I quoted last week a crucial, perhaps the crucial, passage from G.E. Moore's book Principia Ethica.
This gist of it is that goods come in two sorts: instrumental and inherent. We pursue instrumental goods so that we may secure and increase the inherent goods.
Furthermore, inherent good consists chiefly of a consciousness enjoying something outside of itself: personal relationships or beautiful objects.
Each of these is a compound whole: that they are consciousness-enjoying-X or consciousness-enjoying-Y already makes them so, and X and Y are each compounds as well. What do we mean by attributing inherent good to either of these compounds? We mean that each possesses the non-natural property that we call goodness, and that is not subject to further analyses. Goodness is in that sense a simple property, though it simply adheres in a compound, or an "organic unity" as Moore sometimes put it.
At any rate, Moore ends up with a moral objectivism. In calling something good we assign an objective character to it, and we are at least sometimes right about this.
This has all been subjected to a good deal of criticism over the intervening century plus. I'll provide a pertinent link here.
His friend Bertrand Russell agreed with Moore about much of this, at least for a time. Indeed, in the essay "The Elements of Ethics," published seven years later (1910), Russell wrote: "Good and bad are qualities which belong to objects independently of our opinions, just as much as round and square do; and when two people differ as to whether a thing is good, only one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is right."
George Santayana criticized Russell in Santayana's Winds of Doctrine (1913). Although it was directed at Russell by name, the criticism was clearly aimed at aspects of Russell's views that came from Moore. Santayana, who describes his own views as ethical skepticism, complains that "we are asked to believe" by Moore and Russell, "that good attaches to things for no reason or cause, and according to no principles of distribution; that it must be found there by a sort of receptive exploration in each separate case; in other words, that it is an absolute, not a relative thing, a primary and not a secondary property."
Addressing Russell's own chosen example, Santayana observes, "while square is always square, and round round, a thing that is round may actually be square also, if we allow it to have a little body, and to be a cylinder."
Showing posts with label G.E. Moore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label G.E. Moore. Show all posts
26 March 2011
20 March 2011
More from Moore
A week ago I rambled on about Berlusconi and Woolf, ending up with a famous sentence from G.E. Moore's book on ethics.
Here is bit more of the passage whence that sentence comes.
If, now, we use this method of absolute isolation, and guard against these errors, it appears that the question we have to answer is far less difficult than the controversies of Ethics might have led us to expect. Indeed, once the meaning of the question is clearly understood, the answer to it, in its main outlines, appears to be so obvious, that it runs the risk of seeming to be a platitude. By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so great a value as the things which are included under these two heads. I have myself urged in Chap. III. (§ 50) that the mere existence of what is beautiful does appear to have some intrinsic value; but I regard it as indubitable that Prof. Sidgwick was so far right, in the view there discussed, that such mere existence of what is beautiful has value, so small as to be negligible, in comparison with that which attaches to the consciousness of beauty. This simple truth may, indeed, be said to be universally recognised. What has not been recognised is that it is the ultimate and fundamental truth of Moral Philosophy. That it is only for the sake of these things—in order that as much of them as possible may at some time exist—that any one can be justified in performing any public or private duty; that they are the raison d’être of virtue; that it is they—these complex wholes themselves, and not any constituent or characteristic of them—that form the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress: these appear to be truths which have been generally overlooked.
Here is bit more of the passage whence that sentence comes.
If, now, we use this method of absolute isolation, and guard against these errors, it appears that the question we have to answer is far less difficult than the controversies of Ethics might have led us to expect. Indeed, once the meaning of the question is clearly understood, the answer to it, in its main outlines, appears to be so obvious, that it runs the risk of seeming to be a platitude. By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so great a value as the things which are included under these two heads. I have myself urged in Chap. III. (§ 50) that the mere existence of what is beautiful does appear to have some intrinsic value; but I regard it as indubitable that Prof. Sidgwick was so far right, in the view there discussed, that such mere existence of what is beautiful has value, so small as to be negligible, in comparison with that which attaches to the consciousness of beauty. This simple truth may, indeed, be said to be universally recognised. What has not been recognised is that it is the ultimate and fundamental truth of Moral Philosophy. That it is only for the sake of these things—in order that as much of them as possible may at some time exist—that any one can be justified in performing any public or private duty; that they are the raison d’être of virtue; that it is they—these complex wholes themselves, and not any constituent or characteristic of them—that form the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress: these appear to be truths which have been generally overlooked.
