Excerpts from Stephen Darwall's chapter on "Moore to Stevenson" in Ethics in the History of Western Philosophy Ed. Cavalier, Gouinlock and Sterba (MacMillan/St. Martin's Press, 1990).

Moore held that ethics attempts to answer two distinct questions: first, 'what kinds of things ought to exist for their own sakes?' (or, as he also put it, what is 'good in itself or has intrinsic value?'), and, second, 'What kinds of actions ought we to perform?' (PE, viii). Of these two, Moore believed the former to be more fundamental. Indeed, in Principia he held that the latter question, concerning right and wrong, really asks no more than which acts will actually bring about the most intrinsic value. Later he was to give up this 'analytical consequentialism', and maintain that while 'right' does not mean productive of the best consequences, nonetheless it is always right to do whatever will promote the most intrinsic value. Moore never wavered from the position that the most important substantive question of ethics is: What is good in itself? What has intrinsic value?

Still, he thought, there is a question that is even more fundamental for ethics than this substantive one. And that concerns the nature of intrinsic goodness itself. Before we can assess attempted answers to the question of what is good, or even know what could count as evidence for and against them, we must first know what the question itself is about. So Moore argued that the issue of 'how "good" is to be defined, is the most fundamental question in all Ethics' (PE, 5).

Now it is important to appreciate that what Moore meant by 'definition' was a matter not of lexicography, but of elucidating the nature of the property to which 'good' refers. Moore thought it self-evident that when we wonder whether something is good we are wondering whether it has a specific property. And so the most fundamental question concerns the nature of that property: what is intrinsic value?

Moore's first answer, in Principia, may seem unlikely to provide much help in moral philosophy; for his thesis was that 'good' refers to a property that is simple and unanalyzable, one that can be given no contentful description at all. The property of goodness cannot be further analyzed. Nonetheless, Moore thought his discovery very powerful. Admittedly, it could not lead directly to knowledge of what is good, but it could demonstrate various proposed paths to that knowledge to be blind alleys.

The field of ethics was littered, Moore held, with attempts to argue for some substantive theory of good or other on the grounds that goodness simply is whatever property the theory identified as characteristic of what is good. So hedonists, Moore charged, had tended to argue that pleasure is the only intrinsic good on the grounds that 'good' simply means pleasurable, that being pleasurable is simply what it is to be good. But 'good' means no such thing. Indeed, Moore said, there is nothing contentful that it means. 'Whenever [a person] thinks of "intrinsic value" or "intrinsic worth," or says that a thing "ought to exist." he has before his mind the unique objectóthe unique property of thingsówhich I mean by "good."' (PE, 17.) That property is not identical with any of the properties with which philosophers have sought to identify itónot with being desired, nor being desired when fully informed, nor being desired by God, nor tending to promote survival, nor anything else. 'Everything is what it is and not another thing.'

Ethics, as a discipline, is concerned with 'tine only simple object of thought which is peculiar to' itóthe idea of intrinsic value (PE, 5). And since intrinsic goodness is irreducible, it follows that ethics is irreducible to any other subjectónot to any of the sciences, nor to metaphysics, nor to theology.

Moore thought it followed from the unanalyzability of the concept of goodness that no evidence or reasons can be given for any proposition of intrinsic value at all. Strictly speaking, a proposition of, say, psychology can provide no evidence whatsoever for any proposition about what is intrinsically good. As a foundationalist, Moore thought that a proposition can only be evident in one of two ways: either it must be self-evident, or it must be deducible from some other self-evident proposition. If a property is complex and can be analyzed into simple parts, then its existence follows from the existence of the simples that form the complex. Moore gives the idea of a horse as an example: 'hoofed quadruped of the genus Equus'. From the propositions that x is a quadruped, x is hoofed, and so on, we can deduce that x is a horse. But since goodness is a simple property, there are no such propositions from which it can be deduced. A proposition about the good can be known, consequently, only if it is self-evident.

But why was Moore so confident that goodness is not identical with any of the properties with which other philosophers had sought to identify it?... why such confidence that being good and, for instance being the object of informed desire are two things rather than one?

Given Moore's methodological emphasis on questions, it is perhaps fitting that his most powerful argument is known as the 'open question argument'. No definition can settle a question of ethics since 'whatever definition be offered, it may be always asked, with significance, of the complex so defined, whether it is itself good' (PE, 15). So, suppose someone suggests that goodness is identical to the property of being the object of informed desire. That this proposed identification cannot be correct, Moore argued, follows from the fact that the question, Is what we desire when informed good?, does not lack significance, though it would have to if 'good' and 'what we desire when informed' meant the same thing. Consider: since the word 'bachelor' means never married male adult, there is no significant question, Are never married male adults bachelors? But this is not the case with 'good'. It follows, Moore thought, that the fundamental concept of ethics, goodness, is indefinable.