G. E. Moore’s Ethical Theory: Resistance and Reconciliation

This is a comprehensive study of the ethics of G. E. Moore, the most important English-speaking ethicist of the twentieth century. Moore’s ethical project, set out in his seminal text Principia Ethica, is to preserve common moral insight from scepticism and, in effect, persuade his readers to accept the objective character of goodness. Brian Hutchinson explores Moore’s arguments in detail and in the process relates the ethical thought to Moore’s anti-sceptical epistemology. Moore was, without perhaps fully realizing it, sceptical about the very enterprise of philosophy itself, and in this regard, as Brian Hutchinson reveals, was much closer in his thinking to Wittgenstein than has been previously realized. This book shows Moore’s ethical work to be much richer and more sophisticated than his critics have acknowledged.

• A comprehensive study of Moore’s ethics, hitherto undervalued • Cambridge publishes Moore’s principle ethical work (Principia Ethica)

Introduction: irony, naïveté and Moore; 1. Simplicity, indefinability, non-naturalness; 2. Good’s non-naturalness; 3. The paradox of ethics and its resolution; 4. The status of ethics: dimming the future and brightening the past; 5. The origin of the awareness of good and the theory of common sense; 6. Moore’s argument against egoism; 7. The diagnosis of egoism and the consequences of its rejection; 8. Moore’s practical and political philosophy; 9. Moore’s cosmic conservatism; 10. Cosmic conservatism II; Bibliography; Index.