Philosophy
Lovers!
Click Here

G. E. Moore thought that intrinsic goodness was a real property of things, even though (like the number two) it did not exist in time and was not the object of sense experience. He explicitly aligned himself here with Plato and against the class of empiricist philosophers. His predecessors, Moore thought, had almost all committed the error, which he called ‘the naturalistic fallacy’, of trying to define this value property by identifying it with a nonevaluative property. For example, they proposed that goodness is pleasure, or what produces pleasure. But whatever non-evaluative property we try to say goodness is identical to, we will find that it remains an open question whether that property is in fact good. For example, it makes sense to ask whether pleasure or the production of pleasure is good. . . Intrinsic goodness, Moore said, is a simple non-natural property (i.e. neither natural nor supernatural) and indefinable. He thought we had a special form of cognition that he called ‘intuition’, which gives us access to such properties. By this he meant that the access was not based on inference or argument, but was self-evident (though we could still get it wrong, just as we can with sense perception).

John Hare

Click HERE to reach the associated topic for this webpage.
For more topics click HERE.