Tutorial 1 Reading Notes

Moore’s Naturalism

What conclusion is the author arguing for?

Moore is tackling the question of the content of ethical inquiry. He defends 4 conclusions:

1) He argues that ethics is not particularly concerned with the qualities of things but the properties
that those qualities denote. For example, what property is denoted by the quality of being ‘good?’

2) The property of ‘good’ is simple and indefinable

3) Assertions about how the thing in question relates to other things takes two forms: to what
degree does the thing possess the property or the causal relationship between the thing and other
things that possess the property

4) the degree to which a thing possesses the property as a whole is not reducible to the extent it
possesses the property in its constituent parts.

According to Moore, defining things often requires reference to its component properties that make
up the whole. Things that can be defined are characterized as ‘complex.’ However, Moore argues
that, eventually, we will reach a point where the component parts that make up the whole cannot
be defined in such a way because they are ‘simple’ – there is nothing to which the property can be
referenced to help us understand it. For Moore, ‘goodness’ is an example of a simple property. He
anchors his idea of the ‘goodness’ in an intuitionist rationale. We have an experience of what
‘goodness’ is but we cannot explain what constitutes the property itself. In the same way, we cannot
explain the colour red to someone who has never seen it before. I broadly find this argument
convincing. However, while the properties of colour are fixed (red today is the same as red 100 years
ago), this is not necessarily the case of our intuitions as they would evolve and shift over time.
Therefore, even if the property of ‘good’ is simple, our base experience of it is not unchanging.

Furthermore, Moore’s Open Question Argument (OQA) aims to show that one cannot define
goodness with reference to another quality. If one were to ask, ‘is pleasure good?’ they would be
asking a meaningful question, according to Moore. This contrasts with the question, ‘I know he is a
bachelor, but is he unmarried?’ The latter formulation is has little analytical import since we can
know the answer from the definitions of the words. A bachelor, by definition, is not married.
Therefore, the question is closed. However, Moore asserts that this is not the same for the question
‘is pleasure good?’ because the substantive content of goodness and pleasure are distinct. If we
were to equate the property of ‘goodness’ with the property of ‘pleasure’, then the statements
‘pleasure is pleasure’ and ‘good is good’ can be derived. But these statements are tautological and
meaningless. If ‘pleasure is good’ is to have any informative value, the property of goodness must
denote something different to pleasure. This argument is persuasive, given that analytical
equivalency would lead to uninformative tautologies.

However, a potential objection to the OQA argument is that it begs the question. Suppose we take X
to abbreviate some natural property. The question ‘something is X but is it good?’ is only an open
question if we understand that ‘X-ness’ as equating to goodness is false. But this is exactly what
Moore is attempting to establish in his argument. Thus, he appears to be presupposing the
conclusion of his argument in his line of reasoning.