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D. Weinstein Wake Forest University Universität Oldenburg

MOORE’S “HIDE-BOUND OTHODOXY”

W. J. Mander has recently insisted that analytic “philosophy did not just magically replace the earlier Idealism, but rather developed alongside and in conscious opposition to it, and in this process Idealism shaped its successor; as truly as any parent shapes the child who rebels against.”1

Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore thus committed hermeneutical patricide in reconstructing

Idealism simplistically in order to overdramatize their own novelty. But Moore, for his part, oversimplified not just idealists but other immediate predecessors like Herbert Spencer, J. S. Mill and Henry Sidgwick. For Moore, Spencer, Mill and Sidgwick exemplified the errors of modern

“naturalistic” ethics while idealists, particularly T. H. Green, epitomized “metaphysical” ethics at its worst.

Jennifer Welchman has similarly argued that Moore’s purported revolution in ethics was less abrupt and decisive than we now assume not least because Moore’s contemporary readers, including his idealist critics took issue with him much differently than we are now inclined to assume.2 Indeed, Bernard Bosanquet, for instance, thought Principia Ethica neither especially original nor revolutionary though he conceded that Moore was a gifted critic. But so far as he could determine, Moore “hampered himself with ideas no less dogmatic than those of the most hide-bound orthodoxy: and he is not yet therefore a critic in the true sense, a critic who can take the standpoint of that which he criticizes.”3 In other words, Moore inaugurated nothing

1 W. J. Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford University Press, 2011), 2. 2 Jennifer Welchman, “G. E. Moore and the Revolution in Ethics: A Reappraisal,” History of Philosophical Quarterly, 6 (1989). 3 Bernard Bosanquet, “Critical Notice: Principia Ethica,” Mind, 13 (1904), 261. 2 particularly new. He was not so much innovative as he was a provocative but nonetheless sloppy reader of those he appropriated to illustrate alternative versions of the naturalistic fallacy. And if no historical predecessors actually committed anything resembling the naturalistic fallacy, then the fallacy was a historical straw man, making Moore’s rejection of naturalistic and metaphysical ethics much less of a philosophical new beginning and more of an ongoing colloquy of shared suppositions and overlapping, substantive normative claims.4

Moore’s Rejection of Classical Utilitarianism

Now Moore was far more preoccupied with exposing how Spencer, Mill and Sidgwick went astray in committing the naturalistic fallacy than he was with showing up Idealists like Green. He devotes an entire chapter to condemning naturalistic ethics, which he regarded Spencer as exemplifying especially strikingly.5 Next follows a chapter disparaging Mill and then Sidgwick though he regards Sidgwick far more favorably and for that reason I shall say something about his differences with Sidgwick here. Moreover, examining however briefly, Moore’s assessment of Sidgwick

4 Welchman suggests that the idealists by-and-large did not even find Moore especially provocative or the least bit damaging. According to her, the “idealists…were even more at home with the specific doctrines espoused in the Principia than were Moore’s realist supporters.” Contrary to recent assumptions, there “are no indications that idealists viewed Moore’s criticisms of idealist ethics as serious objections to their own theories.” See Welchman, “G. E. Moore and the Revolution in Ethics: A Reappraisal,” 322. Perhaps naturalists like Spencer and Mill and non- naturalists like Sidgwick might likewise have found themselves no less “at home” with Moore than we now assume. But we will never know since they were all dead by the time Principia appeared in 1903. Though Green was dead too, many idealists, like Bosanquet and J. S. Mackenzie, were still very much alive and therefore did respond to Moore. 5 For Moore’s critical account of Spencer, see my Equal Freedom and Utility (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Chapter 6. 3 should assist us in making sense of the Moore’s dismissal of Green too because Sidgwick’s rivalry with Green is significantly revealing about both.6

Moore, like Sidgwick, was a utilitarian though Sidgwick was a hedonist and Moore was not. Furthermore, both were non-naturalists and both deemed good unanalyzable or at least Moore was convinced that Sidgwick deemed good unanalyzable. Of all the hedonists, “Prof. Sidgwick alone has clearly recognized that by ‘good’ we do mean something unanalyzable and has alone been led thereby to emphasise the fact that, if Hedonism be true, its claims to be so must be rested solely on its self-evidence—that we must maintain ‘Pleasure is the sole good’ to be a mere intuition.”7

Moore, then, praised Sidgwick’s commitment to intuitionism and seemed to think that his methodological commitment to intuitionism somehow also committed him to accepting that good was necessarily unanalyzable or undefinable. But it is unclear if Sidgwick thought good unanalyzable or, if he did, whether he regarded this fact especially significant. Nor is it plain that

Sidgwick was particularly preoccupied with good anyway. Rather, as others such as David

