Breathing Life into a Dead Argument: G. E. Moore and … · A century after its publication, G.E....

Breathing Life into a Dead Argument: G. E. Moore and the Open QuestionAuthor(s): Andrew AltmanSource: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the AnalyticTradition, Vol. 117, No. 3 (Feb., 2004), pp. 395-408Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4321453 .

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ANDREW ALTMAN

BREATHING LIFE INTO A DEAD ARGUMENT: G.E. MOORE AND THE OPEN QUESTION

ABSTRACT. A century after its publication, G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica stands as one of the classic statements of anti-naturalism in ethics. Moore claimed that the most basic ethical properties were denoted by 'good' and 'bad' and that all naturalist accounts of those properties were inadequate. His open-question argument aimed to refute any proposed identification of good with some natural property, and Moore concluded from the argument that good must be a nonnatural property.

The received view is that the open-question argument is a failure. In this paper, my aim is to breathe some life back into Moore's argument. My plan for doing so begins by presenting the standard interpretation of the argument and then showing that there is an altemative to that interpretation. The alternative is not developed at any length by Moore and stands in need of some elaboration. I suggest a way of elaborating the argument and then show that the standard criticisms of Moore fail to undermine this alternative version of the open-question argument.

I. INTRODUCTION

A century after its publication, G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica stands as one of the classic statements of anti-naturalism in ethics. Although the book is devoted mainly to substantive ethical issues, Moore's initial chapter in which he presents his metaethical views has received most of the attention. Moore's metaethics revolves around an aggressive attack on naturalism, symbolized by his coining of the term "the naturalistic fallacy". Other thinkers of the time shared Moore's anti-naturalist views, but his indictment of all forms of naturalism as resting on a certain "fallacy" helped to make Principia the center of considerable discussion, much of it quite critical. 1

Moore claimed that the most basic ethical properties were denoted by 'good' and 'bad' and that all naturalist accounts of those properties were inadequate. His open question argument aimed to

La Philosophical Studies 117: 395-408,2004. O 02004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.



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refute any proposed identification of good with some natural property, and Moore concluded from the argument that good must be a nonnatural property.

The received view is that the open-question argument is a failure. Even commentators who think that the argument provides a clue to some important metaethical truth do not think that the argument itself is a good one. Thus, Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton refer to "Moore's accident-prone deployment" of the argument, even as they contend that he "was on to something".2 The "something", as they explain it, is the action-guiding nature of ethical judgments, and there is a lively metaethical debate in the current literature over how to understand that nature. The open-question argument, however, has been pronounced dead.

In this paper, my aim is to breathe some life back into Moore's argument. My plan for doing so begins by briefly presenting the standard interpretation of the argument and then showing that there is an alternative to that interpretation. The alternative is not developed at any length by Moore and stands in need of some elaboration. I suggest a way of elaborating the argument and then show that the standard criticisms of Moore fail to undermine this alternative version of the open-question argument. Accordingly, my fundamental aim is philosophical rather than exegetical. I do not try to resolve reasonable doubts about what Moore - or his text - really meant. Rather, I show that there is a plausible construction of Moore's text that makes for an argument substantially sturdier than the standard interpretation allows.

II. THE STANDARD INTERPRETATION AND AN ALTERNATIVE

Despite the singular term 'the open-question argument', there are at least two separate and independent lines of argument to be found in Moore's text. This has been obscured by the standard interpretation of Principia, which focuses on just one of those lines.

The standard interpretation of Moore's argument takes the open question to be a question about the good of some object that possesses the natural property identified as good.3 If some ethical theory says good is identical to being something that one desires to desire, then the open question would be whether something that one



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desires to desire is good. The question can be open, the argument goes, only if the initial identification of good is mistaken, because a correct identification would mean that the question is about the truth of a tautology and no such question is open.

There are indeed passages in Principia which support the standard interpretation.4 Moreover, in some of those passages, Moore does suggest that open questions are ones whose answers are not tautologies. Yet, in his initial formulation of the argument, the question is about the good of the natural property itself, not about the object possessing the natural property. And the issue for Moore does not seem to concern whether the answer to a question is tautologous but rather whether the question itself makes any sense.