13 March 2011
Silvio Berlusconi and Virginia Woolf
That headline posits an unlikely pairing.
Silvio Berlusconi, of course, is the Italian Prime Minister now in a good deal of trouble over ... well, a lot. He is currently defending three trials -- two involving standard-issue corruption charges, the third involving sex with an underage prostitute.
The child-prostitution thing plays into a broader reputation Berlusconi has of participating in orgies, which he and the world press have agreed to call bunga-bunga parties.
What does that have to do with Virginia Woolf? Simply that she and the Bloomsberries in general are cited now and then to give an air of historical depth to stories about the Italian sex scandal. Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group pretended to be visiting dignitaries from Abyssinia in 1910, and received a red-carpet tour of a naval installation, including the famous battleship Dreadnought.
They used the meaningless phrase "bunga bunga" in the course of pretending that they were speaking their own mysterious language to one another in admiring the battleship.
Woolf tells the story in her memoir, and scholars such as Camille-Yvette Welsch have picked it up from there making it a regular part of the repertoire of Bloomsbury anecdotes.
There is no causal connection between the Bloomsbury use of "bunga bunga" and Berlusconi's. The latter use seems to come from a crude joke that the prime minister enjoys. Still, it is not a coincidence. The joke requires the phrase to sound like it could be some remote exotic tribe's phrase for some terrible system of torture. The same exoticism of the sound is why the same phrase worked for the Bloomsbury-ist prank.
Since I've gotten this far in my ramblings, allow me to include (though not necessarily to endorse) a well-known quote from the favorite philosopher of the Bloomsberries, G.E. Moore. It is a nice summation of his views (and perhaps theirs) on morality: "By far the most valuable things, which we can know or imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects."
He was speaking of intrinsic value there. Instrumental value is another matter. For the sake of those intrinsic values we accept certain instrumental values, many of them far from pleasant. Like the instrumental value of keeping one's hands off overly young girls, and of punishing old men who don't.
Silvio Berlusconi, of course, is the Italian Prime Minister now in a good deal of trouble over ... well, a lot. He is currently defending three trials -- two involving standard-issue corruption charges, the third involving sex with an underage prostitute.
The child-prostitution thing plays into a broader reputation Berlusconi has of participating in orgies, which he and the world press have agreed to call bunga-bunga parties.
What does that have to do with Virginia Woolf? Simply that she and the Bloomsberries in general are cited now and then to give an air of historical depth to stories about the Italian sex scandal. Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group pretended to be visiting dignitaries from Abyssinia in 1910, and received a red-carpet tour of a naval installation, including the famous battleship Dreadnought.
They used the meaningless phrase "bunga bunga" in the course of pretending that they were speaking their own mysterious language to one another in admiring the battleship.
Woolf tells the story in her memoir, and scholars such as Camille-Yvette Welsch have picked it up from there making it a regular part of the repertoire of Bloomsbury anecdotes.
There is no causal connection between the Bloomsbury use of "bunga bunga" and Berlusconi's. The latter use seems to come from a crude joke that the prime minister enjoys. Still, it is not a coincidence. The joke requires the phrase to sound like it could be some remote exotic tribe's phrase for some terrible system of torture. The same exoticism of the sound is why the same phrase worked for the Bloomsbury-ist prank.
Since I've gotten this far in my ramblings, allow me to include (though not necessarily to endorse) a well-known quote from the favorite philosopher of the Bloomsberries, G.E. Moore. It is a nice summation of his views (and perhaps theirs) on morality: "By far the most valuable things, which we can know or imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects."
He was speaking of intrinsic value there. Instrumental value is another matter. For the sake of those intrinsic values we accept certain instrumental values, many of them far from pleasant. Like the instrumental value of keeping one's hands off overly young girls, and of punishing old men who don't.
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