” (Blackwell1985: 17). According to this ideal, the best life is lived inawareness of the Other. This includes other selves (since Russellconsidered a purely selfish life unfulfilling, and a life withouthistory—which involvesknowledge of otherselves—drab) but also thewholly other—thenon-human universe of large impersonal forces, the wind, the sea, themountains and the stars and even (if they exist) the entities ofmathematics. He felt that the self is enlarged by the contemplation ofthe not-self and that the person whose concerns are limited to theirown states of mind has confined themself within a spiritual prison. Bythe same token, a philosophy that reduces reality to an emanationeither of the self or of the collective reduces the self by denying itaccess to the Other. All this may sound unduly elevated, but inpractice what this means is that the good person takes an interest inother people (including people who may not be connected with them) andin the world at large. Russell sometimes talks about contemplation inthis connection, but this should not be understood as a purely passiveprocess. The contemplative person does not just sit and stare (thoughRussell was not averse to this kind of contemplation) but activelyseeks to know the Other through science, history and other forms ofenquiry. Thus Russell’s distaste for idealism and for anti-realist andinstrumentalist philosophies of science is connected with his ideal ofimpersonal self-enlargement. Of course Russell does not attempt toderive an Is (such as the claim that idealism or pragmatismis false) from an Ought (such as the claim that weought to enlarge the Self through contemplation of the Other,something that would be difficult if either of these philosophies werecorrect). But he does suggest that there is something morally suspect,as well as wrong-headed, about attempts to reduce the vast forces ofnature to human experience or to useful predictive devices enablinghuman beings to achieve their puny ends. For Russell the good life isa life that looks outward, which is one reason for his dislike ofphilosophies that diminish what is outside ourselves into somethingnot worth looking at. (SeeRoE: 223–235 and, moregenerally,The Conquest of Happiness, 1930.)

8. Objections to Emotivism and Relativism

A we have seen, Russell’s meta-ethic was closely connected to hisprogram of moral reform. The idea was to advocate a set of humane andegalitarian ends, using non-rational methods of persuasion, and thento argue on the basis of psychology, social science, history andcommon sense that that these ends would be best achieved if, on thewhole, people obeyed a reformed moral code. Judgments that this orthat is good or bad were to be construed as disguised optatives(“Would that everyone desiredX!” and “Wouldthat everyone desired notY!” respectively).“Ought” and “right” were to be given aconsequentialist reading and indexed to the ends that Russell hopedhis audience could be persuaded to share. Thus Russell combined anemotivist analysis of “good” and “bad” with aconsequentialist/relativist reading of “ought” and“right”. But was he right to do so?

Although Russell and Santayana were toying with emotivism in the1910s, it was not until the 1930s that the theory really hit thephilosophical headlines. Since then it has taken a beating, andalthough it still finds favor with the semi-philosophical public, itis no longer widely believed by professional philosophers. Relativismlikewise is generally regarded as a down-list option, though, as withemotivism, there are one or two distinguished philosophers who areprepared to stick up for it. Does Russell’s meta-ethic stand upagainst the objections that have laid emotivism and relativismlow?

8.1 The Vicious Circle Problem

According to Stevenson and Ayer the function of moral judgments is toexpress approval and disapproval. But to approve ofX is tothink or feel thatX is good or right: to disapprove is tothink or feel that it is bad or wrong. Thus the emotivist analysis ofthe moral terms is viciously circular. (Russell himself had developeda similar line of argument against theories which identify rightnesswith a tendency to arouse approval in his “The Elements ofEthics” (1912).)

This objection leaves Russell untouched. To approve ofX may beto think or feel thatX is good, but for Russell to thinkX good is not to approve of it, but to desire that everyoneshould desireX. Implausible as this may be, there is nocircle, vicious or otherwise.

8.2 The Problem of the Disappearing Dispute

If judgments about what is good or bad in itself merely expressapproval and disapproval, then “X is good” said byme and “X is bad” said by you do not contradictone another. After all, I am merely expressing my feelings whilst youare expressing yours, and there is nothing remotely inconsistent aboutthe supposition thatX arouses approval in me and disapprovalin you. But plainly when I callX good and you call it bad weare contradicting one other. Hence emotivism, which seems toimply otherwise, is false.

Again, Russell’s brand of emotivism is immune to this objection.According to Russell, “X is good” and“X is bad” are really in the optative mood despitetheir indicative appearances. As such, they express desires or wishes,and desires and wishes can, in a sense, be inconsistent with oneother, namely when they are not (in Russell’s phrase)“compossible”, that is, when they cannot both be realized.“Would that I had all the ice-cream!” said by me and“Would thatI had all the ice-cream!” said by youexpress contradictory desires since we cannot both have all theice-cream. As such, the two optatives contradict each other, notbecause theydescribe incompatiblefacts but becausetheyprescribe incompatiblestates of affairs.Similarly “X is good” said by me and“X is bad” said by you express contradictorydesires and hence contradict each other. For “X isgood” means “Would that everybody desiredX!”and “X is bad” means “Would that everybodydesired that not-X!”, and the desires expressed by thesetwo optatives are not compossible, or at least, are only compossibleon the condition that we all have inconsistent desires (both forX and for not-X).

But the situation is a little different when we come to judgmentsabout what isright or whatought to be done. As wehave seen, Russell is inclined to give such judgments aconsequentialist reading and then to index them to some presumed setof projects. It is thereforetrue with respect to, say,Russell and myself that we ought to abolish the Death Penalty, sinceabolishing the Death Penalty is conducive to the ends that we happento favor. But it is equally true with respect to some hardcoreretributivist that weought not to abolish the Death penalty,since it isnot conducive to the eye-for-an-eye ends thatshe considers good. And this seems to be a problem. For whenRussell and I say weought to abolish the Death Penalty andthe retributivist says we that weought not, it seems that weare contradicting each other. Yet if the two “oughts” areindexed to different visions of the good, it seems they are quitecompatible. What Russell and I are saying is that abolishing the DeathPenalty can be rationally expected to maximize the thingsweconsider good and to minimize the things thatwe considerevil. What the retributivist is saying (if she is a consequentialist)is thatnot abolishing the Death Penalty can be rationallyexpected to maximize the thingsshe considers good (whichinclude retributive punishment) and to minimize the thingsshe considers evil (such as murderers not getting their justdeserts). And these claims can both be true. Hence Russell’s theorybrings about a spurious appearance of semantic harmony where in factthere is conflict and contradiction. His theory suggests that thefriends and foes of the Death Penalty arenot contradictingeach other, when in fact it is evident that they are. Genuinedisagreement would only be possible between those who agreed about theends but disagreed about the means. Thus if (in 1940) Hitler claimedthat the Luftwaffe ought to bomb London rather than the RAF airfieldswhilst Goering claimed that the Luftwaffe ought to bomb the RAFairfields rather than bombing London, the two would be incontradiction since their ends were presumably the same. But theirviews would be quite compatible with those of a pacifist who claimedthat nobody ought ever to bomb anything!

Russell himself had raised much the same objection against relativistdefinitions of “good” and “bad” in 1912:

If in asserting thatA is good,X meant merely to assertthatA had a certain relation to himself such as pleasing histaste in some way [or being conducive his ends] andY, insaying thatA is not good, meant merely to deny thatAhad a like relation to himself; then there would be no subject ofdebate between them. (Philosophical Essays:20–21/Papers 6: 222)

But, as Russell plainly believes,there is a subject ofdebate between them, which means that relativistic readings of“good” and “bad” must (at least sometimes) bewrong. A similar problem afflicts his own subsequent analyses of“ought” and “right”. Since their“oughts” are indexed to different ends, it seems that whenthe Nazi says “We ought to bomb London” and the pacifistsays “Nobody ever ought to bomb anything” they are notcontradicting one another, though it is as clear as daylight that theyare.

Russell might reply that his suggestion is not intended as anaccount of what “right”, “wrong” and“ought”actually mean, but asproposalabout what theyought to mean. His theory is not intended asadescription of our current semantic slum, but as a schemefor linguisticreform. It may be thatat present wetake those whose “oughts” are indexed to different ends tobe contradicting one other but Russell is hoping to change all that.Given current usage, when Hitler says “We ought to bombLondon” and the pacifist says “Nobody ever ought to bombanything”, the two claims contradict each other, but onceRussell’s reform is has been implemented this disagreeable disputewill be smoothed into non-existence.

The problem with this is that Russell’s “proposal” is nota very attractive one. One of the things wewant to do withmoral language is express our disagreements. Russell’s new-fangled“ought” would be unable fulfill one of the most importantlinguistic functions of the old-fashioned “ought”, namelyto express that fact that people with different ends disagree (as wewould now put it) onwhat ought to be done. In deprivingpeople with different ends of the means to contradict each otherRussell would be doing them a disservice. Moreover, Russell would beleft with a peculiarly ramshackle meta-ethic. He would have adescriptive account of what “good” and “bad”do mean and a prescriptivesuggestion about theabout what “right”, “wrong” and“ought”ought to mean. There is no actualinconsistency in this but it does seem to be a bit anomalous. If thename of the game is toanalyze the moral concepts, then itseems Russell’s analysis of “right” and“ought” is wrong. But if the name of the game is toreform the moral concepts, then why not subject“good” and “bad” to the same treatment, givingthem the kind objectivity that Russell would evidently have preferredthem to have?