The key sentence says, "... whatever definition be offered, it may always be asked, with significance, of the complex so defined, whether it is itself good'". The "complex" is the set of natural properties with which good is alleged to be identical. It is clear that Moore thinks the question would remain even if it were only a single, simple natural property that was identified with good. One could ask, "with significance", whether that property was itself good. The open question, in its initial formulation then, is a question about the good of natural properties and not a question about the good of objects possessing the properties.

Moore appears to clarify what he means by "with significance" a few lines later when he writes that the issue is whether a question is "intelligible". If we take 'intelligible' in a straightforward way to mean 'possesses meaning', further doubt is cast on the adequacy of the standard interpretation of Moore's argument. A question whose answer is a tautology is intelligible: the fact that the question has any answer at all shows its intelligibility, as unintelligible questions are simply unanswerable.

In a subsequent passage, Moore reinforces the idea that his argument concerns the intelligibility of asking about the good, not of the objects which possess a given natural property, but of the property itself. He writes that, regardless of which property a naturalist theory picks out as identical to good, "Everyone does in fact understand the question, 'Is this good?'6 Accordingly, his argument appears to involve the thesis that, for any natural property (or set of them), the question of whether the property is good has meaning: the fact that



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"everyone" would understand such a question establishes that it has meaning. In the next section, I propose an explication of Moore's argument that elaborates on the idea that the open question concerns the meaningfulness of predicating good of natural properties.

III. GOOD AND SELF-PREDICATION

My proposal is that we understand the open-question argument as one that rests on the premise that the property of good cannot be intelligibly predicated of itself but can be intelligibly predicated of any natural property.7 Accordingly, the question 'Is natural property 'P' good?' would always be intelligible. In other words, the question would be meaningful, even if the answer would be a negative one. 'Is being yellow good?' is not a question likely to arise without reference to a particular object, but it is intelligible and the answer would be something like: "In general, yellow is not good or bad, but in a particular painting or color scheme for a house, it may well be good or bad".

In contrast, it seems to make no literal sense to ask, "Is good good?" (or, analogously, 'Is bad bad?). The question would have no meaning, not because it is a tautology that good is good, but because it would be like asking, 'Is largeness large?'8 Although the questions are syntactically well-formed, they ask about the self-predication of properties for which self-predication seems to make no sense. The proper response to 'Is largeness large?' would not be "Yes, largeness is large: it's a tautology", but rather, "The question lacks literal meaning". And there are passages in Moore's text that suggest he thought that the same is true for 'Is good good?'

Several pages prior to launching into the open-question argument, Moore discusses issues of predication and identity. He draws a distinction between the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication and claims that those who commit the naturalistic fallacy conflate identity with predication: they assert that pleasure is good, thinking that the assertion commits them to the thesis that pleasure is identical to good. He then comments that "no difficulty need be found in my asserting 'pleasure is good' and yet not meaning 'pleasure' is the same thing as 'good' ".9 The assertion may simply be a matter of predication.




Predicating 'good' of a natural property poses no philosophical problems, in Moore's view, but he does appear to question the intelligibility of predicating good of itself. Referring to the term 'the good', he says that it is a substantive to which the adjective 'good' applies. Moore appears to be using 'the good' to refer to the class of all good things, i.e., the extension of 'good'. In any event, he writes that, given that 'the good' is a substantive, "then it must be different from the adjective itself'". 1

It is possible to construe Moore as simply making a point about grammar here: the subjects of sentences cannot be predicates. But given his tendency to slide back and forth between the formal and material mode, it is also possible to understand him as making a metaphysical claim: the property of good cannot be sensibly said to characterize itself. Let us call that claim the "self-predication premise".

In his recent account of the open-question argument, Brian Hutchinson notes the difficulty in making any sense of "Is good good?"11 However, he then proceeds to equate being a "significant" question with being a question whose answer is not a tautology. Thus, he ends up missing the importance of self-predication to Moore's argument. The key idea of the argument is that one cannot intelligibly pose the question of whether good is predicated of itself: such a question lacks literal meaning.

