Abstract
This volume is the reprint of the famous and much-discussed treatise of Dr. G. E. Moore, the present Editor of Mind, which was first published in 1903. Readers will turn at once with interest to the brief note added to the preface in which the author tells us that he is still in agreement with its main tendency and conclusions. His thesis is that “good” is indefinable, but that “the good” can be defined. The good is the thing, simple or complex to any degree, to which the indefinable predicate good belongs. He illustrates his meaning by an extreme case. He asks us to imagine a world exceedingly beautiful, and then to imagine the ugliest world it is possible to conceive. We are asked, in comparing these worlds, to accept the limitation that “we are not entitled to imagine that any human being ever has, or ever, by any possibility, can, live in either.” Is it irrational, he asks, to hold that it is better that the one should exist and not the other? To most students of ethics the limitation makes the question nonsense in the literal meaning of the term. It is interesting to find that Dr. Moore can still think it a rational question after the lapse of twenty years. Yet we must admit the force of his logic, for if value is to have any meaning at all to the realist, it can only be by finding some way of attaching it to the object and presenting it in complete abstraction from the subject, for the mind is limited in its activity to contemplation.
Principia Ethica.
By Dr. George Edward Moore. Pp. xxvii + 232. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1922.) 15s. net.
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Principia Ethica . Nature 110, 74 (1922). https://doi.org/10.1038/110074b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/110074b0