8.3 “Ought” and the Open Question Argument

Another problem is that the later Russell’s account of“ought”-judgments runs foul of Moore’s Open QuestionArgument (as his earlier self could have told him). To say thatA ought to doX (with respect toB) is to saythat on the available evidenceA’s doingX would be mostlikely to maximize what some contextually specified person or groupB takes to be good and to minimize whatB takes tobe evil. But, construed as an account of what we actually mean, thisis obviously incorrect. As Russell himself had nearly put it thirtyyears earlier:

It is held that what we ought to do is that action, among all that arepossible, which [is likely on the available evidence] to produce thebest results on the whole [according to some contextually specifiedstandard of goodness]; and this is regarded as constituting adefinition ofought. I hold that this is not a definition,but a significant proposition … It might be proved, in thecourse of moral exhortation, that such and such an action [is likelyon the available evidence to] have the best results [according to somecontextually specified standard of goodness]; and yet the personexhorted might inquire why he should perform the action. The exhorterwould have to reply: “Because you ought to do what [is likelyto] have the best results [according to some contextually specifiedstandard of goodness].” And this reply distinctly addssomething. The same arguments by which good was shown to beindefinable can be repeated here,mutatis mutandis, to showthe indefinability of ought. (RoE: 101/Papers 4:573, somewhat modified)

Thus Russell is making exactly the same mistake that he accused Mooreof making in 1904! (See above, §4).

Again Russell might reply that he is not attempting to describe how weactually use “ought” but making a suggestionabout “ought” should be used. But if we are to ring outthe old “ought” and ring in the new, we need to be assuredthat this would be a good idea. And that requires something rathermore solid in the way of a cost/benefit analysis than Russell managesto supply.

8.4 The Problem of Validity

It is a common complaint against emotivism that it precludes thepossibility of moral arguments that are valid in a non-trivial sense.An argument is formally valid if and only if, no matter how thenon-logical vocabulary is interpreted, the premises cannot be true andthe conclusion false. But if the premises of a moral argument are nottruth-apt—if they are semanticallyincapable of truthor falsity—then all moral arguments, no matter how obviously“illogical” they may appear, will be trivially valid,since the premises cannot be true! We can avoid this absurdity bymaking explicit what the standard definition of validitypresupposes—that an argument cannot be acandidate forvalidity unless the premises and the conclusions are both truth-apt.But if we do that, moral arguments cease to be candidates forvalidity, no matter how logically impeccable they may appear to be.Stevenson (1944: 154–159) accepts this conclusion as aconsequence of his theory, but to the rest of us it seems a very largedead rat to swallow.

Russell is immune to this argument as regards “ought”,“right” and “wrong” since in his viewought-judgments are susceptible to truth and falsity. “It iswrong (wrt toB) to kill the innocent” is a truth-aptexpression. Hence the argument “It is wrong (wrt toB) tokill the innocent; to bomb the village would be to kill the innocent:therefore it is wrong (wrt toB) to bomb the village”, isa candidate for validity, and is in fact, valid. To argue from thesame premises that it would beright (wrtB) to bombthe village would be obviously fallacious.

But what about this argument?

It is good to contemplate whatever is beautiful;
Michelangelo’s David is beautiful;

Therefore

It is good to contemplate Michelangelo’s David.

Isn’t it obviously valid? And wouldn’t it be obviouslyinvalid to conclude from the same premises that contemplatingMichelangelo’s David would bebad? Yet if arguments involving“good” are not even candidates for validity, it appearsthat the two arguments are on a par!

This is a telling objection againstsome forms of emotivismwhich portray moral judgments as mere expressions of raw feeling,analogous to cries of ecstasy or groans of pain. But Russell is betterplaced to meet this difficulty, since in his view judgments about whatis ultimately good and bad are disguised optatives, designed toexpress desires or wishes of a certain kind. And it is possible toconstruct a rudimentary concept of logical consequence (and hence ofvalidity) that applies to arguments in the optative mood. Sentences inthe optative have fulfillment conditions just as sentences in theindicative have truth-conditions. To understand an optative sentenceis a) to understand that itis in the optative and b) tounderstand what the world would have to be like to satisfy the desiresor the wishes expressed. Just as indicative validity can be defined interms of truth, optative validity can be defined in terms offulfillment. (It would be nice to talk of “satisfaction”rather than “fulfillment” here, but the word“satisfaction” has been preempted to stand for a differentbut related notion.) An optative sentenceQ is the logicalconsequence of a set of optative sentencesP and a (possiblyempty) set of factual sentencesC, if and only if, however thenon-logical vocabulary is interpreted, the desires expressed inP cannot be fulfilled under the circumstances described inC unless the desire expressed byQ is fulfilled too. Anoptative argument is valid if the conclusion is an optativeconsequence of the premises; invalid otherwise. Hence there can bevalid (and invalid!) arguments about goodness as well as logicalrelations between the relevant sentences. Thus our argumentbecomes:

1′.: Would that everyone desired to contemplate whatever isbeautiful!
2′.: Michelangelo’s David is beautiful.
3′.: Would that everyone desired to contemplate Michelangelo’sDavid!

This is not perhaps a very plausible reconstruction of the originalargument, but itis logically valid in the sense defined. Forthe wish expressed at premise 1′) cannot be fulfilled under thefactual conditions specified at premise 2′) without fulfillingthe wish expressed at the conclusion 3′).

8.5 Geach’s Problem

But there is another broadly logical objection to emotivism that ismuch more difficult for Russell to meet. The objection was firstmooted by W.D. Ross (1939) but it was reinvented and refined by P.T.Geach (1960, 1965), who modestly attributes it to Frege. Consider thefollowing obviously valid argument:

(1): It is always good to contemplate beautiful works of art.
(2): If it is always good to contemplate beautiful works of art, thenit is good to contemplate Michelangelo’s David.

Therefore

(3): It is good to contemplate Michelangelo’s David.

In this argument, the sentence “It is always good to contemplatebeautiful works of art”, occurs twice. In (1) it occurs byitself as an assertion; in (2) it occurs unasserted as part of alarger sentence. We know what the sentence is supposed to mean at itsfirst occurrence—despite its indicative appearance it is reallyin the optative mood and expresses a wish: “Would that everyonealways desired to desire to contemplate beautiful works ofart!”. But what about itssecond occurrence where itappears as the antecedent to a conditional? Is it expressing that wishthere? Surely not. For someone can subscribe to the conditional (2)whilst rejecting the relevant wish. For example, we can imaginesomebody reasoning like this:

(1′): It is not good to contemplate Michelangelo’s David [perhapsbecause it arouses unhealthy sexual appetites for strappingfifteen-year-olds].
(2): If it is always good to contemplate beautiful works of art, thenit is good to contemplate Michelangelo’s David.

Therefore

(3′): It is not always good to contemplate beautiful works of art.

The person who accepts this argument clearly doesnot wishthat everyone should always desire to contemplate beautiful works ofart. But she subscribes to premise (2) nonetheless. Thus the sentence“it is always good to contemplate beautiful works of art”,cannot generally be construed as an optative when it occurs in anembedded context (that is when it occurs as a sub-sentence within alarger, more complex sentence). This is already a very damagingobjection to Russell’s theory of how “good” functions,since it shows that the theory is radically incomplete. Russell canonly account for a very restricted class of cases, namely those inwhich sentences of the form “X is good” are used bythemselves to make an assertion, not the numerous cases in which suchsentences occur, unasserted, as components of larger sentences. (Itis, so to speak, a theory of the semantic atoms that cannot accountfor their role within semantic molecules.) But there is worse to come.Suppose Russell added one or more epicycles to his theory to explainhow “X is good” manages to be meaningful inunasserted contexts. The revised theory would have to distinguishbetween different uses of “good”, giving one account forasserted contexts and a different account (or set of accounts) for theunasserted contexts. Thus “X is good” wouldsometimes be a disguised optative and sometimes something else. (Nevermind what—it does not really matter.) Now, consider thefollowing argument schema:

X is good.
IfX is good thenQ.

Therefore

In this argument “X is good” would have one meaningin premise (i)—in which it would be an optative—andanother in premise (ii)—in which it would be a creature of someother semantic kind. (I have emphasized the point by putting the firstoccurrence in italics and the second in bold.) But an argument is onlyvalid if the words involved retain the same meanings throughout theinference. If not, we have an instance of the fallacy of equivocation.So it looks as if any attempt to deal with Geach’sfirstproblem by explaining how “good” works in unassertedcontexts would have the unintended side-effect of converting obviouslyvalid arguments such as the above into instances of equivocation. Notonly is the theory radically incomplete—if itwerecompleted, it would reduce a huge number of obviously valid argumentsto invalidity by construing them as equivocal.