In contrast, Moore appears to hold that asking about the good of any natural property never produces a question without literal meaning. The question 'Is being the object of a second-order desire good?' does make sense. So does 'Is pleasure good?' And so on for all natural properties and entities, as Moore views the matter. He also undoubtedly makes the tacit assumption (following Leibniz's law) that F and G cannot be the same property if F admits of intelligible self-predication but G does not. Accordingly, Moore concludes that good cannot be identical to any natural property.

The foregoing reconstruction of the open-question argument relies on certain tacit premises that could be brought into question. For example, there is the premise that good is a property that can be ascribed to an object in terms of a predicative adjective and not solely in terms of attributive ones. Geach famously rejected that premise. But as long as we are prepared to adopt a cognitivist



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reading of 'good', we can rely on a philosophically modest way to understand properties that is sufficient to vindicate the idea that good is a property in its own right. Frank Jackson formulates the understanding clearly: "property talk ... is a way of talking of the nature on which predication supervenes'.13 And as Jackson notes, such talk does not commit one to a realist or nominalist or any other particular metaphysical account of what that nature is.

We know that some versions of the open-question argument fail because they involve intensional contexts in which co-referential terms cannot necessarily be substituted salva veritate. For example, I cannot validly infer the conclusion that P is not identical to good from the two premises: (1) Object, 0, is P and (2) 1 believe that 0 is not good. The belief context is intensional, rendering the inference invalid.

However, the reconstruction I have offered does not rest on an invalid inference. To be sure, questions about intelligibility can involve intensional contexts. A sentence may be intelligible to a person, even though another sentence with the exact same meaning is unintelligible to her. But the key point of the reconstructed argument is that a certain kind of question has no meaning at all, not simply that one question is intelligible to someone even though another question is not so. This seems to be a context in which one can validly infer the conclusion that some property, P, is not identical to good from the premises: (1) Good does not admit of intelligible self-predication, (2) Good can be intelligibly predicated of P, and (3) Properties cannot be identical with one another if one admits of intelligible self-predication and the other does not.

Perhaps the most serious problems with the reconstructed argument concern the self-predication premise. Moore provides no illumination as to why he might accept the premise. It is entirely possible that he is concerned to halt the kind of regress generated in Plato's famous third-man argument. 14 Moore might have thought that a higher-order good would be required to make sense of the question whether good is good. And a still higher-order good would be needed to make sense of the question whether second-order good is good. And so on. In order to forestall the troubling ontological implications of such a regress, the self-predication premise would be




a reasonable one to affirm. The premise has prima facie plausibility and would prevent the regress from getting off the ground.

It is true that there are some properties that can be intelligibly predicated of themselves. Consider the property of being a property, or the property of not being a number. Each of those properties has itself as a property: the property of being a property is itself a property, and the property of not being a number is itself not a number. On the other hand, the property of being large seems to be one that does not admit of intelligible self-predication. It makes no sense to ask, "Is largeness large?"

Moore apparently thought that good and large were alike in that respect, although he never provided any explicit argument to that effect. He may simply have thought that the self-predication premise was obviously and fundamentally true, i.e., that it was an "intuition" in his sense of the term.15 Alternatively, the judgment could be treated as an "intuition" in another sense: a provisionally fixed point of reference with which theories of meaning must be consistent, unless they can produce very strong systematic reasons for holding otherwise. In fact, Moore's judgment about good fits with what seems to be a rule regarding self-predication: properties cannot be intelligibly predicated of themselves, with certain exceptions such as some negative properties (e.g., not being a number), the property of being a property, the property of self-identity, and the property of being instantiated in at least one object.16 Perhaps the property of good is another exception but one would need to adduce strong reasons to regard it as such. Until such reasons are provided, one of the key premises of the self-predication version of the open-question argument would seem to be on solid ground.

IV. THE STANDARD CRITICISMS

There are four standard criticisms of the open-question argument: (1) It begs the question of whether a natural property can be identical with good, (2) It hastily generalizes from a few instances of natural properties, (3) It fails to deal with the paradox of analysis, i.e., the paradox that an adequate conceptual analysis must be nontrivially true and also true simply in virtue of the meanings of the analysans and analysandum, and (4) It fails to take account of the fact that



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predicates that are not identical in meaning can still refer to the same property.17 However, the self-predication version of the open- question argument proposed in the previous section is not vulnerable to any of these four criticisms.

