Phil 160

Principia EthicaBy G. E. Moore

Defining ‘Good’

• Moore seeks to give an account of what the good is.

• A reasonable place to start is providing an account of what the word ‘good’ means.

Obstacles to a definition of ‘good’

• When one is asking for what it means for something to be morally good, they are looking for reasons for a thing to be good. They are not looking for the common usage of the term ‘good’ such as one might find in the dictionary.

• So the good is not to be defined in terms of its common usage.

Good as a simple concept

• Complex concepts are concepts that are composed of parts. A mousetrap for example is composed of a plank, a lever, a latch, and a spring, so a mousetrap is complex.

• A Simple concept is one that is not composed of parts. Yellow is simple because there are no parts to it. Moore contends that Good is simple in the same way as is Yellow.

• So ‘good’ may not be defined in terms of its parts, because it doesn’t have any.

Distinction between good things and The Good

• Sometimes when we define things, we do so by example.

• Moore contends that when we find examples of things that are good, like intelligence or loyalty, we are finding good things, but not finding ‘The Good’ because The Good has no constituent parts.

• So the good cannot be defined by example.

Reduction

• Often, to define a word, we substitute a different word or phrase for it in the same context to see if the context remains the same.

• Some philosophers propose that the good just is pleasure, or the satisfaction of second-order desires.

• Moore, to deal with these proposals advances what has become known as the “open question argument”.

The Open Question Argument• If someone claims that the good just is pleasure, it

seems like a sensible question to ask, “Is pleasure good?”.

• In this sense the question of whether pleasure is good is an open question, indicating that pleasure is not a straightforward synonym of the good.

• If it were, we should think that the phrases “pleasure is good” and “pleasure is pleasure” both meant the same thing, and they clearly do not

• So the good cannot be reductively defined.

Moore’s positions

• Non-naturalism: the good as a notion is amenable to clarification only in moral terms, not in any naturalistic way.

• Intuitionism: the good is not only basic and indefinable, but it is primitive. That is, the good is intuitively understood by us, and is a concept that we base other definitions on, not something that we can define.