The Moore the Merrier

Gary Cox opens up G.E. Moore’s ethics, and his open question argument.

- Gary Cox

The branch of moral philosophy with the fancy-sounding title ‘meta-ethics’ is most fundamentally concerned with questions of meaning and reality in ethics. To cut a very long story short, there are basically two types of meta-ethicists: those who believe that there are objective moral facts or, at least, that there are objective means of establishing that an action is right or wrong, and those who don’t. The latter believe instead that morality, however it may be dressed up, is actually just a matter of taste, a basic matter of approval or disapproval. Not surprisingly, the first group of philosophers are known as moral realists, the latter as moral subjectivists.

Humean Morality

Most famous amongst moral subjectivists is the great Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). Hume argues that we receive no sensory impressions of the goodness or badness, rightness or wrongness of a person, action, or event. In other words, there are no moral properties to be observed alongside the natural properties we observe. When I witness a stabbing, for example, I perceive the knife going in, the blood flowing, and the cries of the victim, but I do not perceive the badness of the act. Rather, I interpret the act as bad. The false supposition that goodness and badness are natural properties of persons, actions, and events has come to be known as the naturalistic fallacy.