This is, perhaps, the leading problem for non-cognitivist orexpressivist theories of value and a vast amount of ink has been spilttrying to solve it. (See, for instance, A. Miller, 2013,Contemporary Metaethics: an Introduction, 2^nd edn:6, 37–9, 53–67, 68, 70–1, 73, 79n23, 89–102,118, 127–32 & 245 and Schroeder, 2010,Non-Cognitivismin Ethics: chs. 3, 4 & 7.) It would take me too far afield todiscuss the matter in detail. Suffice to say that Russell’s theoryfaces ship-wreck unless this problem can be solved and, in my opinion,the problem is insoluble.

8.6 Commitment and Inconsistency

I am accused of inconsistency, perhaps justly, because, although Ihold ultimate ethical valuations to be subjective, I neverthelessallow myself emphatic opinions on ethical questions.

Thus wrote Russell in reply to critics who thought that his emotivismprecluded him from being so relentlessly preachy. There was, theythought, some kind of pragmatic inconsistency between vehement moralopinions (frequently voiced) and meta-ethical emotivism (RoE:145–150/Papers 11: 48–52). Russell makes shortwork of this. In his view the function of the words “good”and “bad” is to express certain kinds of desires. Since hehad the relevant desires there was no inconsistency in hisusing “good” and “bad” to express the desiresthat they were designed to express. There is nothing inconsistentabout using a piece of verbal machinery to do what you think it isdesigned to do.

I am quite at a loss to understand why any one should be surprised atmy expressing vehement ethical judgments. By my own theory, I am, indoing so, expressing vehement desires as to the desires of mankind; Ifeel such desires, so why not express them?

Nor (as he might have added) is there any inconsistency betweenRussell’s meta-ethical emotivism and his moral and political activism.To think, for example, that nuclear war would be bad is to desire thateveryone not desire it, a desire that presumably springs from afirst-order desire that there should be no such thing. In trying toavert nuclear war, therefore, Russell was acting on a desire that forhim had a high priority. Which looks like an eminently rational thingto do.

8.7 Russell’s Feelings and the Duck Argument

But in defending himself against the charge of inconsistency, Russellmakes a crucial concession.

But what are “good” desires? Are they anything more thandesires that you share? Certainly thereseems to be somethingmore … In opposing the proposal [to introduce bull-fightinginto America], I shouldfeel, not only that I was expressingmy desires, but that my desires in the matter areright,whatever that may mean.

What exactly is it that Russell feels? That those who thinkbull-fighting is good (and therefore desire it) are making some kindofmistake and conversely that those think that bull-fightingis bad (and are therefore opposed to it) are in some sensegettingit right. Thus the “something more” that Russellcould not help feeling was that his views about the badness ofbullfighting weretrue and the views of the imaginarybull-fighting aficionadosfalse. But how can that be if“bull-fighting is bad,” really is in the optative? For asentence to be true or false it must be semantically capable of truthand falsity or, as the current jargon has it,truth-apt. Thusin admitting that he could not help feeling that he would be right(that is, correct) to oppose bull-fighting in America, Russell, wasadmitting to feelings which suggest that his meta-ethic is false.Moreover the very fact that hehad these feelings providesevidence for his theory’s falsehood. Consider “Oh to be inEngland, now that April’s here!”, a sentence that is clearly inthe optative (except for the bit about April’s being here). It is hardto see how anybody who understood this sentence could coherently feelor think it to be true or false. Its optative character is obvious (tothose who understand English) and the fact that it is in the optativeexcludes the possibility of truth and falsehood. Since Russellwas inclined to feel that “Bull-fighting is bad”is true, and since this is not an incoherent thing to feel or think,this strongly suggests that “bull-fighting is bad”, unlike“Oh to be in England!”, is not in the optative mood.

Indeed there is something odd about the very idea of a disguisedoptative. Of course, it is possible to give orders or express wishesby means of sentences that are grammatically in the indicative mood.Henry IV’s “You have good leave to leave us”, isgrammatically in the indicative but it is merely a slightly less curtvariant of the obviously imperative “Worcester, get theegone” (Shakespeare,Henry IV, 1.3). But when we useindicatives to express wishes or convey commands we are engaging incommunicative acts which would misfire badly if the people we weretalking to failed to get the point. Even if King Henry had confinedhimself to “You have good leave to leave us”, omitting theexplicitly imperative “Worcester, get thee gone”,Worcester would have had to be singularly obtuse not to realize thathe was being ordered to leave. Competent speakers are usually wellaware when a grammatically indicative sentence is being used to give acommand or express a desire (indeed, this is one of thecriteria of linguistic competence!). But it is Russell’shypothesis that, despite appearances, “X is good”(in the sense of good as an end) is exclusively in the optative moodeven though, for most people, it is neither intended nor interpretedas such. We have been good-ing and bad-ing things up and down forhundreds of years whilst radically misunderstanding the meanings ofour own utterances. To suppose this is to suppose that meaning isindependent of our collective intentions, which is a very large deadrat to swallow. Russell might reply that our usage belies our statedintentions, that we use “X is good”as ifit were in the optative, and that despite our protestations to thecontrary,his theory provides the best explanation of ouractual use. The problem with this reply is that it is based on anobviously false premise. We don’t in fact use “X isgood” as if it were in the optative mood—we treat as if itwere truth-apt. This brings me to the most obvious and perhaps themost compelling objection to emotivism—what I like to call theDuck Argument.

The main problem for most forms of non-cognitivism is that moraljudgments look and behave like propositions—that is, in thisconnection, the kinds of things that can be true or false. They have,as the jargon has it, a “propositional surface”. We claimthat such sentences are true or false, we speak ofknowingthe difference between good and bad, right and wrong (where knowledgewould appear to entail truth), wewonder whether our ethicalopinions are right or wrong (in the sense of correct or incorrect) andbelieve that we or others are, or at least may be,mistaken in our moral beliefs (in the sense that they may befalse). All this is difficult to make sense of except on theassumption that moral judgments are what they appear tobe—statements which express beliefs, describe some purportedfacts and are therefore capable of truth and falsity. The argumentdoes not show that thereare such facts (after all, much thesame points could be made about theological discourse, and a set oftruth-apt sentences cannot conjure God into existence). It could bethat there are no moral facts corresponding to our opinions and thusthat they are predominately false, like the propositions of Greekmythology. But the way we talk strongly suggests that our moralpronouncements are in the true/false game, and thus that they aretruth-apt or truth-valued. If something looks like a duck, swims likea duck and quacks like a duck, then the chances are that it is indeeda duck! Likewise, if somethinglooks like a truth-aptexpression (since on the surface it is in the indicative mood), if itbehaves logically like a truth-apt expression (which again iswhat “X is good” undoubtedly does), if it istreated by the people whose use sustains its meaningasif it were truth-apt, then, absent compelling arguments to thecontrary, it probably is truth-apt.

8.8 Objections Concluded

Thus Russell’s brand of emotivism is subject to devastatingobjections, some of which he was aware of. Moreover he was not thatkeen on it. Although he thought he could show that

I am not guilty of any logical inconsistency in holding to [emotivism]and at the same time expressing strong ethical preferences … infeeling I am not satisfied. (RoE: 149/Papers 11:51)

In particular, he found himself “incapable of believing that allthat is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don’t like it”. Whythen was he an emotivist? Because he could not “see how torefute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values”(RoE: 165/Papers 11: 310–311). What were thesearguments and why did Russell find them so compelling?

9. Objections to Objectivism

“When I was young,” writes Russell,

I agreed with G.E. Moore in believing in the objectivity of good andevil. Santayana’s criticism in a book calledWinds ofDoctrine, [which Russell read in 1913] caused me to abandon thisview, though I have never been able to be as bland and comfortableabout it as he was. (Portraits from Memory: 91)

As a piece of intellectual autobiography this is not veryilluminating. Santayana’s book abounds in mellifluous sneers, butarguments are conspicuous by their absence. Russell’s reasons forrejecting a non-natural property of goodness have to be reconstructedfrom literary asides, delivered in passing in the course of hisanti-War polemics.

9.1 Persecution, Punishment and the Subjectivity of Value

However, Santayana does giveone reason, not for doubting theexistence of the Moorean Good, but for wishing that nobody believed init. The idea that there are objective moral facts breeds intoleranceand fanaticism. Accordingly, the rejection of this idea “wouldtend to render people more truly social”, specifically, moretolerant. “Moral warfare would continue”, he writes,“but not with poisoned arrows.” Russell came to agree,especially after the outbreak of World War I.

