G. E. Moore took a very specific position: “good” is simple and
indefinable. He didn’t think it was complex, and he didn’t think ethics
collapses into illusion.
Perhaps this was a mere process of
elimination, like ticking boxes until only one remains. Moore believed he had
a positive insight: that “good” is a non-natural property—something real, but
not reducible to anything like pleasure, desire, biology, or divine command.
That makes it too easily to demand that a person who says they have no
such insight and their insight says it is wrong should be believed. That shows
there is something wrong with his notion. He is clearly redefining his
subjective notion of good – defining it as something real and not subjective.
Moore complained that many philosophers commit what he called the
naturalistic fallacy—they try to define “good” in terms of something else,
like pleasure (hedonism), or what we desire or what God wills. He argues that
these attempts confuse what things are good with what goodness itself is.
Imagine someone says: “Grass is whatever becomes straw.” That’s mistaken.
Straw comes from grass, but it doesn’t define what grass is.
Likewise
pleasure might be something that is often good, but that doesn’t mean goodness
is pleasure. He is identifying a consequence, sign, or common feature—not the
essence.
You can point to many yellow things (bananas, sunflowers), but
you can’t define “yellow” in simpler terms—it’s something you just directly
recognize. Moore thinks “good” is like “yellow”: simple, unanalyzable, but
still meaningful.
Moore famously gave us the Open Question Argument.
Take any proposed definition such as that good is pleasure. Moore asks, if
pleasure is good. If “good” really meant “pleasure,” that question would be
meaningless—like asking “Is pleasure pleasure?” The question still feels open
and debatable for some pleasures seem bad such as cruelty, addiction. And some
non-pleasures seem good such as sacrifice, truth. So the question isn’t
closed—it’s still intelligible and arguable.
So good cannot mean
pleasure. Also if you say that good is whatever God wills or good is what we
desire we run into a wall. We are no better off for God willing something does
not make it good and desiring something does not make it good.
Was
Moore right? Philosophers are still divided. In his favour he correctly
spotted a real confusion: mixing up “what things are good” vs. “what goodness
is”. His Open Question Argument is powerful and still widely discussed.
Against him it may be asserted that the Open Question Argument doesn’t
prove indefinability. It just reveals that people can be confused about
meanings.
You may say that there is no way to tell if we are confused
about meanings or if the issue is indefiniability. It can even be both.
Others (like naturalists) insist “good” can be reduced to natural
properties such as well-being.
Moore’s view is that good is real, it is
simple and that good is indefinable.
Attempts to define it confuse
instances of goodness with goodness itself. The mistake he’s targeting is like
trying to understand what something is by pointing only to its effects,
examples, or consequences.
R. M. Hare argues that moral language is not
about describing objective facts but about prescribing actions. When we say
something is “good,” we are not identifying a property (as G. E. Moore
thought), but expressing a commitment or recommendation that we are logically
bound to apply consistently in similar situations. This means that moral
judgments are not objective in the sense of being true or false like
scientific statements; instead, they function as universalizable
prescriptions. Hare therefore helps explain why people may think values are
objective—they treat moral statements like factual claims—but in reality, they
are using them to guide behaviour while being constrained by logic and
consistency rather than by independently existing moral properties.