First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This chapter is Moore’s most important discussion of the subject of free will. He distinguishes the question of whether right and wrong depend not on what we can do if we choose, but rather on what we can do in some more absolute sense, from the question of whether we ever could have done anything different from what we actually did do. He analyzes closely the ambiguities of ‘could have done’ and ‘could have chosen’. He maintains that certain propositions ordinarily (...) taken to be perfectly true are not only compatible with the principle of causality, but also license claims that we have free will. (shrink)

In April 1939, G. E. Moore read a paper to the Cambridge University Moral Science Club entitled ‘Certainty’. In it, amongst other things, Moore made the claims that: the phrase ‘it is certain’ could be used with sense-experience-statements, such as ‘I have a pain’, to make statements such as ‘It is certain that I have a pain’; and that sense-experience-statements can be said to be certain in the same sense as some material-thing-statements can be — namely in the sense that (...) they can be safely counted on. When Moore later read his paper to Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein took violent exception to it, and the two entered into a heated exchange. The only known notes of this exchange are a previously unpublished verbatim record of part of it, taken by Norman Malcolm. This paper is an edition of Malcolm’s notes. These notes are valuable for both philosophical and scholarly reasons. They give us a glimpse of a sustained exchange between Wittgenstein and a real-life interlocutor; they contain a defence by Wittgenstein of the idea that a word’s use can illuminate its meaning; and they provide evidence of Wittgenstein’s philosophical engagement with the topic of certainty, and with Moore’s thought on it, long before he began to write the notes which make up On Certainty, in 1949. (shrink)

G. E. Moore 's 1912 work Ethics has tended to be overshadowed by his famous earlier work Principia Ethica. However, its detailed discussions of utilitarianism, free will, and the objectivity of moral judgements find no real counterpart in Principia, while its account of right and wrong and of the nature of intrinsic value deepen our understanding of Moore 's moral philosophy. Moore himself regarded the book highly, writing late in his career, "I myself like [it] better than Principia Ethica, because (...) it seems to me to be much clearer and far less full of confusions and invalid arguments." Short but philosophically rich, and written with impressive precision and intellectual candor, Ethics is a minor classic which repays careful study. This new edition includes Moore 's essay "The Nature of Moral Philosophy" as well as editorial notes, an introduction, and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

This chapter and the one that follows analyze and elucidate the normative structure of utilitarianism. Although Moore did not consider himself a utilitarian, it becomes evident as the book proceeds that he accepts utilitarianism’s consequentialist account of right and wrong despite rejecting its hedonistic value theory. These opening chapters are a model of analytic exposition as Moore lays out utilitarianism’s theoretical commitments and contrasts various distinct but closely related normative theses. Moore expounds the utilitarian theory with far greater precision than (...) the classical utilitarian thinkers ever achieved. (shrink)