First consider the charge of question begging. Naturalistic theories identify some natural property, P, as identical to good. The standard version of the open-question argument then says: "But it's always an open-question whether an object, 0, possessing any given natural property, P, is good. So no natural property can be identical to good". And that version is guilty of question begging in this sense: the premise that, whatever P is, it is always an open question whether 0 is good is not argued for and does not seem to have support in considerations that are independent of the conclusion that the premise is supposed to support, viz., the conclusion that no natural property is identical to good.

The self-predication version of the open-question argument does not proceed in any such question-begging way. In particular, it does not assert that the question of whether 0 is good is an open one. Rather, the argument asserts that the question of whether good can be predicated of P is an intelligible one. That assertion does not beg the question of whether P is identical to good. The intuition about meaningfulness that underwrites the assertion may be incorrect. But it does not assume anything about the relation of P to good. Instead, in conjunction with the premises that good is not a property that can be intelligibly predicated itself and that F and G cannot be identical properties if F but not G admits of intelligible self-predication, the assertion entails that P is not identical to good.

Next, let us turn to the criticism of hasty generalization. There is this much truth to the charge: Moore did indeed consider only a few examples of natural properties that might be proposed as candidates for being identical with good. But the measure of Moore's argument should not be the number of natural properties he considered. Rather, it should be whether the ones he considered were the leading candidates from the philosophical theories of his day. And the properties Moore examined were among the leading candidates: pleasure, being the object of desire, and being the object of a desire to desire. Perhaps there were other theories he should have considered. But it is insufficient to charge Moore with hasty gener-




alization unless one specifies the leading candidates that Moore overlooked.

Of course, today we have more sophisticated candidates than were available in Moore's era. So an argument that was not hasty then could be hasty now. Thus, consider a theory not among the candidates in Moore's day, viz., Richard Boyd's view that good is a homeostatic cluster of natural properties that involve the satisfaction of human needs and well-being.18 Is there reason to think that our reconstructed version of Moore's argument works against such a naturalistic theory?

Given the self-predication premise, the key issue is whether it is intelligible to ask: Is such a cluster of properties (or the individual properties that form the cluster) good? It seems that the question makes perfect sense. In fact, it is quite reasonable to answer the question: "Of course the cluster is good; if serving human interests did not count as something good, then our entire framework of ethical and practical thought would collapse".19 But the fact that such an answer is available shows that, given the self-predication premise, the cluster is not identical with good but rather that the cluster itself (or its individual properties) has the property of good.

Third, let us consider the paradox of analysis. The paradox often leads philosophers to claim that an adequate analysis can involve an analysans that is not obviously or transparently equivalent in meaning to the analysandum. And it may be that the standard interpretation of Moore's argument relies on the apparently dubious premise that an adequate analysis will always be transparent. After all, even if good were identical to P, a lack of transparency in the identity relation may lead us to regard as open the question of whether an object that possessed P was good.

However, the version of the open-question argument that relies on the self-predication premise is not vulnerable to the charge of assuming that adequate analyses (or statements of property identity) must be transparent. The argument does suppose that we can reliably distinguish properties that admit of intelligible self-predication from those that do not. But that supposition is not tied in any way to the idea that if some natural property, P, were identical to good, then the identity relation between them would be transparent to us.



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The fourth and final of the standard criticisms is that the open- question argument ignores the fact that predicates which do not have the same meaning can still refer to the same property. For example, it is claimed that 'being water' and 'being H20' refer to the same property although their meaning is not the same. Moore's argument is said to ignore the possibility that 'good' could refer to the same property as some natural-property predicate, 'P', even if a lack of synonymy between 'good' and 'P' always made it an open question whether an object to which P applied was also good.

