G.E. Moore died in October 1958, just days after my own birth. That's a neat little irrelevant connection with which to return to my discussion of Moore's approach to ethics and how its embrace feels like a philosophical breakthrough for me.
Moore's approach, in a few words, is to understand good as a direct observable though non-natural property of events and experiences, a property not reducible to anything else.
A quick qualification of that. Goods come in two classes, as we intuitively experience them, intrinsic and instrumental. We pursue instrumental goods so that we may secure and increase the intrinsic goods. A crude example: we eat nutritional foods so that we may survive so that sometimes we may savor dessert. So it is strictly intrinsic good that is the simple irreducible property.
This suggests, to revert to the Jamesian terminology I quoted yesterday, that with regard to intrinsic goods we have a "special intuitive faculty" of recognizing good when we see it, and that we must take as the intrinsic goods simply those on which neurologically healthy adult humans, the presumed possessors of this faculty, agree. Then we can apply reason to the further questions raised by the various instrumental goods, to test whether and how far they will allow us enjoy the desserts of life.
Moore says that the list if intrinsic goods is a short one. To paraphrase him a bit: the pleasures of social relations, the enjoyment of the beautiful in art, the appreciation of the sublime in nature, these are the ultimate goods in life, the intrinsic goods. The right is derived from the good, that is, actions that increase opportunities for these goods, without overcompensating losses, are right.
Here we can bring in the historical element that Moore rather neglects and that James rightly emphasizes. Over time, the human race, as a pragmatic development, has discovered that certain rules and roles contribute to this goal of increasing the intrinsic good in the world. Roles and rules have developed. Working within these roles, following these rules, has come to be called “right.”
Right in an objective sense and right in a way that we do not have to see ourselves as commanded to understand, in order to understand.
Now: note that to Moore, each of the good things on our short list is good through being appreciated and enjoyed. Sublime natural vistas are sublime because of their impact on humans. But that doesn't reduce his view to utilitarianism, because good is not pleasure. Good is the non-natural quality that shows itself in these particular instances, which each happen to be, on the whole, pleasant. Since his ethics doesn't have us pursuing pleasure per se, the troubles that arise when we try to include the pleasure of, say, a sadist or a pathological serial killer in the hedonic calculus don't arise. There is no hedonic calculus.
Suppose there were a proposal to create a series of explosions that would produce a gradual slope where there is now a sharp falling off, so there would be no waterfall at Niagara, just a course of rapids. Presumably the people proposing these explosions would have some goal in mind that they would achieve that would (in their view) be worth it. Yet the contemplation of Niagara is one of the great desserts of life -- hence the viability of the tourist industry there.
What I think, following my Moore/James hybridization, is this: rational folk ought to be able to agree that the contemplation of that place is a sublime perception, and such perceptions are good. Accordingly, we ought to be able to agree that any such course of action as that hypothesized above would have real costs, moral costs. Whether the moral costs would be "worth it" is, as I'm sure you would say, something we can't know in the abstract. But I submit we can know this: the moral costs would be real, and a failure to even take them into account would be ... well ... immoral.
Next week I'll have a bit more to say about this view of ethics (teleological intuitionism, to give it a label) and about its relationship to what one might call "desire satisfactionism."
I have other obsessions with which I will be dealing here over the next couple of days/entries. But I will return to these matters next week.
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