The Ineffable and the Incalculable: G.E. Moore on Ethical Expertise

Abstract

Although the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica is widely acknowledged as a momentous event in the history of ethics, it is especially significant in connection with the idea of ethical expertise, since it was hailed as a turning point in the use of reason rather than sentiment to decide ethical questions. Moore’s friend Lytton Strachey wrote to him saying that his book “laid the true foundations of Ethics” and that “It is the scientific method deliberately applied, for the first time, to Reasoning. . . . I date from Oct. 1903 the beginning of the Age of Reason” (quoted in Baldwin, 1993, p. xi). In addition, John Maynard Keynes famously wrote that “I went up to Cambridge at Michaelmas 1902, and Moore’s came out at the end of my first year. . . . it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth” (1972, p. 435). A hundred years later, Moore’s work is viewed more critically, but hardly less seriously, and few doubt that Moore did, indeed, try to impose on the field of ethics more structure and analytical rigor than was previously associated with it. In this chapter, then, I shall explain what, according to Moore, would constitute ethical expertise. I shall begin by devoting the remainder of this section to the task of interpreting the notion of ethical expertise itself. One question about the notion of ethical expertise is whether it is primarily a matter of knowledge or practice. Although the notion of expertise obviously has more of a theoretical connotation than a pragmatic one, the subject matter of ethics is so inevitably pragmatic that some have thought it to be an essentially practical endeavor. Aristotle, for example, writes in his Nicomachean Ethics that “Our present inquiry does not aim, as others do, at study; for the purpose of our examination is not to know what virtue is, but to become good” (p. 1103b, ll. 27– 29). But in modern ethics, the opposing view is predominant. Moore’s teacher Henry Sidgwick, for example, writes in his Methods of Ethics that “here as in other opinions we ought to aim at nothing but truth” (p. 335) and “on reflection it is generally admitted that it cannot be good to be in error on . . . any . . . point” (p. 429). And Moore himself is quite emphatic in his claims that “The direct object of