| Phi 110 Fall 2015 |
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Utilitarianism continued to be of interest in Britain through the 19th century and received a systematic development (along with other ethical theories) in Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (originally published in 1874), which Moore refers to in several places. Moore accepts Utilitarianism’s concern with the consequences of actions, but his views on the evaluation of such consequences are quite different from Mill’s.
These selections fall into two groups. The larger and more important is a group of sections from early in the book in which Moore identifies a “naturalistic fallacy” in views like Mill’s. The second consists of sections, both early and late, in which Moore elaborates the form of consequentialism that he supports.
• Sections 10-14 provide his discussion of the “naturalistic fallacy” that he describes already in the third paragraph of §10, the mistake of assuming that the properties that make something good can serve as a definition of ‘good’. He claims, on the contrary that ‘good’ is “indefinable” in a sense he notes at the beginning of the section. He offers an argument for this in §13 (1): if it makes sense to ask, for example, whether pleasure is good, then, even if the answer is yes, the word ‘good’ doesn’t mean ‘pleasure’.
• In §17, he begins to present his positive ethical theory. He states his consequentialism (on p. 25 of the original edition, whose pages appear as marginal numbers on the handout) schematically in terms of the concept of “intrinsic value” (i.e., value as an end rather than as a means).
• The two sections 112-113 from relatively late in the book begin by recalling a test for determining what is intrinsically good that he’d presented earlier, and then go on to consider what is good in this way. He argues that pleasure itself has little intrinsic value (though it may be a part of wholes which do have such value), and he then goes on (in §113) to identify the things of greatest value as wholes of this sort: “the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.”
Moore’s somewhat pedantic style (as in his claim in §14 that ‘the good’ may be definable even though ‘good’ is not) may make it surprising that he was an enormous influence on a group of writers, artists, and critics of the early 20th century known as the “Bloomsbury group.” What he identifies as having intrinsic value may seem to explain this in part, but much of the reason is probably that his identification of the “naturalistic fallacy” aligned with a strand in that era of “modernist” thinking about art.