My H[erbert] S[pencer] lecture was partly inspired by disgust at theuniversal outburst of righteousness in all nations since the warbegan. It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has givenme a disgust of all ethical notions, which evidently are chieflyuseful as an excuse for murder. (Letter to Samuel Alexander, 5/2/1915,RoE: 107/Papers 8: 56)

There is something rather paradoxical about this, since Russell wasfirmly convinced of the rightness of his own anti-War activities:“When the War came, I felt as if I heard the voice of God. Iknew it was my business to protest, however futile protest mightbe” (Autobiography II: 18). If there are no objectivemoral properties, there is no such thing as moral knowledge, whichmeans that Russell cannot have literallyknown that he oughtto protest. At best he could have known that he ought to protestgiven his values. But though he sometimes seems to talk as ifit is objectively wrong to believe in objective values, Russell’sposition is (or can be made to be) coherent. It might just be a factthat moral realists tend to be more intolerant and cruel than moralrelativists and anti-realists. Hence those who dislike intolerance andcruelty have a reason for running down objectivity. As Russell himselfput it,

for my part, I should wish to see in the world less cruelty,persecution, punishment, and moral reprobation than exists at present;to this end, I believe that a recognition of the subjectivity ofethics might conduce. (RoE: 117/Papers 13: 326)

The word “recognition” suggests that the“subjectivity of ethics” is true, and thus that there isno such thing as a non-natural property of goodness. But setting thesuccess-word to one side, itmight be the case that we wouldbe better off believing in the subjectivity of ethics since believingin objective values leads to persecution, punishment, cruelty andmoral reprobation. It might pay in terms of peace, love andunderstanding if people came to believe Russell’s brand of emotivism.But the fact that a beliefpays, in some sense, does not makeittrue, as Russell himself was at pains to point out (seePhilosophical Essays, chs. iv & v). So even if wewould be better off believing that there were no objectivevalues (a thesis Russell later came to doubt), this does not provethat there are no such things.

9.2 Russell and the Argument from Relativity

So what were Russell’s reasons for rejecting a non-natural property ofgoodness? One argument, subsequently popularized by J.L. Mackie (1977)as “the Argument from Relativity”, starts with thediversity of moral opinion and the supposed impossibility of proofwhen it comes to ultimate values.

If our views as to what ought to be done were to be truly rational, weought to have a rational way of ascertaining what things are such asought to exist on their own account [that is, what things are good]…. On [this] point, no argument is possible. There can benothing beyond an appeal to individual tastes. If, for example, oneman thinks vindictive punishment desirable in itself, apart from anyreformatory or deterrent effects, while another man thinks itundesirable in itself, it is impossible to bring any arguments insupport of either side. (RoE: 112/Papers 13:186)

Now it is, of course, aconsequence of Russell’s later viewboth a) that it is impossible to have a rational argument about“what things are such as ought to exist on their ownaccount” and b) that in such disputes there can be nothingbeyond “an appeal to individual tastes”. But though youcan arguefrom emotivism and the non-existence of objectivegoodnessto the truth of a) and b), can you arguefrom a) and b)to the non-existence of objectivegoodness?

The argument, I suggest, is best construed as an inference to the bestexplanation. The best explanation of a) that it is impossible to havea rational argument about what is good or bad in itself and b) that insuch disputes there can be nothing beyond “an appeal toindividual tastes” is the hypothesis c) that there is nothingobjective to disagree about since thereis no such thing asgoodness—rather our opinions on these topics are somehowdependent on, or expressive of, our disparate desires and perhaps ourdiverse upbringings.

Is this a good argument? Not by itself, no. For it is not clear thattheses a) and b) represent genuine facts. And even if a) and b)are true anddo represent genuine facts, is c) thebest explanation? Perhaps there is a property of goodness but ithappens to be a property that it is difficult to discern. Some peopleare just better at seeing what is good or bad than others. As Russellhimself put it in 1909 “the difficulty of discovering the truthdoes not prove that there is no truth to be discovered”(Philosophical Essays: 20/Papers 6: 222).

However, the Argument From Relativity looks a little better if wefollow Russell’s hints and combine it with the Argument fromExplanatory Impotence.

9.3 Russell and Explanatory Impotence

In his polemical article “North Staffs’ Praise of War”(1916) Russell suggests an argument which prefigures a famous argumentof Gilbert Harman’s 1977. (It is typical of Russell, incidentally,that he develops his meta-ethical position in the course of anewspaper controversy about the rights and wrongs of World War Irather than in an article in an academic journal.)

I have been led to [the view that all ethics is subjective] by anumber of reasons, some logical, some derived from observation.Occam’s Razor … leads me to discard the notion of absolute goodif ethics can be accounted for without it. Observation of ethicalvaluations leads me to think that all ethical valuations can be soaccounted for, and that the claim of universality which men associatewith their ethical judgments embodies merely the impulse topersecution or tyranny. (RoE: 117/Papers 13:325–6)

The idea seems to be that our moral evaluations—our beliefsabout what is good or bad, wrong or right—can be explainedwithout supposing that they correspond to facts involving Mooreanproperties of “absolute” goodness or badness. And sinceour evaluations can be accounted for without supposing that there areany such properties, and since the only reason for we believing inthem is the evidence of our evaluations, we have no reason to supposethat such properties exist, and some reasons (of an Occamist sort) forsupposing that they do not.

As it stands, this argument is inconclusive. For a Moorean mightsimply hang tough, insisting that his own views about goodness arebest explained by close encounters of the Platonic kind, involving anintimate acquaintance with both goodness itself and the properties onwhich it supervenes. Of course, it is difficult to make naturalisticsense of such cognitions, but it is difficult to make naturalisticsense of our knowledge of logic, mathematics and modality. This is the“companions in guilt” strategy that is often deployed inarguing for moral objectivity (for more on which, see Lillehammer2007). However the Argument from Explanatory Impotence gets a littlestronger if we combine it with the Argument from Relativity. For thefact is that people often disagree about what is intrinsically good orbad, abouthow good or bad the good things and the bad thingsreally are, and about therelations between goodness andbadness and what we ought to do. We have already seen that Russelldisagreed with Moore about whether we ought to do that action thatwillactually bring about the best consequences or the actionthat it isreasonable to believe will bring about the bestconsequences, which means that they had different intuitions about therelations between goodness and obligation. Moore disagreed withSidgwick about whether anything besides pleasure is good as anend:

This proposition that “pleasure alone is good as an end,”the fundamental proposition of Ethical Hedonism [is] in ProfessorSidgwick’s language, … an object of intuition. I shall try toshew you why my intuition denies it, just as his intuition affirms it.Itmay always be true notwithstanding; neither intuition canprove whether it is true or not; I am bound to be satisfied,if I can “present considerations capable of determining theintellect” to reject it. (PE: §45)

More comically, the Cambridge Apostles seem to have had a seriousdisagreement in 1899 about whether “self-abuse” was bad initself, Moore intuiting that it was and his opponents arguing that itwas not (Levy 1981: 207–8). Now, how could Moore explain theintuitions of his opponents? Not by an encounter with badness, sinceanybodyfully acquainted with badness and its relata wouldhave been forced to admit that self-abuse was bad. The non-naturalfacts being impotent in this particular, he would have been drivenback on natural causes (such as a taste for self-abuse) to explain themisperceptions of his degenerate opponents. Thus he would have beenforced to admit thatsome moral evaluations could beexplained without the aid of non-natural properties. But once this isadmitted, a “Why stop there?” problem opens up. For afterall, it would have been child’s play for his opponents to return thecompliment, Moore’s self-denying intuitions being the obvious productsof a Puritanical upbringing. Once we admit thatsome moralintuitions can be explained by natural, as opposed to non-natural,causes—which seems pretty obvious given the prevalence of moral“error”—it is hard to hold the line and insist thatthere areany of them that cannot be accounted for bytemperament, upbringing, desire and taste. It ispossible, ofcourse, that some moral evaluations are due to natural, and some tonon-natural, causes, but given that everybody admits thatmany of our intuitions can be given a naturalisticexplanation (namely, the mistaken ones), Occam’s razor suggests thatthere is no need for the non-natural to explain those moral intuitionsthat we regard as correct. When supplemented by Relativity (which iswhat Russell seems to be hinting at) Explanatory Impotence provides apowerful argument against non-natural properties.

9.4 Emotivism or the Error Theory?

Thus Russell’s explicit arguments for the “subjectivity ofvalue” are objections to objectivism rather than arguments for arival hypothesis. Moore’s theory is wrong since it presupposesnon-existent non-natural properties of goodness and badness. But ifnaturalism is not an option, that still leaves twoalternatives—some kind of non-cognitivism or an error-theory (see §1). Russell’s dominant view was to be a form of emotivism, and hence ofnon-cognitivism. But although emotivism was Russell’s dominant viewfrom 1913 onwards, there were two significant wobbles. In 1922 heproposed a version of the error theory, anticipating J. L. Mackie byover twenty years. And in 1954 inHuman Society in Ethics andPolitics, he endeavored to inject a little objectivity intoethics by developing a form of naturalism. The first wobble is moreinteresting than the second, but neither should be neglected in anaccount of Russell’s ethics, even though Russell abandoned the theoryofHSEP within weeks of publication, reverting to theemotivism of 1935.

