“It may be that life is only worth living, because it enables us to study metaphysics—is a necessary means thereto.”
— G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica
I have recently read the Principia Ethica, by G.E. Moore. I disagreed with the book, so I thought to write a blog post recording the ways in which I did so.
I will quote freely from the book in this blog post, so as to more clearly show my opposition; I will not bother with page numbers, since I will ensure that the quotation can always be easily found in the book by searching for it with a word lookup in the Project Gutenberg edition, which will always be used here.
0. Contents
1. The logic of desire
1.1. Desire to desire
1.2. Cause of rational desires
1.3. Meaning of good
1.4. Natural property
1.5. Prevalence of hedonism
2. Worth of things
2.1. Beauty
2.2. What ought to be
3. Worth of actions
4. Moore vs. Russell
4.1. The good, as opposed to “good”
4.2. Intuition
4.3. Emphases
1. The logic of desire
Rational desire is opposed to sensitive desire. Rational desire is the desire had by the rational appetite, i.e., the human will. Sensitive desire is a desire had by the sensitive appetite; the distinction between the concupiscible and irascible appetites is not relevant here.
1.1. Desire to desire
We do not choose what we love. More precisely, we do not choose to love anything, or to desire it; to desire or not to desire something, when we speak of rational desire, is not immediately a matter of choice.
We may say that we “desire to desire” some things, and this can be one of three things; we can have a rational desire to have a sensitive desire, a sensitive desire to have a rational desire, or we may have a rational desire to have more knowledge about something, which we have reason to expect would create in us a greater rational desire. There are probably no sensitive “metadesires” either.
1.2. Cause of rational desires
Rather, desire is caused by a certain understanding of an object; the will desires whatever is proposed to it “under the aspect of good”, which is really the same with being; the measure in which an object is understood will, therefore, determine how much it is desired.
It may be thought that this is a denial of the freedom of the will, but there is still room for free choice here. First, while it is generally irrational to choose a lesser good when a greater one is available, we sometimes do not have enough knowledge to decide that one thing is superior to another, and yet we must choose, irrationally, all the same. Second, the will may choose whether we act upon sensitive desires or resist them, and it is the willpower that solves conflicts between sensitive desires with rational ones. ¶ I believe that when Thomas said that the will “does not desire of necessity all things whatsoever it desires”, he referred chiefly to choice; I also believe that any developed account of choice must regard it as a choice of which desires to act upon, and not as a choice of what to desire.
Now, since desire is caused by understanding, and understanding can be correct or mistaken, so can desire, and in the same way. A mistaken desire is a desire that is ultimately founded on a misapprehension of fact or a fallacious inference. A correct desire is a desire that is caused by correct apprehension or sound inference.
1.3. Meaning of good
Given the fact that goodness and being are the same in reality, it is impossible, even in principle, to know that something is good without knowing what it is, and the reverse is possible only through imperfect knowledge. Given the account of desire just given, to think that something is good is to (rationally) desire it, insofar as it is good.
So, I disagree with Moore when he says the following:
It does seem to be true that we hardly ever think a thing good, and never very decidedly, without at the same time having a special attitude of feeling or will towards it; though it is certainly not the case that this is true universally.
No— it is true universally. And given what I said so far, generally, I disagree with Moore’s central thesis, that “good” is an indefinable, simple notion. Since there are correct desires, and the correctness of a desire is objective, “good” may be fittingly defined as “the object of correct rational desire.”
This is what is captured by saying that “the good in all its senses is the desirable, and the evil is the undesirable”, as Hastings’s Encyclopædia said. Moore correctly points out that “‘desirable’ does not mean ‘able to be desired’ as ‘visible’ means ‘able to be seen’”, but he incorrectly defines desirable as “what it is good to desire”, which is not a good definition.
Of course, if something is objectively good, then to desire it would be an object of correct rational desire; it must be noted that, given what was said, we cannot know that something is desirable without having rational desire for it ourselves.
