Abstract:

Before Moore, western debate in ethics was centralized either in moral judgment or in summum bonum of life.  Moore changed this intellectual track and concerned about ethical terms, which is called Meta ethics.  His descriptions of ethical terms can be viewed as the response against Ethical naturalism.  He claimed that viewing Good in correlation with any natural property is Naturalistic fallacy, which raises the infinitely regressive open question.  According to him, an ethical term like Good is indefinable, unanalyzable, simple, intuitively graspable, and non-natural.  However, he, further, argues that apprehension of many Goodness in order to get an idea of its relation between partial values is organic Unity.  This paper is presenting how Moore establishes pluralism by his doctrine of Organic unity.

Moore’s Idea of Organic Unity:

Moore distinguishes the value of whole and value of parts.  For example, in apprehension of beautiful flower, there is combination of different color; each particular color may have separate value which is different with its whole.[1] If Y is goodness apprehended by seeing yellow color of flower and R is Goodness apprehended by seeing red color of same flower, then Whole Goodness W is given combined while seeing same flower wholly. But the organic whole W is not equal to sum of R and Y, rather it is different. This whole goodness according to Moore is like biological organism which has different property of consciousness and which cannot be found in its partial organ. Moreover, every neurons of brain has goodness in some extent, which is quite different with the goodness of whole brain having psychology.  In addition, apprehension of whole goodness does not change to the apprehension of partial goodness.  If we apprehend W, then apprehension of R and Y does not change.  We apprehend these all goodness as W + R + Y at the same time and it is organic unity.  Hence whole is not equal to sum of parts rather it is in association with parts and these plurality are independent, not influenced by each other, although whole-part are in relation.  He says, “The value of such a whole bears no regular proportion to the sum of the values of its parts.”[2]

Defending Plurality:

By the doctrine of organic wholeness, it is reasonable to say that Moore is defending plurality of Goodness.  There are many Goodness, that may be beauty, love, value and rightness and so on.  Good cannot be sketched as monistic ideal.  Intuition reveals such plurality of Goods; one system cannot define all the intuitive goodness.

Moore thought that an important bar to the pluralistic view is naturalistic fallacy.[3] He used the word naturalistic fallacy to his predecessor’s doctrine on ethics which reduces Good as identical with a single natural property like Pleasure. Defining Good as identical with single natural property compels to believe in value monism that the only one things is valuable and other are valueless whereas Moore insists upon the self evident existence of many Values which arises as different intuitive cognition. In such monistic definition of Good, Moore saw the open question that if pleasure is Good, then is it Good that something is pleasant? For example, someone is listening music and enjoying pleasure, then question may ask as ‘is it Good that Music is Pleasant?’ These types of questions are open to all and go to infinite regress without end and hence ‘Good’ is not definable as any natural property.

Critique of defining ethical terms as natural property leads, for Moore, to the establishment of autonomous ethics distinguished from positive science.

Moore’s explanation of Naturalistic fallacy and Open Question Argument concludes that the Good is indefinable, non-natural property. To be indefinable does not lead to the agnosticism rather it presupposes self-evidentiality.  Nevertheless, according to Moore, Good cannot be analyzed as formal proposition, it is unanalyzable and has no truth function, and it is just apprehensible.

Critique:

In my opinion, Moore’s pluralism and intuitive value is failure to supply the idea for moral judgment.  Meta ethics must be in relation with moral science.  But in accordance with Moore, Goodness, Value etc. are improvable self evident whereas he is silent about ‘is there any self evident for moral judgment’.  If value is self-evident and intuitively apprehensible, all people would know about that, but every people have different supposition about value.  If a different person’s different opinion about value is self evident, then how the summum bonum of religious terrorist can be judged?  Moore is implausible in this condition.

Moreover, in my sense, Moore has reduced ethics into Aesthetics. Ethical value cannot be identical with the aesthetic beauty and love. A deep intuition about beauty is quite different with value. Value presupposes belief and justification. No one choose the summum bonum of life by intuition, rather he justifies his life’s worth by specific standard.

As a cognitivist, Moore argues that moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world. This assumption reflects his epistemic common sense realism but if ethical judgment entails truth function, how it can be intuitive.  This assumption presupposes the factual analyticity, which falsifies his claim of Good as unanalyzable.  This fallacy is happening because Moore keeps rightness-wrongness, value, beauty, and Good all in one category whereas they reflect different significance.  To be ethical judgment (right/wrong) objective, that must be distinguished from beauty and value because beauty, Good, Love etc. cannot be fully objective.

Conclusion:

Hence, rejecting naturalistic doctrine by open question argument, Moore defends the Value Pluralism; the plural values within an organic unity and pluralism of different Organic Unity. Combination of plural color in one flower has the plural beauties; this is the pluralism within an organic unity. Moreover, except beauty, there are many ethical terms like love, virtue etc which can be called the pluralism of different organic unity.  Again, value, beauty, virtue etc. differs in conditions and objects that we apprehends, hence organic unity of beauty of a flower is different with organic unity of beauty of a painting.  These arguments show that there is no any system, which can define ethical terms bounding upon one system.

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[1] Moore, G .E., Principia Ethica Page no. 29

[2]  Ibid, Page no. 27

[3] Hurka, Thomas, Moore’s Moral Philosophy, The Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy,