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

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. – 227 p.This is the first comprehensive study of the ethics of G. E. Moore, the most important English-speaking ethicist of the 20th century. Moore’s ethical project, set out in his seminal text Principia Ethica, is to preserve common moral insight from skepticism 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-skeptical epistemology. Moore was, without perhaps fully realizing it, skeptical 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.Introduction: Irony, Naïveté, and Moore
Simplicity, Indefinability, Nonnaturalness
Good’s Nonnaturalness
The Paradox of Ethics and Its Resolution
The Status of Ethics: Dimming the Future and
The Origin of the Awareness of Good and the Theory of Common Sense
Moore’s Argument Against Egoism
The Diagnosis of Egoism and the Consequences of Its Rejection
Moore’s Practical and Political Philosophy
Moore’s Cosmic Conservatism
Cosmic Conservatism II