Phillips have claimed, Sidgwick viewed ethics as being fundamentally about what we ought to do and not about goodness. As Sidgwick stipulates at the very outset of The Methods of Ethics, “a

‘Method of Ethics’ is explained to mean any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings ‘ought’—or what it is ‘right’ for them—to do, or to seek to realise by voluntary action.”8

6 For Green’s rivalry with Sidgwick, see my Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 54-5. 7 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press, 1903), 59. 8 Henry Sidgwick [1907], The Methods of Ethics, 7th edition (London: Hackett, 1981), 1. For Phillips’ view that Sidgwick was not so much interested in goodness as he was in what we ought to do, see David Phillips, Sidgwickian Ethics (Oxford, 2011), 35-6. Phillips also concludes that 4

Now notwithstanding Moore’s preference for Sidgwick over Mill and his contention that

Sidgwick was no less consumed with the problem of good than he was, Moore deemed Sidgwick’s intuitionism a failure when all was said and done. And his account of its failure bears directly on his explanation of how methaphysical ethics purportedly fails as well as on his interpretation the relationship between pleasure and good in metaphysical ethics. For Moore, Sidgwick’s intuitionism goes wrong insofar as he holds intuitively that pleasure alone is good in itself. That is, Sidgwick errs in not appreciating that whatever goodness is, it is necessarily “something beyond the limits of human existence.” Furthermore, whatever this something is, we typically experience it as pleasurable, making our consciousness of pleasure, and not pleasure itself, so significant.9

Our consciousness of pleasure is not identical with but instead attends to good. Our consciousness of pleasure merely marks goodness, therefore the “most that can be said for it is that it does not seriously mislead in its practical conclusions, on the ground that, as an empirical fact, the method of acting which brings the most good on the whole does also bring the most pleasure.”10 Hence, it is unsurprising that hedonists typically “recommend a course of conduct which is very similar to that which I should recommend.”11 Nonetheless, “in so far as their reason for holding these conclusions to be true is that ‘Pleasure alone is good as an end,’ they are absolutely wrong: and it is with reasons that we are chiefly concerned in any scientific Ethics.”12

At best, then, the most we could say in defense of hedonism, especially its utilitarian variety, is that maximizing pleasure “was a matter of fact under actual conditions, generally

because Sidgwick was not much preoccupied with goodness or with defining it, his non-naturalism was superior to Moore’s. (35 and 38). 9 Moore, Principia Ethica, 84-5 and 89. 10 Ibid., 107. 11 Ibid., 62. 12 Ibid., 90. 5 accompanied by the greatest quantity of other goods,” which would be a “strange coincidence.”

Assuming this unexpected coincidence true, pleasure would thus serve a “good criterion of right action.13 But there is little reason to suppose this coincidence.14

Metaphysical Ethics

Moore begins Chapter IV, “Metaphysical Ethics” referring to unnamed Hegelian-influenced

“modern writers” who also followed the Stoics, Spinoza and Kant in deploying metaphysical propositions as grounds for inferring ethical propositions. The only “modern” metaphysical writer he eventually comes around to naming and discussing specifically are J. S. Mackenzie and Green.15

According to Moore, Mackenzie typifies those modern metaphysicians who hold that our supreme good is realizing our true selves. More importantly and erroneously:

They also imply, as I said, that this ethical proposition follows from some proposition

which is metaphysical: that the question ‘What is real?’ has some logical bearing upon the

question ‘What is good?’….To hold that from any proposition asserting ‘Reality is of this

nature’ we can infer, or obtain confirmation for, any proposition asserting ‘This is good in

itself’ is to commit the naturalistic fallacy….It rests upon the failure to perceive that any

truth which assert ‘This is good in itself’ is quite unique in kind—that it cannot be reduced

13 Ibid., 91-2. 14 In addition, given the practical difficulties of estimating all the short and long term results of our actions, we have all the more reason to abandon pleasure as a normative criterion: “And, since the practical guidance afforded by pleasure as a criterion is small in proportion as the calculation attempts to be accurate, we can well afford to await further investigation, before adopting a guide whose utility is very doubtful and whose trustworthiness we have grave reason to suspect.” (Ibid, 108). 15 For Mackenzie’s assessment of Moore, see his “Book Review of Principia Ethica,” International Journal of Ethics, 14 (1904). Note especially Mackenzie’s comment that the only “real difference” between Moore and idealist adversaries “seems to lie in his contention that Good cannot be defined.” (382). 6

to any assertion about reality, and therefore must remain unaffected by any conclusions we

may reach about the nature of reality….If, for instance, we are told that the ideal consists

in the realization of the ‘true self,’ the very words suggest that the act that the self in

question is true is supposed to have some bearing on the fact that it is good.”16