10. Russell’s Error-Theoretic Wobble: There Is No Absolute Good

“Is There an Absolute Good?” was apparently delivered onthe 14^th of March 1922 at special meeting of the Apostles(RoE: 122–124/Papers 9: 345–346).Russell opens up in the fine, flippant style that the Apostles tendedto admire:

When the generation to which I belong were young, Moore persuaded usall that there is an absolute good. Most of us drew the inference thatwe were absolutely good, but this is not an essential part ofMoore’s position, though it is one of its most attractive parts.

But he soon gets down to philosophical business in what must be one ofthe pithiest meta-ethical papers on record (it is a mere 809 wordslong). Moore is right, he says, in thinking that “when we say athing is good we do notmerely mean that we have towards it acertain feeling, of liking or approval or what not.” Indeed“ethical judgments claim objectivity”; that is, theypurport to tell it like it is. However, this “claim [to]objectivity … makes them all false”. Since there is noproperty of goodness corresponding to the linguistic predicate“good”, nothing can ever possess it. Hence, any claim thatfriendship or anything else isgood will be false, sincethere is no such thing as goodness for friendship or pleasure to be.The same goes for badness. Moreover, if there is no such thing asgoodness or badness, there is no such thing as rightness either, sincefor an action to be genuinely right it must be such that it canreasonably be expected to produce more good and less bad than anyalternative. But if there is no such thing as goodness to be produced,no action can be expected to produce more of it than any other. Ofcourse, an action can still berelatively right: more likelyto produce more of what somebodybelieves to be good and lessof what somebodybelieves to be bad than any alternative. Butno action can begenuinely right orgenuinelyobligatory, since there are no such properties as goodness or badnessfor conscientious agents to maximize or minimize.

Thus far this is very like the error theory of J.L. Mackie (Mackie1946, 1977: ch. 1 and Joyce 2001). But there is a twist. For Mackie,as for Russell, “good” is a meaningful predicate eventhough there is no property corresponding to the word. But Mackie,unlike Russell, is unfazed by this fact. So far as Mackie isconcerned, meaningful predicates that refer to non-existent propertiespose no particular problems. But for Russell, we can only talkmeaningfully aboutnon-existent things if they are defined interms of things with which we are acquainted. This is a consequence ofhis Fundamental Principle that

every proposition that we can understand must be composed wholly ofconstituents with which we are acquainted (Mysticism andLogic: 209/Papers 6: 154)

or, as he was later to put it,

that sentences we can understand must be composed of words with whosemeaning we are acquainted. (Schilpp (ed.) 1944: 692/Papers11: 27)

According to Russell, it

seems natural to infer, as Moore did, that, since propositions inwhich the word “good” occurs have meaning, the word“good” [itself] has [a] meaning.

This, however, is a “fallacy”. Even though“good” can appear in meaningful sentences it does not havea meaning of its own. This is very puzzling. What does Russell meanwhen he says that “good” has no meaning? And why isMoore’s view dependent on the thesis that it does?

Let us start with Moore. As stated above (§2.1), Moore’s Open Question Argument goes like this:

“AreX things good?” is a significant or openquestion for any naturalistic or metaphysical predicate“X”; (whether simple or complex).
If two expressions (whether simple or complex) are synonymous thisis evident on reflection to every competent speaker.
The meaning of a predicate or property word is the property forwhich it stands. Thus if two predicates or property words havedistinct meanings they name distinct properties.

From (1) and (2) it follows that

“Good” is not synonymous with any naturalistic ormetaphysical predicate “X” (or“goodness” with any corresponding noun or noun-phrase“X-ness”).

From (3) and (4) it follows that

Goodness is not identical with any natural or metaphysicalproperty ofX-ness.

Premise (3) is crucial. Moore takes it for granted that the meaning ofa predicate is the property for which it stands. Hence, if there wereno property of goodness corresponding to the word “good”,“good” would be meaningless. Since “good” isquite obviouslynot meaningless, the corresponding propertyis guaranteed. Thus we move from an obvious semantic fact—that“good” is plainly meaningful—to a much morecontentious metaphysical claim—that there is a correspondingproperty of goodness. What greases the wheels of this transition isthe apparently innocuous assumption that if a word like“good” is to mean something, there must be something (or at least some property) that it means. If thisdoctrine were true, then the objections to objectivism discussed inthe last section would fall to the ground. The very fact that we cantalk meaningfully about goodness would show that there mustindeedbe such a property. It might be causally impotent andmetaphysically queer, but the fact that we can discuss it would entailthat we were stuck with it anyway.

To the end of his days Russell believed that

there are words which are only significant because there is somethingthat they mean, and if there were not this something, they would beempty noises not words. (Russell 1959: 177)

But when he was young he thought thatmost words were likethis, which explains the swollen ontology ofThe Principles ofMathematics:

Homeric gods, relations, chimeras and four-dimensional spaces all havebeing, for if they were not entities of a kind, we could make nopropositions about them. (Russell,The Principles ofMathematics: 449)

The breakthrough came with his Theory of Definite Descriptions (1905).Phrases such as “the present King of France” areincomplete symbols, which can function meaningfully in thecontext of a sentence even though there may be nothing that they mean.They are incomplete because they have no meaning when taken inisolation and in the context of a sentence can be analyzed away. When“the King of France is bald” is analyzed in accordancewith Russell’s formula—“There is something which is Kingof France such that if anything is King of France, it is identicalwith that thing, and that thing is bald”—the phrase“the King of France” simply disappears, though we are leftwith the predicate “is King of France”. “The King ofFrance is bald”, is false because there is no King ofFrance—nothing which satisfies the propositional functionbeing king of France—and there is no need to supposethat the King of France must have some kind of being in order for thisproposition to make sense.

This brings us back to the Open Question Argument. So far as I cansee, Russell continued to accept premises (1) and (2) andthus—with reservations—sub-conclusion (4).“Good” does not mean that same as any naturalisticpredicateX—at least, it does not mean the same as any ofthe naturalistic predicates that have been suggested so far. But healso accepts something like premise (3), that the meaning of apredicate is the property for which it stands. It was because hebelieved that some predicates were among the words “which areonly significant because there is something that they mean”, andwhich would be “empty noises not words” in the absence ofthis something, that he continued to believe in properties, right upuntil 1959. How then can Russell fend off Moore’s conclusion (5) thatthere is a property of goodness that is not identical to anynaturalistic property ofX-ness? By modifying premise (3):

3′.: The meaning of a predicate or property word is the property forwhich it stands,so long as that predicate is a completesymbol.

Some predicates arenot complete symbols, and these canfunction meaningfully in the absence of the properties that they mightdenote. One of these predicates is the word “good”.

Without the theory of incomplete symbols, it seemed natural to infer,as Moore did, that, since propositions in which the word“good” occurs have meaning, therefore the word“good” has meaning [or as we might now say, a referent];but this was a fallacy.
My point is that the word “good” does not stand for apredicate [by which Russell means a property] at all, but has ameaning only in the sense in which descriptive phrases have meaning,i.e., in use, not in isolation.

Thus “good” can be meaningful in the absence of a propertyof goodness and the error theory is safe from semantic refutation.

But Russell is not quite out of the woods. He continued to believe inhis Fundamental Principle that to understand a proposition we must beacquainted with the referents of the words that remain once theproposition has been boiled down to its ultimate constituents. Thismeans, in effect, that things which don’t exist have to be defined interms of things which do, indeed, that things whichdon’texist have to be defined terms of things (including universals) withwhich we areacquainted. How then is “good” to bedefined? More pedantically, how are sentences involving“good” to be analyzed so that the word “good”can be eliminated? According to Russell,

when we judge “M is good”, we mean: “Mhas that predicate [property] which is common toA,B,C, …[the things we approve of] but is absent inX,Y,Z, …[the things we disapproveof].”

The emotions of approval and disapproval, Russell notes,

do not enter into the meaning of the proposition “M isgood”, but only into its genesis.