That the good is the same as the object of correct rational desire is also betrayed, I think, by such expressions as Moore’s description of personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments as “the rational ultimate end of human action”, and Sidgwick’s expression, quoted by Moore, that some things are “only reasonably to be sought” by men insofar as they lead to either excellence or perfection. ¶ That to have the wrong desires is ultimately the result of an irrationality of the same kind as any other – either a misapprehension of objective fact or a fallacious inference – is the core of my opinion, and I believe it is strange to talk about “irrationality” when the mistake is ultimately about “intuitions” which, regarding their truth or falsehood, are totally independent of all the rest of human knowledge.
This notion of goodness perfectly passes by Moore’s famous “open question argument”. To ask whether it is good that the objects that we correctly and rationally desire are those objects and not others would end up being a question about scepticism – are there some things which it is impossible not to be misled about, because we would be perfectly justified in a wrong conclusion? If so, then, of course, we can correctly and rationally think that something is good without it being good. I think all forms of scepticism are obviously false, but I cannot show this at this time.
It helps to consider the idea of a “good man”, who always acts rightly. Given that there are correct and mistaken desires, then it is true either that the perfectly good man always acts upon correct desires, or that, sometimes, his actions are a result of mistaken desires; and the latter opinion is intolerable. So, the good course of action must always be identical with the most desirable course. If it were not, it would be fair to ask such stupid questions as, “why should we be moral?”
1.4. Natural property
Goodness, as I have defined it, and given the real identity of good and being, is probably a “natural property”, but I am not sure.
Which among the properties of natural objects are natural properties and which are not? For I do not deny that good is a property of certain natural objects: certain of them, I think, are good; and yet I have said that ‘good’ itself is not a natural property. Well, my test for these too also concerns their existence in time. Can we imagine ‘good’ as existing by itself in time, and not merely as a property of some natural object? For myself, I cannot so imagine it, whereas with the greater number of properties of objects—those which I call the natural properties—their existence does seem to me to be independent of the existence of those objects.
What the hell is he on about? I seriously have no clue.
And I think that this is unnecessary, anyway. I think that non-naturalism ought to be identified with Moore’s central thesis, that goodness is indefinable; deciding which things to call “natural” is not productive. For what it’s worth, I think that everything that exists is natural, since the universe may also be called nature, interchangeably.
1.5. Prevalence of hedonism
Moore says that the “prevalence of Hedonism” is due mainly to what he calls the “naturalistic fallacy”, which means to disagree with his opinion that goodness is indefinable. Hedonism is, in fact, more rational than Moore’s opinion, because while it is borne out of a mistake, it is less egregious a mistake than Moore’s.
The hedonist, while recognizing perfectly that the good must be the object of correct rational desires, undertakes a mistaken analysis of human action, and his error follows as a result. To repeat matter from my blog post on the passions, there are two possible analyses of desire in relation to pleasure:
A1. (a) For various reasons, men desire certain things. (b) When they attain those things, the desire is fulfilled. (c) Because of this, they are pleased.
A2. (a) For various reasons, certain things cause pleasure in men. (b) Men expect that, when they attain those things, they will be pleased. (c) Because of this, they desire them.
As I have said, “in both analyses we have various reasons leading men to desire various things and then seek them, at the attaining of which they are pleased. Neither is more compatible with experience than the other.”
However, analysis A2 is rather fitting to sensitive desires, if any, while A1 best fits rational ones. Since rational desires are caused by knowledge, and therefore have intellectual “reasons” of various kinds – since goodness is a transcendental, not a category – A1 is the only correct way to describe rational desire, and it is only that which is desired with good reason that ought to be called good. Pleasure is not always good, in this sense.
But because the attainment of our desires nevertheless pleases us, to attain the good, especially our ultimate good, will be something pleasing; and it is for this reason that the last end of man is called “happiness” even by non-hedonistic ethical theories, such as Aristotle’s and Thomas Aquinas’s.