In responding to this criticism, it is important to keep in mind that Moore's argument is fundamentally a metaphysical one about the identity and nature of properties. He is trying to figure out what kind of property good is and whether it could be identical to some natural property. Some passages in the text do indeed suggest that a lack of synonymy between 'good' and natural-property predicates is the key to the open question.20 But those passages are the ones that resonate with the standard interpretation of the argument. In contrast, those passages that support the self-predication version of the argument do not raise any questions regarding synonymy. In particular, the self-predication argument does not deny the possibility that non-synonymous predicates refer to the same property. Rather, the argument holds that it is unintelligible to assert that good has itself as a property. Synonymy is not an issue.

V. AN ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT OF SELF-PREDICATION

It would seem that the best hope for criticizing the version of the open-question argument explicated in section III is to attack directly the self-predication premise. A critic might begin by claiming that the question, 'Is largeness large', does make literal sense, and the answer to the question is, "No: it is not large, and it is not small and it is not medium or any other size for that matter". The answer is "No" because largeness (like small and medium) is a property of physical objects, and largeness is not itself a physical object. Yet, if the question were literally meaningless, there would no answer to it at all, not a negative answer.

Similarly, the critic might continue, the question 'Is good good?' also makes literal sense, and again the answer is, "No: it is not good




and it is not bad". Good (like bad) is a property of objects and properties such as pleasure, knowledge and friendship, and good is not itself such an object or property. Yet, if the question 'Is good good' were literally meaningless, as the self-predication premise asserts, then there would be no answer to the question, not a negative answer. Thus, the critic might conclude that the self-prediction premise is mistaken.21

This criticism of the self-predication premise can, however, be accommodated by a variant of the self-prediction version of the open-question argument. The variant is closely parallel to the self- predication argument and operates from the same general idea that there is, as a rule, something philosophical awry with self- predication.

Let us assume, arguendo, that the critic is right and that the question of whether largeness is large is a meaningful question and that its answer is a negative one. But notice that the truth of that answer would not just be some contingent fact about largeness. There would be a kind of metaphysical necessity to the answer that derived from the nature of largeness: largeness is not the kind of entity that could be large.

Now let us further assume that the question of whether good is good also makes sense and has a negative answer. The truth of that answer would not be some contingent fact about good. The falsity of the proposition that good is good would reflect a metaphysical necessity about the nature of good: unlike pleasure, knowledge, or friendship, good is not the kind of entity that could itself be good.

Yet, even if one were to accept these assumptions about self- prediction, the self-predication version of the open-question argument would not need to be entirely jettisoned but rather could modified as follows. Any given natural property, P, would be the sort of thing that could have 'good' truly predicated of it: nothing in the nature of P as a natural property would constitute a metaphysical obstacle to its having the property of being good. Accordingly, it would always be an open question whether any given natural property, qua natural property, had the property of being good. In contrast, good would not be the sort of property that could have 'good' truly predicated of it: the prediction would always be false. Thus, it would never be an open question whether good has itself



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as a property insofar as the question would be automatically closed by the fact that the answer would, of metaphysical necessity, be a negative one. And given that F and G cannot be identical properties if F has some property that G lacks (from Leibniz's law), it would follow that no natural property could be identical to good.

Notice that this variation of the argument still makes self- predication the key issue, in contrast to the standard version of the open-question argument. Moreover, as with the self-predication argument presented in section III, the argument in this section hinges on the idea that there is something deeply awry with predicating good of itself. Here the problem is that good is a property of the wrong metaphysical type to be good, thereby making 'Good is good' a proposition that is necessarily false as a metaphysical matter. The self-predication thesis attributed to Moore in sections II and III held that 'Good is good' is not false as a matter of metaphysical necessity but rather lacking in literal meaning. Yet, from the alternative account of self-predication sketched in this section, one can develop an argument closely parallel to Moore's and arriving at his conclusion that good is not identical to any natural property.

It would be no easy matter to decide whether the account of self-predication presented in this section is better than the one I have attributed to Moore. Philosophers are likely to have competing intuitions about the meaningfulness and truth-value of such self- predicating propositions as 'Largeness is large' and 'Good is good'. Yet, even if the account of self-prediction sketched in this section is accepted, it is still possible to make some modifications in the self-predication version of the open-question argument and arrive at Moore's anti-naturalist conclusion.

