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Name:
G.E. Moore
George Edward Moore
Dates:
Born: November 4, 1873
Died: October 24, 1958
Biography:
G.E. Moore was a British philosopher who made important contributions to our
understanding of ethics. In his Principia Ethica he defended the doctrine of
moral realism, the idea that moral judgments really are true or false rather than
simply opinions or emotional reactions. As part of his defense, he described what he
considered the naturalistic fallacy. According to him, we commit a fallacy whenever we
try to define a moral concept like "good" in nonmoral terms.
What this means is that statements like "pleasure is the highest good" are fallacious and fail to truly capture what "good" really is. This applies to any natural, nonmoral property like pleasure, desire, and even utility. Goodness, according to Moore, is its own property and cannot be reduced to any other property. This also means that science cannot provide us with a full account of morality because science only deals with natural, quantifiable properties, and that is something which goodness certainly is not.
Moore also played an important role in the development of the debate between realism and idealism. Moore defended the doctrine of realism, according to which there is a real world out there independent of us and which our senses can access. In his "Refutation of Idealism," a series of papers he wrote throughout his career, he attacked the idealist position defended by Berkeley and others, according to which every object is simply a composite of ideas in our minds and, hence, is dependent upon us for its existence.
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Related Resources:
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