Principia Ethica

Principia Ethica is a 1903 book by the British philosopher G. E. Moore, a vastly influential work. Moore's insistence on the indefinability of "good" and his exposition of the so-called naturalistic fallacy were long regarded as path-breaking advances in moral philosophy, though they have been seen as less impressive and durable than Moore's contributions in other fields.[1]



Contents
[hide]  *1 Summary  ==Summary[ edit] == Moore insists that "good" is indefinable, and provides an exposition of what he calls the "naturalistic fallacy."[1]  He defends the objectivity and multiplicity of values, arguing that knowledge of values cannot be derived from knowledge of facts, but only from intuition of the goodness of such states of affairs as beauty, pleasure, friendship and knowledge. In Moore's view, right acts are those producing the most good.[2]  However, he also believed that there are only various different sorts of things that are good, including knowledge and aesthetic experience. Moore argues against consequentialism. Moore's argument begins from the claim that "ordinary people" think they ought to do what they promised to do, not because of the probable consequences of breaking their promise, but simply because they promised. In thinking this way, they are not considering their moral duties in terms of consequences. The consequences of the actions lie in the future, but they are thinking more about the past (that is, about the promises they made).[3] ==Reception[ edit] == Principia Ethica helped to convince many people that claims about morality cannot be derived from statements of fact.[4]  Clive Bell considered that through his opposition to Spencer and Mill, Moore had freed his generation from utilitarianism.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-5" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[5]  Principia Ethica was the bible of the Bloomsbury Group,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-6" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[6]  and the philosophical foundation of their aesthetic values. Leonard Woolf considered that it offered a way of continuing living in a meaningless world.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-7" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[7]  Moore's aesthetic idea of the organic whole provided artistic guidance for modernists like Virginia Woolf,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-8" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[8]  and fed into Bell's concept of Significant form.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-9" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[9]
 * 2 Reception
 * 3 See also
 * 4 References
 * 5 Further reading
 * 6 External links

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">Principia Ethica also had a powerful influence on modernism through the anti-empiricism of T. E. Hulme.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-10" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[10]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">Socioculturally, a line can be traced from Principia Ethica to the liberal thought of Roy Jenkins,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-11" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[11]  as evidenced in his 1959 pamphlet Is Britain Civilised? and actuated in his subsequent Home Office reforms which established much of the institutional framework for the permissive society in England.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-12" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[12]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">Moore's ethical intuitionism has been seen as opening the road for noncognitive views of morality, such as emotivism.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-13" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[13]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">C. P. Snow sketched the enduring influence of Moore on his followers' group-belief in pleasure: "They tried to get the maximum of pleasure out of their personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometrical figures, well then, one accepted that too....If you didn't believe in pleasure, you couldn't be civilized".<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-14" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[14]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls compares Moore's views to those of Hastings Rashdall in his The Theory of Good and Evil (1907).<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-15" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[15]  Moore's views have also been compared to those of Franz Brentano, Max Scheler, and Nicolai Hartmann.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Schneewindp153_2-1" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[2]

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">Principia Ethica has been seen by Geoffrey Warnock as less impressive and durable than Moore's contributions in other fields.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Warnock_1-2" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[1]  John Maynard Keynes, an early devotee of Principia Ethica, would in his 1938 paper 'My Early Beliefs' repudiate as Utopian Moore's underlying belief in human reasonableness and decency.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-16" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[16] ==See also<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] ==