While hedonists analyze action wrongly, at least they analyze it at all. They recognize that the good must be that which is, correctly, rationally desired, and this is commendable. Moore thinks no reasons can be given, founded in our knowledge, why we should desire some thing; the good is only postulated by the moralist, and if the ordinary actor has any knowledge of it, it is through such a made-up, ad-hoc faculty as the “moral intuition”, which was introduced by the “ethical intuitionists” that followed upon Moore’s doctrines.
I think my notion of goodness also passes by the SEP’s interpretation of the open question argument, that the notion of goodness will “at least seem conceptually open to competent users of moral terms”. With such large schools as Aristotelians and hedonists on my side, I am confident in thinking simply that the people to whom the question seems open, given my definition, are simply not competent users of moral terms. Moore and the intuitionists certainly aren’t.
2. Worth of things
It is obvious, in the first place, that we cannot say that everything natural is good, except perhaps in virtue of some metaphysical theory, such as I shall deal with later.
I believe that all being is good, and that evil is privation. This is a metaphysical theory, and I think he has not “dealt with it” so as to prove it wrong. As Moore puts it, “the question ‘What is real?’ has some logical bearing upon the question ‘What is good?’”, and, “Ethics must be based on Metaphysics”. As I said in §1.4, I think “natural”, as Moore uses it, is a vacuous term.
2.1. Beauty
Moore took exception with Sidgwick’s opinion that no one would “consider it rational to aim at the production of beauty in external nature, apart from any possible contemplation of it by human beings.” I think Sidgwick is right, if his opinion is taken to refer to beauty itself; but beauty is the appearance of which goodness is the corresponding reality. It is certainly rational to aim at making the world better in ways that will not improve the life of human beings, if doing so is possible.
But then I do not think that this means that such improvement is “not only a means to our end, but also itself a part thereof.” As Thomas correctly said, “there are certain individual goods which have not a necessary connection with happiness, because without them a man can be happy”; and these are always such goods as we may, rationally, either choose or not choose, according to our estimation of alternative uses of our time. Only man’s last end, happiness, must always be sought.
2.2. What ought to be
They profess that Metaphysics is a necessary basis for an answer to that other and primary ethical question: What ought to be? What is good in itself? That no truth about what is real can have any logical bearing upon the answer to this question has been proved in Chapter I. To suppose that it has, implies the naturalistic fallacy.
The naturalistic fallacy is not a fallacy, but simply a disagreement with Moore’s opinion; he has proved nothing. The question, “what is good in itself?”, obtains, from me, all being as an answer, insofar as it exists.
I think the question, “what ought to be?”, is meaningless in the abstract. Sure, given a certain human being, it is clear that he ought to achieve his natural end, happiness, which Thomas says is to be found in God alone; but there is no answer to how the universe ought to be as a whole. This is necessarily the case, because the created universe, as such, could always be made better; there is always a better possible world. So there is no question of which world ought to have been; the divine will was perfectly free, and rational, to have made this world instead of a better one. ¶ I also see no reason why humans cannot always make the world better, given enough time and effort; and I do not think that they ought always to improve it as much as possible, since to do this does not pertain to their last end.
Moore says that writers “seem frequently to confuse the proposition that one particular existing thing is good, with the proposition that the existence of that kind of thing would be good, wherever it might occur.” Now, given any being, its existence really would be good wherever it occurred, in one sense; but it might hinder the good of other beings. If a tapeworm materialized inside my body, for instance, its existence would be good in itself, but its existence there would deprive me of my proper function, and so be an evil to me.
3. Worth of actions
In other posts, I might say “value” to mean exclusively “economic value” or “social utility”, and even oppose it to the “moral worth” of actions; but here I follow Moore.
Moore, in various places, asserts that both an action and its consequences may have “intrinsic value”, and that an action is made better by both things. I quote at length, breaking up his long paragraph in natural places.
