G.E. Moore

G.E. Moore a British philosopher (1873-1958), a founder of analytic philosophy and a defender of common sense and moral realism. His careful attention to the meaning of ordinary language and his open-question argument against the definition of goodness in natural terms made him one of the most influential teachers and thinkers of his time at Cambridge.

Life and Education

George Edward Moore was born in London in 1873 and educated at Dulwich College and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied classics before turning to philosophy. He became a fellow of Trinity and a lecturer, and he spent almost his entire academic life at Cambridge, succeeding Bertrand Russell in the chair of philosophy and later editing the journal Mind.

He was associated with the Bloomsbury group and was a close friend of Russell, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, who admired him as a moral example as well as a thinker. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy and received the Order of Merit in 1951. He died in Cambridge in 1958.

Moore was known for his personal simplicity and probity, and for the extraordinary care with which he examined even the smallest philosophical question. His influence was as much through his manner of doing philosophy as through his published conclusions.

The Refutation of Idealism

Moore's early work was a sustained attack on the idealist philosophy that dominated British universities at the end of the nineteenth century. In his paper The Refutation of Idealism he argued that the idealist claim that to be is to be perceived rests on a confusion, since it treats the object of an experience as if it were identical with the experience itself.

He defended instead a common-sense realism, holding that material things exist independently of being perceived and that we know a great many such things with certainty. In A Defence of Common Sense he listed propositions that he was more certain of than any philosophical argument against them, such as that he had two hands and that the earth had existed for many years.

His method was to test a philosophical theory by its consequences for ordinary beliefs and to prefer the obvious to the paradoxical whenever the argument for the paradox was less certain than the belief it contradicted. This appeal to common sense became a hallmark of analytic philosophy in its early years.

Principia Ethica and the Open Question

Moore's Principia Ethica, published in 1903, is one of the founding works of twentieth-century moral philosophy. In it he argued that good is a simple, indefinable property, not to be identified with pleasure, desire or any natural quality. To define the good in such terms commits what he called the naturalistic fallacy.

His argument turns on the open question. If someone says that pleasure is good, it always remains a meaningful question whether pleasure is really good, whereas if good meant the same as pleasure the question would be closed. The fact that the question stays open shows that good cannot be reduced to any natural property.

He was, however, an intuitionist in ethics, holding that fundamental moral truths are known directly rather than by inference. His insistence on the autonomy of the moral predicate and his method of close conceptual analysis influenced later meta-ethics, including the work of the emotivists and their critics.

Analysis and Philosophical Method

Moore is credited with helping to establish the analytic method that gives analytic philosophy its name. He approached questions by asking what exactly a proposition means and by breaking complex notions into simpler ones. His papers on perception, on the concept of external objects and on the nature of propositions are models of patient clarification.

He engaged closely with the work of Russell and of Wittgenstein, and his essays record his responses to both. His inquiry into the senses and the problem of the external world influenced debates about perception, scepticism and the foundations of knowledge for decades.

He also contributed to the theory of value and to the analysis of the right and the good, distinguishing what is good in itself from what is good as a means. His careful distinctions gave moral philosophy a vocabulary that later writers refined and contested.

Influence and Legacy

Moore's influence on British philosophy was enormous, and it operated largely through his teaching and conversation. A generation of philosophers learned from him to value clarity, honesty and the piecemeal examination of particular problems, and his students carried his method across the English-speaking world.

His work in ethics set the agenda for meta-ethics, and the naturalistic fallacy and the open-question argument remain standard references in the subject. His defence of common sense shaped the realism of later analytic philosophers and their confidence that ordinary beliefs deserve serious weight.

He is remembered as a thinker of great integrity and as one of the founders of a tradition. Though his positive doctrines were widely criticised, the standards of clarity and rigour he exemplified became the common property of analytic philosophy, and his name remains associated with the careful analysis of meaning.

See also

• Meta-ethics
• Naturalistic fallacy
• Common sense realism
• Principia Ethica