That is, “good” is defined in terms of the things that weapprove (and disapprove) of, even though the fact that we approve (ordisapprove) of them is not incorporated into the analysis. Now, inRussell’s opinion, the proposition

M has that property which is common toA,B,C, … [the things we approve of] but is absent inX,Y,Z, … [the things we disapproveof],

will be always be false since the things we approve of have nothing incommon apart from the fact that we approve of them. That is why“all propositions in which the word ‘good’has a primary occurrence are false.” But will such propositionsin fact be false? SurelyX,Y,Z,etc.do have a property in common, namely the propertyofbeing X or Y or Z or …! Perhaps Russell would replythat disjunctive properties are not real properties. He took a dimview of disjunctive facts inThe Philosophy of Logical Atomism, and if disjunctivefacts should be rejected, then disjunctive properties wouldappear to be equally suspect (Papers 8: 185–6/ThePhilosophy of Logical Atomism: 71–72). Even so, we cannotbe sure that inevery case the things that we approve ofdon’t have something in common other than a) the fact that we approveof them and b) that they satisfy a disjunctive predicate. Nor is thisthe only problem. Though Russell defines “good” in termsof the things that “we” approve (and disapprove)of, what he seems to mean is thateach person defines“good” in terms of the things thathe or sheapproves (or disapproves) of. Thus if you and I approve of differentthings, whenI say “M is good” and you say“M is not good” what I mean is thatM hasthe property shared byX,Y,Z …[the things thatI approve of] whereas whatyou meanis that is that it doesnot have the property shared byA,B,C … [the things thatyou approve of]. But in that case the Problem of theDisappearing Dispute rears its ugly head. On Russell’s theory my“M is good” and your “M is notgood” may be quite consistent. But since they are obviouslynot consistent, there must be something wrong with Russell’stheory. We can put the point by paraphrasing Russell’s own criticismsof simple subjectivism:

If in asserting thatA is good, [a person]X meantmerely to assert thatA had a certain relation to himself suchas pleasing his taste in some way [or thatA had acharacteristic shared by the things of which he approved] andY, in saying thatA is not good, meant merely to denythatA had a like relation to himself [or to deny thatAhad the characteristic shared by the things of which he,Y,approved]; then there would be no subject of debate between them.(Philosophical Essays: 20–21/Papers 6:222)

Nor is this all. As we saw in§8.1, our moral sentiments are partly constituted by our moral beliefs.What distinguishes approval from a warm feeling of liking is not somedifference in phenomenological flavor but the thought that the thingwe approve of is good or right. Our moral sentiments are feelingsthat, where what follows the “that” is a moraljudgment. But if we can’t have feelings of approval or disapprovalwithout the corresponding moral beliefs, we can’t explain theintellectual origins of the common conceptions of goodness and badnessin terms of pre-existing sentiments of approval or disapproval. Forprior to these conceptions there were no such sentiments. This is notthe criticism that sank the emotivist theories of Ayer and Stevenson.The problem is not that Russell’sanalysis of“good” is viciously circular because it presupposes thevery concept that it purports toexplicate. The problem isthat hisgenealogy of “good” is viciouslycircular (and therefore false) since it presupposes the concept itpurports toexplain. For in his capacity as an error-theoristRussell does notdefine “good” and“bad” in terms of approval and disapproval. Rather hegives agenealogy of these notions in which the feelings ofapproval and disapproval play a crucial part. As he himself puts it:“the emotions of approval and disapproval do not enter into themeaning of the proposition ‘M is good’, but onlyinto its genesis”. But our concepts of “good” and“bad” cannot be caused by prior feelings of approval anddisapproval if those feelings are partly constituted by the verybeliefs they are supposed to cause. My belief thatM is goodcannot be caused by tendency to approve ofM, if I cannotapprove ofM without believing thatM is good.

However, the real difficulty with Russell’s error theory and the onewhich probably weighed with Russell himself, seems to be this. GivenRussell’s theory of meaning, he can make sense of non-existentproperties but not non-natural predicates. At least, he cannot makesense of predicates that are not definable in terms of things withwhich we are acquainted. Thus on the assumption that we are notacquainted with goodness (which we obviously cannot be if there isreally no such thing), and on the assumption that “good”cannot defined in terms of the things with which weareacquainted (which seems pretty plausible if is not equivalent to anynaturalistic predicate) then we cannot evenunderstand thepredicate “good”. At least, we cannot understand it, if itis construed as a descriptive predicate whose function it is to denotea property (whether real or non-existent).

After 1922, Russell abandoned the error theory and reverted to theemotivism that he had been flirting with since 1913. His reasonsremain obscure. But perhaps it had something to do with the fact thathis Fundamental Principle, when combined with the OQA, made itdifficult, if not impossible, to make sense of “good” asstanding for a property that isboth non-existentand non-natural. Since he retained his faith in theFundamental Principle he had to give up the error theory. And since hehad already rejected the objectivity of ethics—what we wouldnowadays describe as moral realism—this left him no alternativebut some form of non-cognitivsm. In my opinion this was the wrongchoice. He would have done better to give up the Fundamental Principleand stick with the error theory. But perhaps the thesis that moraljudgments are mostly false was a bit too much for a dedicated moralistsuch as he. As he wrote to his brother, he would rather “be madwith truth than sane with lies” and the idea that morality waslargely composed of lies—or a best useful fictions—wouldhave been too much to bear (see Pigden (ed.) 1999: 20, 121–122,& 189–193).

11. Russell’s Humean Wobble: Human Society in Ethics and Politics

Russell’sHuman Society is a fun book to read, butmeta-ethically it is a bit of a mess. There is much wit and somewisdom, though both the wit and the wisdom are more conspicuous whenhe is discussing human nature and human society than when he isdiscussing the finer points of ethical theory. (I particularly likehis frequent complaints that human behavior seldom rises to the levelof enlightened self-interest. If only we could manage to beintelligently selfish, the world would be a much better place.) Thedrift of the argument is sometimes difficult to discern, partlybecause of has frequent digressions to makebon mots, andpartly because of his dialectical method of presentation, whichapproaches what he takes to be the truth via a series of successiveapproximations.Human Society in Ethics and Politics waspublished in 1954, but the meta-ethical bits were originally writtensome years earlier and intended for inclusion inHuman Knowledge:Its Scope and Limits (1948). Russell held them back because hewas not sure whether ethical propositions rose to the dignity ofknowledge. He continued to be doubtful about this, but by the early1950s his doubts had sufficiently dissipated for publication to becomea possibility. Nevertheless, there are marked analogies between thetwo books.Human Knowledge attempts to establish theexistence of a mind-independent world on the basis of privateperceptions.Human Society attempts to establish an ethicthat is in some degree independent ofindividual minds on thebasis of subjective sentiments.

Hume looms large in Russell’sHuman Knowledge. Indeed thewhole book can be seen as an attempt to concede the premises of Hume’sskeptical argument—that the data we start with are private andpersonal and that we cannot infer an external world from such data bymeans of demonstrative inference—whilst resisting itsconclusion—that we can have no knowledge of an external world.(Hence the need for non-demonstrative inference.) But although Humewas Russell’s chief opponent inHuman Knowledge, he wasperhaps a meta-ethical ally inHuman Society. In theEnquiry Concerning the Principles of Moral, Hume sought tobase an inter-subjective ethic on human sentiments, specifically thesentiments of approbation and disapprobation. Hume was much more atease in the world than Russell, and was only interested in moralreform in so far as morals rested on the “delusive glosses ofsuperstition and false religion” (which in his opinion includedall religion) or the ideological delusions of factiouspoliticians and mercantile economists. But he did want a meta-ethicthat would enable him to transfer the monkish virtues (whose statusas virtues depended on the “delusive glosses”)from the catalogue of virtues to the catalogue of vices. Thus hewanted to be able to show that those who approved of “celibacy,fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence,solitude” were making some kind ofmistake. How did hepropose to do this? By combining a definition with an empiricalresearch program.

The hypothesis which we embrace is plain. It maintains that moralityis determined by sentiment. Itdefines [my italics] virtue tobewhatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator thepleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary. We thenproceed to examine a plain matter of fact, to wit, what actions havethis influence. (Hume 1975 [1748]: 289)

The matter of fact is less plain than Hume suggests, since the“spectator” is anidealized observer, whose moralsense operates at optimum in part because (unlike the rest of us) heis relevantly informed. This means that we cannot simply predict thereactions of the spectator by observing the reactions of mankind,since mankind is sometimes mistaken about the relevant facts. Inparticular, since many people are subject to the delusive glosses ofsuperstition and false religion, their reactions are liable to bedistorted by false beliefs, leading them to approve of what is reallyvicious (such as celibacy, fasting etc) and to disapprove of what isreally right (such as playing whist on Sundays with “modestwomen”). Since a virtue iswhatever mental action or qualitygives to a [suitably qualified]spectator the pleasingsentiment of approbation, and since nobody would approve offasting, celibacy etc if they did not think they would beuseful in procuring anagreeable afterlife, nosuitably qualified person would approve of them, since being suitablyqualified involvesnot being subject to the delusive glossesof superstition and false religion. However Hume’s meta-ethic restspartly on adefinition (which Hume obviously conceives of asreporting a truth of language) and partly on the thesis that peopleshare the same moral sensibility which can therefore be“idealized” to serve as the criterion for virtue. In otherwords Hume’s theory rests on the presupposition that, given the sameinformation, we would approve or disapprove of much the samethings.

