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Page 167
The Linguistic Turn: George Edward Moore
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The question of whether something is good is always an ‘open’ question everyday use, but is an essential method of philosophical analysis. Particularly, Moore finds, when dealing with the more outlandish of philosophical claims, which may turn out not to mean very much at all once analysed properly. This view was to have a striking influence on the development of Wittgenstein’s later thought, and indeed the work of Wittgenstein’s now published as On Certainty can be seen as a direct response and development of Moore’s ‘common-sense’ approach. According to Moore, any concept can be analysed primarily in one of two ways. It can either be dissected into constituent parts, in other words into more elementary concepts, or it can be defined negatively by its relations to and distinctions from other concepts (this second idea is similar to that of the structuralists: see Saussure). Moore goes on to use this method of analysis in his discussion of ‘what is good?’, a question he takes to be the central problem of ethics. On Moore’s view ‘good’ is a concept that cannot be defined or analysed into constituent parts. It is analogous to the concept of ‘yellow’. Moore says that ‘good’ is “a simple notion, just as ‘yellow’ is a simple notion; that, just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to anyone who does not already know it, what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is”. Even though all things that are good might be pleasurable, Moore goes on to argue that although one can say of some natural property, like pleasure for instance, that it is good, this assertion can always meaningfully be followed by the question, why is it good? Moore famously claims that the question of whether something is good is always an ‘open’ question. To suppose otherwise is to commit what Moore called ‘the naturalistic fallacy’, the tendency of empiricist philosophers to confuse an idea of what is natural with what is good.
In Principia Ethica Moore’s view was that ‘good’ denotes some simple non-natural, (i.e. abstract in the Platonic sense) property of which we are intuitively aware. He rejects both Kant’s view that ethics is concerned with reason, and the utilitarian view (see Mill) that some natural property can be identified with ‘the good’, in favour of an ethics predicated on value judgements which are as distinct and mindindependent as any ordinary matter of fact. Value can never be defined in non-evaluative terms, hence the naturalistic fallacy. But in his later writings Moore abandoned the Platonic conception of value in favour of one in which value-judgements are really expressions of approval or emotion, a view later developed in detail in the ‘prescriptivist’ theory of R.M. Hare. Moore’s work in the philosophical analysis of meaning also pre-empted the ideas of J.L. Austin. ‘Moore’s paradox’, as Wittgenstein called it, asserts that though it looks like a nonsense, there are contexts where the assertion, ‘It is raining, but I don’t believe it’ makes sense. Moore’s explanation of what appears to be a contradiction when we assert that a proposition is true but claim not to believe it draws a distinction between what is asserted and what is implied. To claim that it is raining makes an assertion which is either true or false. Someone making this assertion implies that they believe it. When they go on to assert ‘but I don’t believe it’, they contradict not the original assertion but the original implication. Nevertheless, Moore realised, it is the contradiction between the assertion and the implication that gives the expression the appearance of nonsense. Such fine distinctions in meaning have only become apparent due to the centrality of linguistic analysis, of which Moore is an early exponent, to much recent philosophy and have helped solve some long-standing philosophical puzzles. 167