WJEC/Eduqas RS for A2/Yr2: Religion and Ethics (DRAFT)

T1 Ethical Thought

very simple. He began his ethical enquiries with what he considered the most obvious question to ask: ‘what is good?’ By this, Moore is concerned with what he calls the ‘intrinsic value’ of good as an end in itself. He sees this as a peculiar use of the word good that differentiates it from good or right actions that are a means to an end in bringing about good. Ethics, then, is based entirely on the underpinning notion of what good ‘is’. Moore writes: Let us, then, consider this position. My point is that good is a simple notion , just as yellow is a simple notion; that, just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to anyone who does not already know it, what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is. Definitions of the kind that I was asking for, definitions which describe the real nature of the object or notion denoted by a word, and which do not merely tell us what the word is used to mean, are only possible when the object or notion in question is something complex. Moore is not saying that things can’t be ‘good’; indeed, there are many things that can be identified by their ‘goodness’, for example, pleasure, love, happiness, health and so forth. What Moore was pointing out was that a particular quality that is described as ‘good’ cannot be used to define ‘good’; in other words, we cannot identify a single property or quality that explains what goodness in itself ‘is’. We can say a door is yellow so that it is a yellow door, but when we ask what yellow is, we do not reply ‘it is door or dooriness’. A yellow door would help us understand the notion of yellow but the door does not define what yellow ‘is’. In the same way with ‘good’, we can identify pleasure as good but to answer that ‘goodness’ is pleasure, that is – pleasure alone – does not satisfy our quest for a definition as there are many other things that are also good or a means to goodness. There is no shortage of possible definitions: naturalness, virtue, wisdom, love, peace, duty, etc. This means that good in itself cannot be a natural property and to identify it with a particular natural property does not define good. Good in itself is ‘unanalysable’. Moore called this the Naturalistic Fallacy and just as Hume argued you cannot derive an ought from is, Moore argued you cannot define goodness through nature and experience. Good is simply good. Key quotes If I am asked, ‘What is good?’ my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked ‘How is good to be defined?’ my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it. (Moore) It does not matter what we call it provided we recognise it when we meet it. (Moore on the Naturalistic Fallacy) Another way Moore tried to explain it was in relation to ‘parts’. He argued that things are often defined in relation to their constituent parts, for example, a horse, namely four legs, etc., or a chariot, four wheels, etc. The problem with good is that it has no constituent parts itself, it is just a simple notion or concept. He writes: ‘Good, then, if we mean by it that quality which we assert to belong to a thing, when we say that the thing is good, is incapable of any definition, in the most important sense of that word. The most important sense of definition is that in which a definition states “what are the parts which invariably compose a certain whole?”; and in this sense good has no definition because it is simple and has no parts. It is one of those innumerable objects of thought which are themselves incapable of definition, because they are the ultimate terms of reference to which whatever is capable of definition must be defined.’

DRAFT

The door cannot define yellow in the same way an action cannot reveal what ‘good’ means.

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