Ethical naturalists might assert at this stage that predicating good of itself is neither meaningless nor false as a metaphysical matter but rather is true: good really does have itself as a property. Perhaps a naturalist argument resting on such a premise could work. However, there would seem to be a strong presumption against the premise in light of the fact that the general rule seems to be that properties do not have themselves as properties. The self-predication version of the open-question argument and the variant developed in this section both operate from that rule. The naturalist counterargument would




have the burden of explaining why the rule does not apply to good. That burden has yet to be met.

VI. CONCLUSION

Moore's presentation of the open-question argument involves a confusing mix of distinct lines of thought. He concedes as much himself in the "Preface to the Second Edition", which remained unpublished until 1993.22 Nonetheless, there is a line of argument, inchoate but discernible, which can be developed into a serious chal- lenge to any form of naturalism that identifies the property of good with some natural property or with some set of such properties. The standard version of the open-question argument is indeed dead. But there is another version that ethical naturalists and other critics of Moore have yet to put to rest.23

NOTES

See, e.g., W.F. Frankena, "The Naturalistic Fallacy", Mind 48 (1939), 464-477. 2 See, e.g., Stephen Darwall, Alan Gibbard and Peter Railton, "Toward Fin de siecle Ethics: Some Trends", Philosophical Review 10 1: 1 (1 992), 115-116. 3 See, e.g., Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, p. 43 and Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions, p. 86. In their review of 20th century metaethics, Darwall, Gibbard and Railton initially formulate the open-question argument in a way that conforms to the version that I will explicate below, but they do not seem to realize that the version is importantly different from the standard interpretation of the argument. Later in their article, they simply revert to the standard interpretation without noting the difference. See Darwall, Gibbard and Railton, "Toward Fin de siecle Ethics", 1 16-117 and 177. 3 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica: Revised Edition, Thomas Baldwin, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1993/1903) pp. 95 and 176. 5 Moore, Principia, p. 67. 6 Ibid. p. 68. 7 When I use 'self-predication' in connection with some property, I am referring to the ascription of the property to itself. In a strict sense, 'predication' refers the ascription of a predicate-term to something and not the ascription of the property which the predicate connotes. 8 Cf. Plato, The Parmenides 132A-B. 9 Moore, Principia, p. 65. 10 Ibid. p. 61.



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11 Brian Hutchinson, G.E. Moore's Ethical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2001), p. 30. 12 P.T. Geach, "Good and Evil", Analysis 17 (1956), pp. 35-42. 13 Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1998), pp. 15-16. 14 Plato, The Parmenides, 131E-132B. 15 Moore, Principia, pp. 35-36. 16 Kaveh Kamooneh, Eric Brown, and Steven Rieber helped me in formulating the exceptions to the rule against self-predication. 17 The standard criticisms of the open-question argument are endorsed in Nich- olas Sturgeon, "Moore on Ethical Naturalism", Ethics, 113:3 (April 2003), 528-556. Sturgeon concludes that, in light of those criticisms and others he levels at the argument, Moore has made "virtually no case at all against ethical naturalism". Sturgeon does concede, though, the possibility of someone developing "under Moore's inspiration ... a much better case". (531) My aim in this paper is to show that the main elements of a strong case against naturalism can be found in Moore's text and elaborated into an argument that prominent defenders of naturalism, such as Sturgeon, have failed to rebut. 18 Richard Boyd, "How to Be a Moral Realist", in Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1988), 203 ff. 19 Boyd himself gives effectively the same answer, writing that "it is character- istic of what we recognize as moral discourse ... that considerations of human well being play a significant role in determining what is said to be 'good' ". "How to Be a Moral Realist", p. 21 1. 20 See, e.g., Moore, Principia, p. 68. 21 I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies for the criticism addressed in this section. 22 Moore, Principia, pp. 16-21. Moore writes that he confused three distinct theses: (1) 'Good' is not identical with any other predicate, (2) 'Good' is not identical with any analyzable predicate, and (3) 'Good' is not identical with any predicate referring to a natural or metaphysical property. 23 I would like to thank Steven Rieber and Stephen Darwall for providing valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Georgia State University E-mail: [email protected]



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