What about Russell? His theory, like Hume’s rests on a set of“fundamental propositions and definitions”:

Surveying the acts which arouse emotions of approval ordisapproval, we find that, as a general rule, the acts which areapproved of are those believed likely to have, on the balance, effectsof certain kinds, while opposite effects are expected from acts thatare disapproved of.
Effects that lead to approval are defined as “good”,and those leading to disapproval as “bad”.
An act of which, on the available evidence, the effects are likelyto be better than those of any other act that is possible in thecircumstances, is defined as “right”; any other act is“wrong”. What we “ought” to do is, bydefinition, the act which is right.

These definitions and propositions, if accepted provide a coherentbody of propositions which are true (or false) in the same sense as ifthey were propositions of science. (RoE:161–162/Human Society in Ethics and Politics: 116)

Now (1) is a variant of Sidgwick’s thesis that common-sense moralitiestend to solidify around rules which are believed to have generallybeneficial consequences, where the benefit is cashed out in terms ofhuman welfare. It is a dubious thesis, especially as Russell himselfhad argued that many traditional moralities foster the interests ofthe elite at the expense of other groups—foreigners, women,slaves and serfs. Perhaps Russell wants to exclude such moralities, byrestricting his claim to civilized communities, where“civilized” rules out societies with blatantly elitistmoral codes. Thesis (2) purports to define “good effects”,but it does not statewhose approval is to determinegoodness—people in general, people at their impartial best, orjust the enlightened and well-informed? Without some clarity on thispoint, too many things will wind up as good, since for any likelyeffect there will be some weirdo somewhere who approves of it.Conversely, if beingdisapproved of means that an effect isnot good, the class of good effects may vanish altogether,since for any likely effect there will be some weirdo somewhere whodisapproves of it. Paradoxically given his long career as amoral radical, Russell’s meta-ethic seems to have less critical bitethan Hume’s, at least as regards ends. Hume’s theory allows him totransfer a reputed virtue to the catalogue of vices if people approveof it on the basis of false beliefs. Russell seems to be stuck withwhatever effects people happen to approve of even if their tendency toapprove is based on false beliefs and malodorous passions. But thereal problem lies with (3). It defines “right” and“ought” in consequentialist terms and as we have seen (andas Russell himself had argued many years before) such a definition isclearly false, at least if it is construed as a report of currentusage. It is not a tautology to say that the right thing to do is theaction that seems likely to produce the best consequences, which itwould be if Russell’s definition were correct.

The theory could be improved by retaining (1) and (2) with the classof approvers more carefully specified, but replacing (3) withsomething like:

3a.: The right thing to do is defined as the action which an impartial,informed and non-superstitious spectator would approve of doing.

On the assumption that the impartial spectator would retain thebroadly consequentialist tendencies of our rude ancestors, (1) and(3a) together would allow us to derive:

3b.: The right thing to do is that action which seems likely to producethe best effects.

And this would be a moderately plausible synthetic claim rather than apatently false definition. Moreover, it would provide the basis forthe right kind of utilitarian ethic—at least, it would do so ifthe ethical jury in (2) is specified in such a way as to ensure thatthey approve of the right effects.

But so far from being “true in the same sense as if they werepropositions of science”, the definitions (2) and (3a) aresimply false, at least if they are construed as accounts of what thewords in question actually mean. Russell seems to have been aware ofthis, as the tell-tale phrase “if they are accepted”indicates. Perhaps these definitions should be understood not asattempts to codify current usage but as proposals for linguisticreform (which, was a common dodge on the part of mid-centuryphilosophers when their purported analyses proved false). But in thatcase they can be rejected without making any kind of mistake, alongwith Russell’s entire ethic. And what can be rejected withoutintellectual error can hardly qualify as knowledge.

Russell himself may have agreed. He was not at all sure that therewas such a thing as ethical knowledge and soon reverted tohis earlier emotivism. Within one month of the publication ofHuman Society he was expressing “completeagreement” with the emotivism of A.J. Ayer (RoE:165/Papers 11: 175). The reason, I suspect, is that he cameto see that his definitions of ‘right’ and‘good’ were intellectually optional. Some years later a MrHarold Osborn sent him a book which attempted to provide an objectivebasis for a humanistic ethic. Russell’s letter of thanks points out aproblem: “any system of ethics which claims objectivity can onlydo so by means of a concealed ethical premise, which, if disputed,cannot be demonstrated” (Dear Bertrand Russell: 98).That is precisely what is wrong withHuman Society in Ethics andPolitics.

12. Conclusion

We started out with Russell’s adverse verdict on his own meta-ethics:“I am not, myself, satisfied with what I have read or said onthe philosophical basis of ethics” (RoE:165/Papers 11: 310–11). And we can see in a sense thathe was right. Every meta-ethic that he developed seems to be subjectto insuperable, objections. But although Russell’s writings on ethicsare unsatisfactory, this does not mean that they are worthless.Meta-ethics is a difficult subject and it is hard to get it right. Andif we everare to get it right, we must learn from those,like Russell, who got it interestingly and instructively wrong. In thecourse of his long philosophical career, Russell canvassed most of themeta-ethical options that have dominated debate in the Twentieth andTwenty-First Centuries—naturalism, non-naturalism, emotivism andthe error-theory, and even, to some extent, subjectivism andrelativism. And though none of his theories quite worked out, there ismuch to be learned from his mistakes. Nor is this all. Hisarguments as well as histheories are ofteninteresting and instructive. As we have seen, the ethical corollary tothe argument of “Seems Madam? Nay, It Is,” puts the kyboshon any attempt to resolve Sidgwick’s Dualism of Practical Reason byarguing that although we are distinct beings with different interestsin the world of Appearance, we are, in Reality, all one (§3). Russell’s arguments against objectivism are often quite powerful, andone anticipates Gilbert Harman’s, influential argument that objectivevalues can be safely dismissed since they lack explanatory power (§9.3–9.4). Russell’s damning critique of Moore’s analytic consequentialism ledMoore to abandon the view and perhaps to give up his “undulyanti-reforming” moral conservatism. Moreover Russell’sindirect influence on meta-ethics may have been profoundsince the Open Question Argument, was probably invented to deal withRussell’s ideas. Finally, in the realm of normative ethics, Russelldeveloped a sensible and humane version of consequentialism, which(despite its shaky meta-ethical foundations) is resistant, if notimmune, to many of the standard criticisms, especially ifcombined—as Russell thought it should be combined—with ahealthy dose of political skepticism. It provides a powerful tool forsocial and political criticism, a tool which Russell vigorouslyemployed on a vast range of topics in his writings on practicalethics.

Indeed, I should emphasize that, lengthy as this entry is, I have saidvirtually nothing about the vast bulk of Russell’s writings on moraland political topics. If we are to judge by his literary output,Russell was much more interested in social and political questions andthe rights and wrongs of war and peace than in abstract questions ofethical theory. But, when it comes to Russell’s popular writings,there is no need for an intermediary. His books are easy to get holdof, easy to read, often very funny, and, despite the now datedallusions, easy to understand. Read them yourself and make up your ownmind.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

Note: Many of Russell’s books have been through several editions withdifferent publishers and the consequence is that pagination is notalways uniform. Page numbers cited above are from the editions listedbelow. For the original dates and places of publication, see theBibliography attached to the entry onBertrand Russell.

Books by Russell

2000 [1896],German Social Democracy, Nottingham:Spokesman. Originally published 1896.
1992a [1900],A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy ofLeibniz, London: Routledge (first published in 1900).
1992b [1903],The Principles of Mathematics, London:Routledge. Originally published 1903, second edition with a newintroduction by the author (1937).
1993 [1920],The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism,Nottingham: Spokesman (originally published 1920).
1929,Marriage and Morals, London: George Allen andUnwin: New York: Horace Liveright.
1930,The Conquest of Happiness, London: Allen andUnwin.
1992 [1932],Education and the Social Order, London:Routledge (originally published 1932).
1961 [1935],Religion and Science, New York: OxfordUniversity Press (originally published 1935).
1995 [1938],Power: A New Social Analysis, London:Routledge (originally published 1938).
1992 [1940],An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, London:Routledge (originally published in 1940).
1948,Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, London:George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
1949,Authority and the Individual, London: George Allenand Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
1954,Human Society in Ethics and Politics, London:George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
1959,My Philosophical Development, London: George Allenand Unwin.
1967, 1968, 1969,The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell,3 vols, London: George Allen and Unwin. One volume paperback edition(with introduction by Michael Foot) London: Routledge (2000).

