G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica is a landmark publication in twentieth-century moral philosophy. Through focusing on the origin and evolution of his main doctrines, this guidebook makes it clear that Moore was an innovator whose provocative take on traditional philosophical problems ignited heated debates among philosophers. Principia Ethica is an important text for those attempting to understand and engage with some major philosophical debates in ethics today. The Routledge Guidebook to Moore's Principia Ethica provides a comprehensive introduction to this historic text, examining key Moorean themes including: ethical non-naturalism the naturalistic fallacy the Open Question Argument moral ontology and epistemology ideal utilitarianism vindictive punishment and organicity moral intuition for epistemic justification in ethics theory of value Ideal for anyone wanting to understand and gain perspective on Moore’s seminal work, the book is essential reading for students of moral philosophy, metaethics, normative ethics, philosophical analysis, and related fields.

Recognized as the definitive starting point for twentieth-century ethical theory, the text is reprinted with the previously unpublished preface Moore wrote for a planned, but never completed, second edition. "Free Will" and "The Conception of Intrinsic Value" are also included from his later ethical writings.

Metaethics is the study of moral language, moral ontology, and moral epistemology. This book addresses each of these in a way accessible to both students and professional philosophers. Van Reken defends the classic view of moral realism, advanced by philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Kant. Moral language tends to be the focus of much current metaethical discussion, but this volume concerns itself more with questions of moral ontology and moral epistemology. The concept of the moral field is introduced, which helps distinguish what is moral and what is amoral (a discussion too often overlooked by moralists), and--adapting an epistemological theory developed by Alvin Plantinga--an argument is made that we can know moral truths. Principia Meta-Ethica presents a return to the core issues of metaethics and strengthens the case for moral realism with new arguments, distinctions, and concepts.

Principia Ethica is a foundational text in the analytic tradition of ethical theory and G. E. Moore’s most influential book. In it, he defines the subject of ethics as the general enquiry into the question “what is good?” and famously contends that the predicate “good” is indefinable. Moore claims that whatever definition is offered of the predicate, “it may be always asked, with significance, of the complex so defined, whether it is itself good,” an argument that would later come to be known as the “open question” argument. To fail to accept its conclusion and instead to identify “good” with some other quality or list of qualities is, according to Moore, to commit the error that he names the “naturalistic fallacy.” The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing ethical theories that Moore finds defective. First he addresses “naturalistic” theories, which define good in terms of properties that exist in time and can be experienced; among these theories his primary foci are the “evolutionary” ethics of Herbert Spencer and the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. Moore then criticizes the “non-naturalistic” strand of ethics that defines “good” in terms of a supersensible reality and whose representatives include Kant, Spinoza and the Stoics. While identifying different errors in each of the theories he considers, Moore holds all of them to commit the naturalistic fallacy. The final two chapters of the book develop Moore’s positive ethical vision, discussing respectively the conditions under which conduct is to be considered good or bad, and the notion of the “highest good” or the “Ideal.” He supports the standard consequentialist thesis that the right action is that which results in the most good. However, in his view “the most good” ought to be determined by reference to a set of intrinsic goods in which aesthetic experiences and personal affections are foregrounded, in contrast to hedonistic theories that recognize value only in pleasure or the absence of pain. Moore’s declarations concerning what has intrinsic value influenced members of the Bloomsbury Group such as Lytton Strachey, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes. In her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf has her character Helen Ambrose read Principia Ethica, while Strachey wrote to Moore that he considered the publication date of Principia Ethica to be the “beginning of the Age of Reason.” Although Moore would later disown many of its main contentions and argumentative strategies as confused, Principia Ethica continues to be acknowledged as a pioneering work of ethics and of analytic philosophy. In affirming the importance of understanding the meaning of ethical judgments before progressing to investigations of their truth, the treatise also laid the groundwork for the mid-century linguistic turn in ethics and the contemporary distinction between normative ethics and meta-ethics. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

First published in 1903, this volume revolutionized philosophy and forever altered the direction of ethical studies. It clarifies some of moral philosophy's most common confusions and redefines the science's terminology. 6 chapters explore: the subject matter of ethics, naturalistic ethics, hedonism, metaphysical ethics, ethics in relation to conduct, and the ideal.

George Edward Moore’s Principia Ethica was published by Cambridge University Press in 1903 and this was the birth of the science of ethics. So groundbreaking was this book at the time, that practically overnight, ethicists became meta-ethicists and the book ever since has been recognised as the definitive starting point for 20th century ethical theory. In it Moore is concerned with applying logic to ethics, and with demonstrating that logic can give ethics a better foundation. Moore defines ethics as an inquiry into what is good, including what is good in human conduct. Moore supposed that common sense beliefs about the world were correct as they were and shows how false premises about the way in which good is to be defined can lead to false conclusions about ethical conduct. Known to influence the thinking of Russell, Wittgenstein, Ryle and Keynes to mention but a few, understanding this key work in 20th C ethics is essential, and made achievable in this Briefly guide.