Much of the remainder of Chapter IV is devoted to disparaging Kant. But near the end of the chapter, Moore returns to criticizing metaphysical writers after Kant, who though “profess[ing] to base their Ethics on an investigation of will,” fail to prove that what is willed in a certain way is also good. These writers “make no attempt to shew that will is a criterion of goodness; and no stronger evidence could be given that they do not recognize that this, at most, is all it can be.”17

And even if we could show that willing in a certain way and goodness generally accompanied one another, it would remain “doubtful whether the inference from ‘generally’ to ‘always’ would be valid, and almost certain that this principle would be useless.”18

Green, however, is the sole example Moore gives of a post-Kantian metaphysician who allegedly confuses willing in a certain way with goodness, which explains most probably why

Mander thinks that Moore saw himself as “offering a replacement” for Green’s Prolegomena to

Ethics, which, he adds, “would certainly not have been lost on Moore’s first readers.”19 Evidence for Green’s confusing willing in a certain way with goodness is where we see him “explicitly

16 Moore, Principia Ethica, 113-4. Metaphysical versions of the naturalistic fallacy no less than Spencer, Mill and Sidgwick’s evolutionary and hedonistic versions are proved fallacious in as much as the so-called ‘open question’ argument applies no less forcefully to them as well. That is, for “whatever we may have proved to exist, and whatever two existents we may have proved to be necessarily connected with one another, it still remains a distinct and different question whether what thus exists is good; whether either or both of the two existents is so; and whether it is good that they should exist together.” (126). 17 Ibid., 138. 18 Ibid., 138. 19 Mander, British Idealism: A History, 479. 7 stating that ‘the common characteristic of the good is that it satisfies some desire (my italics).”

Now Green’s “conclusion may be ethical and may even be right, but he has not given us a single reason for believing them.” But the “thing which a scientific Ethics is required to shew, namely that certain things are really good, he has assumed to begin with, in assuming that things which are willed in a certain way are always good (my italics).” Hence, the “Prolegomena to Ethics is quite as far as Mr Spencer’s Data of Ethics, from making the smallest contribution to the solution of ethical problems.”20

Now notice that Moore is not saying that Green confuses goodness with what just happens to satisfy our desires but that he confuses goodness with desire satisfaction itself. Good is that it satisfies desire. In other words, goodness always accompanies desire satisfaction. Whenever and wherever goodness is going on, desires are being satisfied. Goodness is not an object but an experience. Notwithstanding whether the experience of satisfying desires is willing in a certain way, Green, as I have argued elsewhere, does indeed maintain, at least on numerous occasions, that happiness generally if not always accompanies good willing. But insofar as Green is claiming this, he is not analyzing or defining good in Moore’s sense. Green is not confusing a non-natural property, namely goodness, with another natural property, namely desire satisfaction. Therefore, he is not a relevant example of Moore’s naturalistic fallacy. But he could be said to exemplify a complimentary analytical error or fallacy of reasoning. He could seem to be guilty of often enough confusing the experience of happiness with the experience willing in a certain way. He might be charged with claiming that happiness always, as an empirical fact, accompanies good willing. But

I do not think he ever makes such a claim but rather merely insists that happiness normally tends to accompany good willing.

20 Moore, Principia Ethica, 139. 8

Conclusion

While Mander rightly, in my judgment, faults Russell and Moore for committing hermeneutical patricide by reconstructing Idealists simplistically and over exaggerating the differences between them, he does much the same in misrepresenting idealism’s rejection of classical utilitarianism.

Classical utilitarianism wrought idealism no less than analytical philosophy was fashioned by idealism. Moore’s contrasting assessment of hedonism (Chapter II) and metaphysical ethics

(Chapter III) in Principia Ethica demonstrates this plainly even thought his account of Mill and

Sidgwick on the one hand and his account of Makenzie and Green on the other hand have much to be desired. Notwithstanding whether all four were more preoccupied with good or with ought and notwithstanding whether they were what we now call consequentialists, all four tended to converge in recommending the same practical conduct. Though they may have given sufficiently distinct foundational reasons for the conduct they recommended insofar as they understood good differently, happiness was hardly less crucial for idealists as it was for classical utilitarians.

Indeed, as far as Moore was concerned, they all held, whether they realized it or not, that happiness typically accompanies promoting goodness and was therefore an extremely useful substitute

“criterion” for guiding our normative decisions. In finding the naturalistic fallacy in classical utilitarians and idealists alike, Principia Ethica reminds us of just how much they constitute a historical continuum rather than a dramatic break between them.

Finally, I would concede that however little Moore and idealists saw themselves as slaying their predecessors and however much we have subsequently bought into this melodramatic narrative of their intentions, we should not forget to pay sufficient attention to the actual substance and effectiveness of their criticisms. We should no less avoid fetishizing authorial intentions than we should recklessly reconstruct texts out of context.