Anthologies of Russell’s Writings

The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903–1959,Egner and Dennon (eds.), London: Routledge, 1992 (originally published1961).
Dear Bertrand Russell, London: George Allen and Unwin,1969.
Fact and Fiction, London: Routledge, 1994 (originallypublished 1961).
In Praise of Idleness, London: Routledge, 1996(originally published 1935).
Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901–1950, London:George Allen and Unwin; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1956.
Mortals and Others, volume I: Bertrand Russell’s AmericanEssays 1931–1935, edited by Harry Ruja, London: Allen andUnwin, 1975.
Mortals and Others, volume II: Bertrand Russell’s AmericanEssays 1931–1935, edited by Harry Ruja, London: Routledge,1998.
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, London: Routledge,1994 (originally published 1918).
[PE],Philosophical Essays, London: Routledge,1994 (originally published in this format 1961 and in an earlierversion with a slightly different selection of essays in 1910).
Portraits From Memory and Other Essays, London: GeorgeAllen and Unwin, 1956.
[RoE],Russell on Ethics, edited by CharlesPigden, London: Routledge, 1999.
[RoM],Russell on Metaphysics, edited by StephenMumford, London: Routledge, 2003.
[RoR],Russell on Religion, edited by LouisGreenspan and Stefan Anderson, London: Routledge, 1999.
The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell:The PrivateYears, 1884–1914, edited by Nicholas Griffin, London:Routledge, 2002.
The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell:The PublicYears, 1914–1970, edited by Nicholas Griffin, London:Routledge, 2001.
Sceptical Essays, London: Routledge, 1977 (originallypublished 1928).
Unpopular Essays, London: George Allen and Unwin; NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1950.
Why I am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion andRelated Subjects, edited by Paul Edwards, London: George Allenand Unwin, 1957.
Yours Faitfully, Bertand Russell:A Lifelong fightfor Peace, Justice and Truth in Letters to the Editor, edited byRay Perkins, Chicago and Lasalle: Open Court, 2002.

The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell

Referred to asPapers in the text.

Vol. 1:Cambridge Essays, 1888–99, London, Boston,Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983.
Vol. 4:Foundations of Logic, 1903–05, London andNew York: Routledge, 1994.
Vol. 6:Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909–13,London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Vol. 8:The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays,1914–19, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986.
Vol. 9:Essays on Language, Mind and Matter,1919–26, London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Vol. 10:A Fresh Look at Empiricism, 1927–42,London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Vol. 11:Last Philosophical Testament, 1943–68,London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Vol. 12:Contemplation and Action, 1902–14, London,Boston, Sydney: George Allen and] Unwin, 1985.
Vol. 13:Prophecy and Dissent, 1914–16, London:Unwin Hyman, 1988.

Secondary Literature

Aiken, Lillian W., 1963,Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy ofMorals, New York: Humanities Press.
Allard, James, 2003, “Idealism in Britain and the UnitedStates” in Baldwin (ed.), 2003: 43–59.
Ayer, A.J., 1936,Language, Truth and Logic,2^nd edition, New York: Dover, 1952.
Baldwin, Thomas (ed.), 2003,The Cambridge History ofPhilosophy 1870–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
Barnes, W.H.F., 1933, “A Suggestion About Value,”Analysis, 1: 45–46.
Blackwell, Kenneth, 1985,The Spinozistic Ethics of BertrandRussell, London: Allen and Unwin.
Bradley, F.H., 1930 [1893],Appearance and Reality, ninthimpression, corrected, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Geach, P.T., 1960, “Ascriptivism”,PhilosophicalReview, 69(2); reprinted in Geach 1972: 250–254.
–––, 1965, “Assertion”,Philosophical Review, 74(4): 449–465; reprinted in Geach1972: 254–269.
–––, 1972,Logic Matters, Oxford:Blackwell.
Griffin, Nicholas (ed.), 2003a,The Cambridge Companion toBertrand Russell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2003b, “Russell’s PhilosophicalBackground” in Griffin 2003a: 84–107.
Harman, Gilbert, 1977,The Nature of Morality, New York:Oxford University Press.
Hume, David, 1978 [1739–40],A Treatise of HumeanNature, 2^nd edition, Selby-Bigge/Nidditch (eds.), Oxford:Oxford University Press.
–––, 1975 [1748],Enquiries Concerning HumanUnderstanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals,3^rd edition, Selby-Bigge/Nidditch (eds.), Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
Joyce, Richard, 2001,The Myth of Morality, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Langford, C.H., 1942, “The Notion of Analysis in Moore’sPhilosophy”, in Schilpp (ed.) 1942: 321–342.
Levy, Paul, 1981,Moore: G.E. Moore and the CambridgeApostles, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, David, 1989, “Dispositional Theories of Value”.Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume,LXIII: 113–137; reprinted in David Lewis, 2000,Papers inEthics and Social Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress: 68–94.
Lillehammer, Hallvard, 2007,Companions in Guilt:Arguments for Ethical Objectivity, Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan.
Mackie, J.L., 1946, “The Refutation of Morals”,Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 24: 77–90.
–––, 1977,Ethics: Inventing Right andWrong, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
McTaggart J.E.M., 1996,Philosophical Studies, Bristol:Thoemmes; originally published in 1934, though the passage quotedcomes from “The Further Determination of the Absolute”privately printed in 1893.
Miller, A., 2013,Contemporary Metaethics: anIntroduction, 2^nd edition, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Moore, G.E., 1903,Principia Ethica, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press; abbreviated asPE.
–––, 1912,Ethics, London: Williams andNorgate; reprinted, with new pagination, London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1966 (all references to this reprint). [The more recentClarendon edition of 2005, with an introduction by William H. Shaw,has the same pagination as the 1966 edition.]
–––, 1942, “A Reply to My Critics,”in Schilpp 1942: 533–678.
–––, 1993,Principia Ethica, revisededition with the Preface to the second edition and other papers,edited by Thomas Baldwin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; firstedition published in 1903.
Nuccetelli, S. and G. Seay (eds.), 2007,Themes from G.E.Moore: New Essays in Epistemology and Ethics, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
Perkins, Ray, 2007, “Russell’s Meta-ethics,”Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies, 26:179–184.
–––, 2012, “Was Russell’s Error Theory aMistake?”Russell: The Journal of Bertrand RussellStudies, 32: 30–41.
–––, 2019, “Bertrand Russell’s MoralPhilosophy,” in Wahl (ed.) 2019: 334–360.
Phillips, Paul, 2013,Contesting the Moral High Ground:Popular Moralists in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, Montreal:McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Pigden, Charles R., 2003, “Bertrand Russell: MoralPhilosopher or Unphilosophical Moralist?” in Griffin 2003a:450–474.
–––, 2007, “Desiring to Desire: Russell,Lewis and G.E. Moore,” in Nuccetelli and Seay 2007:244–260.
–––, 2019, “Two Arguments for Emotivismand a Methodological Moral,”Russell: The Journal ofBertrand Russell Studies, 39(1): 5–35.
Potter, Michael K., 2006,Bertrand Russell’s Ethics,Bristol: Thoemmes.
Prior, A.N., 1949,Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Oxford:Clarendon Press.
Raphael, D.D. (ed.), 1991 [BM],The BritishMoralists, 2 volumes, Indianapolis: Hackett.
Reid, Thomas, 1843,Essays on the Active Powers of the HumanMind, edited by G.N. Wright, London: Thomas Tegg; available in apaperback reprint from Kessinger Publishing.
Ross, W.D., 1930,The Right and the Good, Oxford:Clarendon Press.
–––, 1939,The Foundations of Ethics,Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ryan, Alan, 1988,Bertrand Russell: a Political Life,Harmondsworth: Allen Lane
Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), 1942,The Philosophy of G.E.Moore (The Library of Living Philosophers), Evanston: NorthwesternUniversity.
––– (ed.), 1944,The Philosophy of BertrandRussell (The Library of Living Philosophers), Chicago:Northwestern University.
Schulz, Bart, 2004,Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schroeder, Mark, 2010,Non-Cognitivism in Ethics, London:Routledge.
Sidgwick, Henry, 1982,The Methods of Ethics,Indianapolis, Hackett; this is a reprint of the 7^th editionof 1907, first published in 1874.
Soames, Scott, 2003,Philosophical Analysis in the TwentiethCentury, vol. 1:The Dawn of Analysis, Princeton:Princeton University Press.
Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1985,Ethics, in Curley ed. andtrans.,The Collected Works of Spinoza (Volume 1), Princeton:Princeton University Press.
Stevenson, C., 1937, “The Emotive Meaning of EthicalTerms,”Mind, 46: 14–31.
Stevenson, Charles, 1944,Ethics and Language, New Haven:Yale University Press.
Stove, David, 1991,The Plato Cult and Other PhilosophicalFollies, Oxford: Blackwell.
Tait, Katherine, 1975,My Father Bertrand Russell, NewYork: Harcourt, Bruce Jovanovich.
Urmson, J.O., 1968,The Emotive Theory of Ethics, London:Hutchinson.
Wahl, Russell (ed.), 2019, The Bloomsbury Companion toBertrand Russell, London: Bloomsbury.
Warnock, Mary, 1978,Ethics Since 1900, 3^rdedn., Edinburg, VA: Axios Institute Press.

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