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Moore's Accounts of ‘Right’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

Tom Regan
Affiliation:
North Carolina State University

Extract

Moore often is credited with implying the view that the meaning of evaluative or normative concepts is distinct from the criteria invoked to justify evaluative or normative judgments. A second view, to the effect that definitions cannot be evaluative or moral assertions, is attributed to him less frequently. In this paper, I shall argue that, while these views seem to be implied by much of what Moore says in Principia Ethica, Moore was not himself uniformly successful in observing their prohibitions. In particular, I shall argue that his account of ‘Right’ in Principia involved the very confusions which he seems to imply others should avoid. Against this backdrop, however, his subsequent treatment of ‘right’ in his Ethics, as well as his retrospective remarks about the relationships between ‘good’ and ‘right’ in his “A Reply to My Critics”, can be interpreted as both predictable and necessary. If the argument developed in this paper is sound, the explanation of Moore's abandonment of his earlier account of ‘right’ is not, as he says, merely because that account is “paradoxical”, but lies, instead, in a latent inconsistency between his Principia account of this predicate and other principles implied in that work.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1972

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References

1 Moore, G. E.. Principia Ethica (Cambridge: The University Press, 1902), p. 20. Hereafter references to Principia will be bracketed in the body of the essay.Google Scholar

2 Nakhnikian, George. “On the Naturalistic Fallacy,” included in Morality and the Language of Conduct, edited by Castaneda, Hector-Neri and Nakhnikian, George, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), p. 152.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 154.

4 Ibid., p. 153.

5 Ibid.

6 Cf., e.g., the passage in Moore's “A Reply to My Critics” cited below.

7 Moore, G. E.. Ethics. (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 105.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., p. 121.

9 Ibid., p. 39.

10 Ibid., pp. 39–40.

11 Ibid., p. 107.

12 Sir Ross, David, The Right and the Good. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 11.Google Scholar

13 The Philosophy of G. E. Moore. Edited by Schilpp, Paul A.. (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1952), pp. 558–59.Google Scholar

14 Op. cit. p. 107. See, too, the reference to “A Reply to My Critics.”