G. E. Moore Books
George Edward Moore (1873–1958) was a British philosopher and a founding figure of analytic philosophy. Renowned for his contributions to ethics, epistemology, and common-sense realism, Moore taught at the University of Cambridge and edited the journal Mind.
Known for: Principia Ethica
Books by G. E. Moore
Principia Ethica
First published in 1903, Principia Ethica is one of the foundational works of modern moral philosophy. In this influential book, G. E. Moore asks a deceptively simple question: What do we really mean when we call something good? His answer reshaped the field. Moore argues that goodness cannot be reduced to pleasure, desire, evolutionary fitness, or any other natural property. Instead, “good” names a basic, irreducible quality that we recognize but cannot define. From that starting point, he builds a far-reaching account of intrinsic value, moral judgment, and the structure of ethical reasoning. The book matters because it forced philosophers to separate descriptive facts from evaluative claims with far greater precision. Moore’s critique of ethical naturalism, especially through his famous open question argument, became a turning point in analytic philosophy. It also influenced generations of thinkers beyond philosophy, including Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and members of the Bloomsbury Group. Moore wrote with unusual rigor and conceptual exactness, and his work remains essential for anyone who wants to understand how twentieth-century ethics came to focus on language, value, and the limits of definition.
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Why Naturalistic Definitions Fail
A great deal of moral confusion begins when we assume that goodness must be identical to some observable feature of the world. Moore’s first major move is to challenge this assumption. Ethical naturalism, as he uses the term, is the view that “good” can be defined by reference to a natural property ...
From Principia Ethica
The Open Question About Good
If goodness were truly definable, moral inquiry would become strangely trivial. Moore’s famous open question argument is designed to show why it is not. Suppose someone says, “Good means pleasurable.” If that were a genuine definition, then asking “Is pleasure good?” would be no more informative tha...
From Principia Ethica
Good Is Simple and Indefinable
Some of the most important things we know cannot be broken down into simpler definitions. Moore believes goodness is one of them. After rejecting naturalistic definitions, he argues that “good” is a simple, indefinable property. By simple, he means it has no component parts that can be analyzed into...
From Principia Ethica
Intrinsic Value and Isolation Tests
Much of ethical error comes from confusing what is valuable in itself with what is valuable as a means. Moore insists on this distinction. Something has intrinsic value if it is good in itself, not merely because it leads to something else. Money, for example, is typically valuable instrumentally: w...
From Principia Ethica
Beyond Pleasure Toward Ideal Goods
Pleasure matters, but Moore denies that it is the whole of the good life. One of his most influential criticisms is directed at hedonism, the view that only pleasure is intrinsically good. Hedonism has intuitive appeal because pleasure is obviously valuable and pain obviously matters. Yet Moore argu...
From Principia Ethica
The Whole Can Exceed the Parts
One of Moore’s most subtle contributions is the principle of organic unities: the value of a whole is not always equal to the sum of the values of its parts. A thing may change moral significance depending on the context in which it appears. This means ethics cannot always be done by simple addition...
From Principia Ethica
About G. E. Moore
George Edward Moore (1873–1958) was a British philosopher and a founding figure of analytic philosophy. Renowned for his contributions to ethics, epistemology, and common-sense realism, Moore taught at the University of Cambridge and edited the journal Mind. His rigorous argumentation and defense of...
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George Edward Moore (1873–1958) was a British philosopher and a founding figure of analytic philosophy. Renowned for his contributions to ethics, epistemology, and common-sense realism, Moore taught at the University of Cambridge and edited the journal Mind. His rigorous argumentation and defense of...
George Edward Moore (1873–1958) was a British philosopher and a founding figure of analytic philosophy. Renowned for his contributions to ethics, epistemology, and common-sense realism, Moore taught at the University of Cambridge and edited the journal Mind. His rigorous argumentation and defense of moral intuitionism shaped twentieth-century philosophical thought.
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George Edward Moore (1873–1958) was a British philosopher and a founding figure of analytic philosophy. Renowned for his contributions to ethics, epistemology, and common-sense realism, Moore taught at the University of Cambridge and edited the journal Mind.
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