Moore wrote Ethics around age 40 while living with his sisters in Richmond (then part of Surrey).[1] Soon thereafter, he went back to the University of Cambridge to become a lecturer.[1] He wrote part of it in mid-1911 while staying at a cottage that Lytton Strachey had rented.[1]Ethics and Principia Ethica (1903) are Moore's only two books about ethics.[2] In a 1952 autobiographical essay, Moore wrote that he preferred Ethics to Principia "because it seems to me to be much clearer and far less full of confusions and invalid arguments".[3]
Thomas Baldwin argues that Ethics represents a retreat from Moore's earlier confidence regarding ethical intuitionism and the method of isolation,[6] a technique for extracting moral intuitions that Moore relies on in Principia Ethica.[7] The third chapter of Ethics argues against expressivism, rejecting the view that "right" and "wrong" mean merely that the speaker approves or disapproves the action described with those words.[8]
According to William Frankena, Moore, in Ethics and Philosophical Studies, moves away from the version of consequentialism that he endorses in Principia Ethica.[9] Instead, Frankena suggests, the Moore of these later works may favour a form of consequentialism according to which there is a necessary connection between the promotion of goodness and rightness.[9] Robert Peter Sylvester reads the entire work as a defence of the view that "the test of right or wrong is determined by the actual consequences of voluntary actions chosen by the agent";[10]William Shaw, who edited a reprint of Ethics, agrees with Sylvester's interpretation.[11] Sylvester understands the version of consequentialism in Ethics to be the same as that for which Moore argues in Principia.[12]
In ethical philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for judgement about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act is one that will produce a good outcome. Consequentialism, along with eudaimonism, falls under the broader category of teleological ethics, a group of views which claim that the moral value of any act consists in its tendency to produce things of intrinsic value. Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative. Different consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods, with chief candidates including pleasure, the absence of pain, the satisfaction of one's preferences, and broader notions of the "general good".
In ethics, casuistry is a process of reasoning that seeks to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending abstract rules from a particular case, and reapplying those rules to new instances. This method occurs in applied ethics and jurisprudence. The term is also used pejoratively to criticise the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to moral questions. It has been defined as follows:
Study of cases of conscience and a method of solving conflicts of obligations by applying general principles of ethics, religion, and moral theology to particular and concrete cases of human conduct. This frequently demands an extensive knowledge of natural law and equity, civil law, ecclesiastical precepts, and an exceptional skill in interpreting these various norms of conduct....
Ethics or moral philosophy is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. It investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. It is usually divided into three major fields: normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.
Ethical non-naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:
Ethical sentences express propositions.
Some such propositions are true.
Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of human opinion.
These moral features of the world are not reducible to any set of non-moral features.
George Edward Moore was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the initiators of analytic philosophy. He and Russell began deemphasizing the idealism which was then prevalent among British philosophers and became known for advocating common-sense concepts and contributing to ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. He was said to have an "exceptional personality and moral character". Ray Monk later dubbed him "the most revered philosopher of his era".
In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, and meaning of moral judgment. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.
In philosophical ethics, the naturalistic fallacy is the claim that it is possible to define good in terms of natural entities, or properties such as pleasant or desirable. The term was introduced by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica.
In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the affected individuals. In other words, utilitarian ideas encourage actions that ensure the greatest good for the greatest number.
In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action. It is sometimes described as duty-, obligation-, or rule-based ethics. Deontological ethics is commonly contrasted to consequentialism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and pragmatic ethics. In this terminology, action is more important than the consequences.
In ethics, welfarism is a theory that well-being, what is good for someone or what makes a life worth living, is the only thing that has intrinsic value. In its most general sense, it can be defined as descriptive theory about what has value, but some philosophers also understand welfarism as a moral theory, that what one should do is ultimately determined by considerations of well-being. The right action, policy or rule is the one leading to the maximal amount of well-being. In this sense, it is often seen as a type of consequentialism, and can take the form of utilitarianism.
Ethical intuitionism is a view or family of views in moral epistemology. It is foundationalism applied to moral knowledge, the thesis that some moral truths can be known non-inferentially. Such an epistemological view is by definition committed to the existence of knowledge of moral truths; therefore, ethical intuitionism implies cognitivism.
Tom Regan was an American philosopher who specialized in animal rights theory. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University, where he had taught from 1967 until his retirement in 2001.
Utilitarianism is an 1861 essay written by English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, considered to be a classic exposition and defence of utilitarianism in ethics. It was originally published as a series of three separate articles in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 before it was collected and reprinted as a single work in 1863. The essay explains utilitarianism to its readers and addresses the numerous criticism against the theory during Mill's lifetime. It was heavily criticized upon publication; however, since then, Utilitarianism gained significant popularity and has been considered "the most influential philosophical articulation of a liberal humanistic morality that was produced in the nineteenth century."
The definist fallacy is a logical fallacy, identified by William Frankena in 1939, that involves the definition of one property in terms of another.
Principia Ethica is a book written in 1903 by British philosopher, G. E. Moore. Moore questions a fundamental pillar of ethics, specifically what the definition of "good" is. He concludes that "good" is indefinable because any attempts to do so commit the naturalistic fallacy. Principia Ethica was influential, with Moore's arguments being considered ground-breaking advances in the field of moral philosophy.
William Klaas Frankena was an American moral philosopher. He was a member of the University of Michigan's department of philosophy for 41 years (1937–1978), and chair of the department for 14 years (1947–1961).
The paradox of analysis is a paradox that concerns how an analysis can be both correct and informative. The problem was formulated by philosopher G. E. Moore in his book Principia Ethica, and first named by C. H. Langford in his article "The Notion of Analysis in Moore's Philosophy".
The Theory of Good and Evil is a 1907 book about ethics by the English philosopher Hastings Rashdall. The book, which has been compared to the philosopher G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903), is Rashdall's best known work, and is considered his most important philosophical work. Some commentators have suggested that, compared to Principia Ethica, it has been unfairly neglected.
Negative consequentialism is a version of consequentialism, which is "one of the major theories of normative ethics." Like other versions of consequentialism, negative consequentialism holds that moral right and wrong depend only on the value of outcomes. That is, for negative and other versions of consequentialism, questions such as "what should I do?" and "what kind of person should I be?" are answered only based on consequences. Negative consequentialism differs from other versions of consequentialism by giving greater weight in moral deliberations to what is bad than what is good. Due to this, it can be considered an instance of what has been called "suffering-focused ethics", the view that the reduction of suffering has moral priority over any other possible duties we may think of.
The values that a person holds may be personal or political depending on whether they are considered in relation to the individual or to society. Apart from moral virtue, examples of personal values include friendship, knowledge, beauty etc. and examples of political values, justice, equality and liberty. This article will outline some current ideas relating to the first group – personal values. It will begin by looking at the kinds of thing that have value and finish with a look at some of the theories that attempt to describe what value is. Reference will be made solely to Western sources although it is recognised that many, if not all, of the values discussed may be universal.
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