British Philosophy and G. E. Moore

Alexander was unusual in his espousal of an evolutionary system, not so much because of its originality, for we have seen that numerous teleological systems of evolutionary ethics were devised in the late nineteenth century, but rather because professional philosophers had pretty much confined such systems to the realm of "popular" literature. Alexander's peers at Oxford were hostile to Spencerian or Darwinian ethics, and philosophers at Cambridge, England, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Oxford, and Chicago were in agreement at least on that score.

Time did little to change the philosophers' stand. William Ritchie Sorley, who replaced Sidgwick as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, held a critical opinion of evolutionary ethics. Before teaching at Cambridge, he published The Ethics of Naturalism: A Criticism (1885), which was an extended examination of "the ethical significance of the theory of evolution." His conclusion was "that the theory of evolution—however great its

achievements in the realm of natural science—is almost resultless in ethics."^[28] Like Sidgwick, Sorley held that evolutionary theory could not supply a perspective from which to resolve critical ethical issues like those of the conflict between the individual and society. Sorley not only agreed with Sidgwick that ethical naturalism—that is, those systems that started from an empirical basis—failed but also followed him in the belief that a religious assumption was necessary for any valid ethical system. Sorley, however, went beyond his predecessor in elaborating a theistic philosophy as a new foundation for ethics. Like Sidgwick's attempt to save utilitarianism by postulating an initial divine sanction, it was not widely regarded as successful.

Of greater professional importance at Cambridge in the generation after Sidgwick was G. E. Moore, who repeated the condemnation of evolutionary ethics. Moore's arguments were important because they were embedded in a broader position that defined a basic starting point for twentieth-century ethics.

In his classic work, Principia Ethica (1903), Moore was careful to distinguish Darwin's ideas from those of Spencer and his followers. He referred to Darwin as a major figure in biological thought and classified Spencer as the best known of the many popular writers on "Evolutionistic Ethics." Moore devoted ten pages to criticizing Spencer's writings on ethics, which he treated like a set of inferior undergraduate essays. In commenting on Spencer's Data of Ethics, Moore's contempt was palpable.

It is, of course, quite possible that his treatment of Ethics contains many interesting and instructive remarks. It would seem, indeed, that Mr Spencer's main view, that of which he is most clearly and most often conscious, is that pleasure is the sole good, and that to consider the direction of evolution is by far the best criterion of the way in which we shall get most of it: and this theory, if he could establish that amount of pleasure is always in direct proportion to evolution and also that it was plain what conduct was more evolved, would be a very valuable contribution to the science of Sociology; it would even, if pleasure were the sole good, be a valuable contribution to Ethics. But the above discussion should have made it plain that, if what we want

[28] William Ritchie Sorley, The Ethics of Naturalism: A Criticism (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1904): 309. Also see his Recent Tendencies in Ethics: Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1904) and Moral Values and the Idea of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918).

from an ethical philosopher is a scientific and systematic Ethics, not merely an Ethics professedly "based on science"; if what we want is a clear discussion of the fundamental principles of Ethics, and a statement of the ultimate reasons why one way of acting should be considered better than another—then Mr Spencer's "Data of Ethics" is immeasurably far from satisfying these demands.^[29]

Although Spencer was a ripe target for Moore's analytical attack, his criticism of evolutionary ethics extended to all variants. Moore distinguished a number of possible approaches to evolutionary ethics in his Principia Ethica. For example, he noted that if we accepted the ethical judgment (independent of Spencer) that evolution was "progress," that is, the more evolved was indeed the better, we had little to go on in determining the ethical value of any particular act. "We cannot assume that, because evolution is progress on the whole, therefore every point in which the more evolved differs from the less is a point in which it is better than the less."^[30] And, "we certainly cannot use it as a datum from which to infer details."^[31] That is, even if a cosmic process leading to progress on the whole existed, it did not supply a point from which we could derive any knowledge of particular moral judgments.