In asserting that the action is the best thing to do, we assert that it together with its consequences presents a greater sum of intrinsic value than any possible alternative. And this condition may be realised by any of the three cases:—
(a) If the action itself has greater intrinsic value than any alternative, whereas both its consequences and those of the alternatives are absolutely devoid either of intrinsic merit or intrinsic demerit; or
(b) if, though its consequences are intrinsically bad, the balance of intrinsic value is greater than would be produced by any alternative; or
(c) if, its consequences being intrinsically good, the degree of value belonging to them and it conjointly is greater than that of any alternative series.
In short, to assert that a certain line of conduct is, at a given time, absolutely right or obligatory, is obviously to assert that more good or less evil will exist in the world, if it be adopted, than if anything else be done instead. But this implies a judgment as to the value both of its own consequences and of those of any possible alternative. And that an action will have such and such consequences involves a number of causal judgments.
I believe that consequences are never morally relevant. Therefore, the case (a) always holds; it is always true, for any action, that “both its consequences and those of the alternatives are absolutely devoid either of intrinsic merit or intrinsic demerit.”
This may be thought to contradict my earlier account of goodness, if no attention is paid to the difference between moral good and metaphysical good. The latter is identical with being, and is what determines whether a desire is a proper or an improper term of action. The former is derived from it, but applies only to action, and regards whether the action is consistent with a given actor’s last end. A morally better action is metaphysically better, considered as an action, but it will not always leave the world metaphysically better as a whole.
So, technically, consequences may be better or worse absolutely speaking, but to use Moore’s words, there is no intrinsic merit in causing good consequences. It all depends upon the action that leads to them.
I agree with Thomas’s doctrine that the goodness of actions derives from their object, end, and circumstance. Actions are better or worse because they make the actor better or worse, and this depends on their (intrinsic, teleological) consistency with his natural end. It happens that to desire the attainment of a bad object, or of a good object in an improper circumstance, is inconsistent with the natural end of man’s rational faculties, so these matter too.
Moore gives no reason to think that consequences are relevant to action in themselves, and I can think of none. It seems irrational to consider consequences to have any moral value.
Furthermore, regardless of the kind of value we are talking about, let us not carry into ethics the errors which were already recognized as such in economics. Value, of whichever kind, is necessarily ordinal. It admits of greater and less; so, for any given three things, we desire the first more than the second and the second more than the third, and (so) the first more than the third. But regarding goodness, value, utility, desire, or virtue, there can be no unique assignment of numbers which can be meaningfully subjected to all the operations of arithmetic. There is technically no such thing as a measure of value, a sum of value, nor for that matter a product of value or average value. ¶ And this is because the soul, being simple, has no extension; subjective states, being intensive, cannot admit of any quantitative determination in extensive terms, i.e., measurement, even with perfect knowledge of all minds.
4. Moore vs. Russell
Russell gave a better, shorter, and clearer account of ethics, along the same lines as Moore, in his essay The Elements of Ethics. I recommend reading it instead of the Principia Ethica, if you still really want to be a non-naturalist. (Or maybe there is better material nowadays, now that we have Huemer and stuff. I don’t know, I haven’t read him.) But because it is more complete in this shorter space, I thought it helpful to distinguish some things that Russell affirms from some of the things that Moore affirms.
4.1. The good, as opposed to “good”
Moore says:
I do not mean to say that the good, that which is good, is thus indefinable; if I did think so, I should not be writing on Ethics, for my main object is to help towards discovering that definition. It is just because I think there will be less risk of error in our search for a definition of ‘the good,’ that I am now insisting that good is indefinable.
Moore thinks that you can never find the meaning of “good”, since he was never able to figure out non-circularly what “desirable” meant. But he thinks you can decide that certain things are good, and others not.
Furthermore, he phrases this as that you can define it. So I think he would easily allow that a moralist could postulate such general propositions as that “all pleasure is good” and “all pain is evil”. Certainly he seems to take less issue with that part of hedonism than with the idea that only pleasure is good.
