This is a comprehensive study of the ethics of G. E. Moore, the most important English-speaking ethicist of the twentieth century. Mooreās ethical project, set out in his seminal text Principia Ethica, is to preserve common moral insight from scepticism and, in effect, persuade his readers to accept the objective character of goodness. Brian Hutchinson explores Mooreās arguments in detail and in the process relates the ethical thought to Mooreās anti-sceptical epistemology. Moore was, without perhaps fully realizing it, sceptical 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 Mooreās ethical work to be much richer and more sophisticated than his critics have acknowledged.
G. E. Moore’s Ethical Theory
This is a comprehensive study of the ethics of G. E. Moore, the most important English-speaking ethicist of the twentieth century. Mooreās ethical project, set out in his seminal text Principia Ethica, is to preserve common moral insight from scepticism and, in effect, persuade his readers to accept the objective character of goodness. Brian Hutchinson explores Mooreās arguments in detail and in the process relates the ethical thought to Mooreās anti-sceptical epistemology. Moore was, without perhaps fully realizing it, sceptical 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 Mooreās ethical work to be much richer and more sophisticated than his critics have acknowledged.