George Edward Moore

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GE Moore (1914)

George Edward Moore (born November 4, 1873 in London , † October 24, 1958 in Cambridge ) was an English philosopher. Together with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein , and in succession to Gottlob Frege , he became one of the fathers of analytical philosophy .

Life

Moore studied at Trinity College , Cambridge, where he became a Fellow in 1898 . From 1925 to 1939 he held the chair of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at Cambridge University. His successor was Ludwig Wittgenstein . From 1921 to 1947 Moore was editor of the philosophy journal Mind . In 1918 he was elected a member (Fellow) of the British Academy .

Work: overview

Moore was trained at Cambridge University. He was particularly known for his advocacy of common sense , for his non-naturalistic ethics, and for his clear and careful way of writing. He was a methodical and meticulous philosopher who, unlike his friend Russell, is less well known outside of professional philosophy.

Moore's best-known writings, The Refutation of Idealism , A Defense of Common Sense, and A Proof of the External World , are all included in his collection of Philosophical Papers . His objection to skepticism is known when he raised his right hand during lectures and stated: "Here is one hand", then raised his left hand and said: "Here is another hand", and concluded that there were at least two material objects in the world and consequently an external world.

ethics

Moore is also known for the “open question” argument from his influential Principia Ethica , which is one of the fundamental writings against ethical naturalism and one of the founding elements of the metaethics of the 20th century.

The naturalistic fallacy

Moore has criticized most other ethical philosophers for making a fundamental mistake called the naturalistic fallacy . Moore agreed that it was possible to determine the good through the properties. So teaches z. E.g. the hedonism that such values ​​can be classified as good that make things pleasant. Other theorists claim that complexity leads to good. Moore, however, opposed the idea that one already has an analysis of the meaning of "good" from the properties with which one can describe the good. Moore describes the inadmissible identification of meanings as naturalistic fallacy . Because just because something has the characteristics of being “good” and “pleasant” does not mean that “good” means nothing other than “pleasant”. The naturalistic reductionist, on the other hand, claims that the two expressions “pleasant” and “good” refer to the same property and thus also have the same meaning.

"And similarly no difficulty need be found in my saying that 'pleasure is good' and yet not meaning that 'pleasure' is the same meaning as 'good', that pleasure means good, and that good means pleasure."

- Principia Ethica . Cambridge University Press. P. 65

The German expression “naturalistic fallacy” is, however, a wrong translation of Moore's term “naturalistic fallacy”, with which he does not mean a fallacy, but a simple error, namely the erroneous claim that the moral predicate “good” can pass a naturalistic descriptive predicate can be defined.

The open question argument

Moore began his doctrine of ethics by pinpointing what "good" is not by making the open-question argument. He showed that an assumed definition of the concept of the good is incapable of doing this conclusively. If you z. If, for example, the good is determined as what is worth striving for, the question still remains whether everything worth striving for is also good. Obviously, with an endless process of questions, one can repeatedly undo attempts to determine what is good. The argument can be structured as follows:

  1. "X is good" = "X has a value P"
  2. X has P, but is X good? (are things with the value P good?)
  3. X has P, but does it also have P? (do things with the value P also have P?)

Therefore, “good” is an independent value independent of all others. One cannot equate the good with happiness or joy, because these terms can always have a content that does not correspond to the good.

The property “good” cannot be defined

Moore concluded that goodness , i.e. H. what we mean by the predicate “good” is not definable. By “definition” Moore meant an analytical summation of the parts of a thing, for example when we say that the horse is a thing with four legs, a tail, a head and so on down to the smallest discernible differences. The property “good”, however, is simple, has no parts and in this respect cannot be described in terms of its own properties or replaced by naming them. It is therefore indefinable. Moore does not stop the analysis at this point, but suggests a separation between the predicate “good” and the expression “the good”. The indefinability of the word “good” does not prevent us from defining “the good”, that is, things that are good. Otherwise ethics are pointless. To illustrate, Moore draws on the analogy that we can define “yellow” by naming things that are yellow. However, this would not have defined the color “yellow”, but only the carriers on which this color comes into its own. We could endlessly imagine and describe yellow things to a person who cannot see yellow, and he would still not understand what we mean by yellow. In his book Principia Ethica , he put it this way:

“It is possible that all things that are good are also something else, just as all yellow things cause certain vibrations in the light. And it is a fact that ethics strives to find out all the other qualities associated with good. But far too many philosophers have thought that in naming these other properties they are actually defining well; that these properties are not just 'other', but absolutely and completely the same as goodness. "

In this respect, according to Moore, it is possible to define something good by listing its properties, i.e. H. it is good and gives pleasure, is useful, scientific, etc. These other properties can then indirectly also be called “good”. However, due to the indefinability of the property “good”, no causal relationship can be established between the other properties and this one itself. From the point of view of speech act theory , this analysis can be reformulated to the effect that “good” is or can be used only performatively , not constatively, i.e. not to describe a property of a thing, but only to evaluate the thing itself.

Good as a non-natural property

In addition to determining good as indefinable, Moore has suggested that it is a non-natural property. This means that two things that are qualitatively identical cannot contain different values. So z. For example, two yellow T-shirts that are identical in every respect in terms of natural properties (in color, from the same factory, with the same brand name, with the same design, etc.) do not differ in terms of their properties (i.e. one is good, the other is against it) not) differ. The property of an object as good is thus completely determined by the other properties that make up the object. The good as a property is made up of various properties of an object. Hence, two objects of the same quality must necessarily have the same value of good.

Moral knowledge

In support of his arguments, Moore taught that one can reliably determine what is good with the help of moral intuition. In this regard he was a proponent of moral intuitionism .

language

Moore was the first to point out the paradox named after him (Moore's Paradox), which resides in the following statement: It's raining, but I don't think it will. Ludwig Wittgenstein initiated a series of work on this problem.

Works

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.iep.utm.edu/moore/#H1
  2. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed July 8, 2020 .
  3. ↑ http://fair-use.org/ge-moore/principia-ethica/s.12
  4. ^ Anzenbacher: Ethics . Patmos Düsseldorf p. 269
  5. ↑ Annemarie Pieper : The good . In: Ekkehard Martens , Herbert Schnädelbach (Ed.): Philosophy. A basic course . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1985, p. 262 ff .
personal data
SURNAME Moore, George Edward
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH November 4, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH October 24, 1958
Place of death Cambridge