The more common view in evolutionary ethics, according to Moore, was a simpler claim: "that we ought to move in the direction of evolution simply because it is the direction of evolution."^[32] Moore claimed this view was invalidated because it was an example of the "naturalistic fallacy—the fallacy which consists in identifying the simple notion which we mean by 'good' with some other notion."^[33]

Moore's Principia Ethica is best remembered for its general assault on all ethical systems based on the naturalistic fallacy. These "naturalistic ethics," which he claimed included the major versions of evolutionary ethics as well as over half the writers of Western ethics,^[34] attempted to define the "good" by reference to some

[29] George Edward Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978): 54.

[30] Ibid., 55.

[31] Ibid., 55.

[32] Ibid., 56.

[33] Ibid., 58.

[34] See Thomas Baldwin, G. E. Moore (London: Routledge, 1990). Baldwin has a good discussion of Moore's critique of earlier ethical positions.

"other thing."^[35] This other thing might be a natural object, or an object inferred to exist in some "supersensible real world." Most of British philosophical writing on ethics fell into one or the other of these two categories. Evolutionary ethics, especially Spencer's, was, for Moore, among the least formidable of his opponents. And in developing his critique of naturalistic ethics he was primarily attempting to show the inadequacy of Mill, Bentham, McTaggart, Bradley, and Green. In their place Moore set out to demonstrate that "good" was a simple notion that could not be defined or analyzed. It therefore could not be defined as pleasure, which the utilitarians contended, or as an evolutionary adaptation. Its existence was simply apprehended.

Moore's writings had the dramatic effect of redirecting much ethical discussion, and over the years an enormous body of literature has been generated in response to his position.^[36] A recent study of Moore claims that "the influence of Moore's ideas spread well beyond Cambridge (and Bloomsbury), partly through the establishment of an 'intuitionist' school of ethical theory at Oxford which largely agreed with him on the central metaphysical issues of ethics. The result is that, for better or worse, twentieth-century British ethical theory is unintelligible without reference" to the Principia Ethica.^[37] The author of this statement meant by his claim that Moore's position "was thought to make unacceptable metaphysical and epistemological demands; so the only recourse was to abandon belief in an objective moral reality and accept an emotivist, prescriptivist, or otherwise anti-realist, account of ethical values."^[38]

Later philosophers, although they rejected Moore's positive contributions to moral philosophy, followed him in criticizing the metaphysical systems of earlier philosophers like Green and in continuing to dismiss Spencer and other writers on evolutionary ethics. Moore's Principia Ethica is, indeed, often cited as having sunk

[35] Moore, Principia Ethica, 38.

[36] For an interesting discussion of Moore's immediate historical impact, see Tom Regan, Bloomsbury's Prophet: G. E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986): 198. Also see Baldwin, G. E. Moore; Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes; and Paul Levy, G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979).

[37] Baldwin, G. E. Moore, 66.

[38] Ibid.

evolutionary ethics "into oblivion."^[39] This is a statement that, if true, certainly needs to be qualified, for we have seen that most earlier philosophers were skeptical about the ethical conclusions of Stephen, Clifford, Spencer, Fiske, and similar writers. Moore was not responsible so much for a set of new objections that led to the demise of evolutionary ethics as he was for reinforcing the attitude with which professional philosophers approached it. If Moore was better remembered than his teacher, Sidgwick, from whom he heard most of the telling arguments against evolutionary ethics, it was a reflection of Moore's greater importance in British philosophy during our century.^[40] Moore captivated the Bloomsbury set who knew him as a young man, and he exerted a gentle but guiding hand in redirecting British ethics. Perhaps another reason his influence was greater than Sidgwick's was a consequence of Moore having a general program for philosophy that he articulated with consummate skill. Sidgwick, in contrast, provided a brilliant analysis of the methods of ethics but was never satisfied that he had successfully achieved an acceptable rational synthesis of our intuitive moral convictions and a rational structure to relate them.