Getting Started with Metaethics
For thousands of years philosophers studying questions about ethics did not distinguish clearly between so-called ‘first-order’ questions, such as ‘what is wrong?’ and ‘why is it wrong?’ and so-called ‘meta’ questions, such as ‘is anything wrong?’, ‘are the answers to what is wrong in the world, or in how we think about it?’, and ‘how, if at all, can we learn what is wrong?’. But sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, that changed, and the questions of normative ethics and those of metaethics came to be sharply distinguished. We’re going to start our class where many stories about metaethics in the twentieth century start: with the opening chapters of G.E. Moore’s 1903 book Principia Ethica.
Moore, according to many stories about how metaethics developed in the twentieth century, posed some of the questions of metaethics so clearly, and offered such vivid answers to them, that he stimulated a series of responses to his metaethical questions that were independent of thinking about normative ethical questions.
G.E. Moore
Moore published Principia Ethica at the age of about thirty, with the ambitious vision implied by his title’s allusion to Newton of laying out the first principles of ethical theory. Moore’s work, like all great philosophical contributions, is highly indebted to those who came before him and whose work he was able to study. But Moore wrote in a clear style that was not encumbered by references to philosophers who had come before him, and that makes it a much easier place to start reading for readers like you who have not read a lot of previous moral philosophy and so would not be able to follow the references, anyway.
Moore’s prose style and emphasis on trying to describe ideas as clearly as he was able over trying to situate those ideas into the context of the historical contributions of other philosophers are the hallmarks of what came to be called analytic philosophy, which grew up and came to be thought of as a distinctive way of doing philosophy around Cambridge University in the early twentieth century, while Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were all there.
Reading
To prepare for today’s class, read the preface and first chapter of Principia Ethica, sections 1-23. Ask yourself the following questions: what thesis is Moore trying to defend? What is his main argument for that thesis? Would Moore distinguish between the questions of metaethics and the questions of normative ethics?