While Russell admits that such a proposition could in theory be postulated, his concern with making a more complete system, rather than mere “Prolegomena to any future Ethics that can possibly pretend to be scientific”, leads him to immediately emphasize that he can think of no such proposition:
There might, as far as mere logic goes, be some general proposition to the effect ‘whatever exists, is good’, or ‘whatever exists, is bad’, or ‘what will exist is better (or worse) than what does exist’. But no such general proposition can be proved by considering the meaning of ‘good’, and no such general proposition can be arrived at empirically from experience, since we do not know the whole of what does exist, nor yet of what has existed or will exist. We cannot therefore arrive at such a general proposition, unless it is itself self-evident, or follows from some self-evident proposition, which must (to warrant the consequence) be of the same general kind. But as a matter of fact, there is, so far as I can discover, no self-evident proposition as to the goodness or badness of all that exists or has existed or will exist. It follows that, from the fact that the existent world is of such and such a nature, nothing can be inferred as to what things are good or bad. (§9¶1)
4.2. Intuition
Moore’s opinion should be rather called “non-naturalism” than “intuitionism”, since while he did speak of “intuitions”, it was in a peculiar sense:
I would wish it observed that, when I call such propositions ‘Intuitions,’ I mean merely to assert that they are incapable of proof; I imply nothing whatever as to the manner or origin of our cognition of them.
Russell, since he could not leave the question of cognition unaddressed, was much happier to affirm the existence of a peculiar ad-hoc faculty for morals, as intuitionists would. Conveniently, he thought that this faculty could learn about both of the features of action that Moore thought were morally relevant, that is, their intrinsic value and the value of their consequences:
In judging of conduct we find at the outset two widely divergent methods, of which one is advocated by some moralists, the other by others, while both are practised by those who have no ethical theory. One of these methods, which is that advocated by the utilitarians, judges the rightness of an act by relation to the goodness or badness of its consequences. The other method, advocated by intuitionists, judges by the approval or disapproval of the moral sense or conscience. I believe that it is necessary to combine both theories in order to get a complete account of right and wrong. (§12¶3)
4.3. Emphases
Russell also goes at length on other things, in which it is not as easy to confuse him with Moore, since Moore simply did not talk about them. If you read only The Elements of Ethics, as I recommended, it is better simply to suppose that the only thesis of the Principia Ethica is that which is in the second section of Russell’s essay, that goodness is indefinable; the rest, at least in Moore’s book, is unimportant decoration.
The emphasis placed by Russell on the related assertion that there are positive evils, and therefore the denial of the privation-of-good doctrine, is worth noting here, though. Moore simply takes it as a matter of course throughout the Principia Ethica that there are certainly very many things which are “positively bad.” Russell, on the other hand, thought to spend more time refuting the absence-of-good doctrine, even taken as something about “the good” rather than as about “good”.
And by “refute”, I do not in this case mean “prove wrong”, but rather simply to “deny”, or more accurately, to whine about it:
The notion that non-existence is what is meant by ‘evil’ is refuted exactly as the previous definitions of ‘good’ were refuted. And the belief that, as a matter of fact, nothing that exists is evil, is one which no one would advocate except a metaphysician defending a theory. Pain and hatred and envy and cruelty are surely things that exist, and are not merely the absence of their opposites; but the theory should hold that they are indistinguishable from the blank unconsciousness of an oyster. Indeed, it would seem that this whole theory has been advanced solely because of the unconscious bias in favour of optimism, and that its opposite is logically just as tenable. We might urge that evil consists in existence, and good in non-existence; that therefore the sum-total of existence is the worst thing there is, and that only non-existence is good. Indeed, Buddhism does seem to maintain some such view. It is plain that this view is false; but logically it is no more absurd than its opposite. (§10¶5)
Russell misunderstood the theory, of course. Pain is always a sign of some evil, either in reality or in sensation; but given that there is evil in reality, it is rather a good thing to feel it, as Thomas says about sorrow. This could not possibly allow that pain is identical with nothingness, since in that case it could never be good; and the evil of which it is a sign is certainly an absence, if truly an evil. The other examples, being vices, are plainly analysable as the absence of virtues. It is simply irresponsible to dismiss the theory like Russell did, and I hope no one does that nowadays.
