Background
Moore, George Edward was born in 1873 in London.
Moore, George Edward was born in 1873 in London.
University of Cambridge University, 1892-1896.
Lecturer in Philosophy at University of Cambridge. 191125, Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic, 1925-1939, University of Cambridge. Editor of Mind, 1921-1947.
Fellow of the British Academy, 1918. Order of Merit, 1951.
When Moore was a student the idealism of such philosophers as Bradley and Bosanquet was dominant in British philosophy. It is no surprise, then, that Moore’s earliest published work shows considerable sympathy with this movement. However, his famous 1903 paper ‘The refutation of idealism’ marked a break with it, and his work over the next few years, along with that of Bertrand Russell, was a sustained criticism of the idealist movement. This work is often thought to put Moore squarely in the empiricist camp, and much of it is certainly an attempt to clarify an empiricist epistemology. However, the limits of this empiricism are clearly visible in his ethical work, where he held that goodness was a non-natural, irreducible property, the object of direct, non-sensory knowledge. Much of Moore’s later work was concerned with the scepticism that characterized the empiricist movement from Hume to Russell. In opposition to this, he defended the view that most of the things that we think we know we really do know. This gave rise to the popular image of Moore as the philosopher of plain common sense. There is, however, little to sustain that image in Moore’s first published book. Principia Ethica (1903). It defended a consequentialist theory of ethics, holding that the fundamental concept of ethics is the good, and that right actions are those which maximize the good. A popular version of such a theory is the utilitarianism of Mill and Bentham, the doctrine that marries consequentialism with hedonism, and holds that the right action is always that which maximizes happiness. Moore, however, ferociously rejected the hedonism that he found in utilitarianism and held instead that goodness is to be found in a number of different things, but preeminently in the experience of personal affection and the contemplation of beauty. He held that it is impossible to give any argument as to what are the ultimate goods; it is self-evident, and we know directly, without argument, what they are. What actions will maximize the good could not be directly known, however; this is a matter of calculation, and so Moore rejected the type of intuitionism which held that we could directly know, without argument or calculation, what are the right acts or the correct moral rules. That ‘the fundamental principles of Ethics must be self-evident’ Moore thought followed from a more basic claim: the fundamental principles of ethics cannot be inferred from any further principles; they are true, but there is no reason why they are true. This view was part of what was to become the most influential aspect of Principia Ethica: its attack on naturalism in ethics. Moore was never completely clear just what he had in mind by talking of naturalism, and he gave a number of different explanations. But we may say that it was, in a general way, any attempt to reduce evaluative notions to non-evaluative ones. The attempt to do so Moore baptized ‘the Naturalistic Fallacy', and it seemed to Moore, and to many others, that it followed from his diagnosis that ethical propositions could not be inferred in any way from nonethical ones. A concern with this issue dominated moral philosophy in the English-speaking world for more than half a century following the publication of Moore’s book. Many thought that Moore’s argument had captured the essential autonomy of ethics. Others, however, thought that it rendered ethics a suspect endeavour, since it seemed to put it largely beyond the pale of rational argument. Moore’s subsequent writing on ethics had nothing like the influence of Principia Ethica. H>s Ethics (1912) was a minute statement of utilitarianism, and an equally minute examination o some objections to it. It defends a consequential ist position, though mainly by asserting that itlS self-evidently correct, a type of argument that has had little force against generations of philosophers who thought that it is self-evidently incorrect. Once he had broken with the idealist traditionMoore’s dominating concern was to understan the nature of sense data and their relation to tn material world. Outside of ethics, it is his work i° this general area that was most influentialn began this in a series of lectures given in 1910", an his very last works still show a concern with t problem. Roughly speaking, sense data might thought to be identical with material objectswhich would yield a theory of perception oft known as direct realism; or they might be thoug to be separate, mental entities which represen material objects; or it might be that there are no material objects independent of our sense dataand that to know a proposition about a maten °bject is merely to know that if certain conditions Were satisfied then certain sense data would be e*perienced. Moore analysed these types of theory, over and over again, in er>ormous detail in such articles as ‘A defence of common sense’ and ‘Proof of an external world’. These papers, like nearly all of Moore’s work, are characterized by an obsessive concern simply to be clear about just what philosophers have meani when they have made such typically Philosophical claims as that we can never really know anything about the external world, or that hme or space is unreal. The painstaking analysis ln such papers gave rise to the popular view that analysis was an end in itself for Moore, but this Was not so. He saw it merely as the necessary groundwork for arriving at the truth. Moore did not arrive speedily at many Philosophical truths: about the relation of sense tjata to external objects, for instance, he did not °rm a view until 1953 and even then he did no n,0re than reject direct realism. On the question of whether we could have knowledge of the external w°rld, however. Moore formed an opinion very ear(yIn his 1905-1906 lecture The nature and reality objects of perception’, Moore submitted to inordinately detailed examination the meaning of the question whether ^ can have any knowledge of the external world, n Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953) he Degan to work towards an answer, one which, in I'Jje way or another, he held to for the rest of his ae: surely, the claim that I know some things a °ut the external world is more certain than any argument that might be given to show it wrong. ls Position found its most famous exposition on, he c aimed to disprove the proposition that we Cannot know the existence of external objects by Pointing out to the audience his two hands. This Vpified what came to be thought of as the uaracteristic Moorean ‘appeal to common sense’. There has been much debate as to what T0rcc—if any—this argumentative strategy had. 0 some, it has seemed that Moore was doing no more ’han merely denying what philosophers have g*Ven arguments for. Others have thought that he as trying to show that such philosophical claims o'ated the rules of ordinary language. It is fair to y ’hat Moore himself was never clear in his own lnd just what was the force of his arguments. Whatever their precise force, however, they had enormous influence, transforming the face of epistemology. Moore was not a great prose stylist, once guilelessly writing an 82-word sentence in which 46 of the words are ‘so’ or ‘and’. His writing, however, always aspired to, and usually achieved, a remarkable simplicity and clarity.