Moore Quote on the Naturalistic Fallacy: Good

Quote

"If I am asked, 'What is good?' my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter." — G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903)

Historical Context

When George Edward Moore published Principia Ethica in 1903, ethics was at a crossroads. The dominant traditions in moral philosophy — utilitarianism, evolutionary ethics, theological ethics, and Kantian deontology — all assumed, in one way or another, that the concept of "good" could be defined in terms of something else. Utilitarians like John Stuart Mill identified good with pleasure or happiness. Evolutionary ethicists like Herbert Spencer identified it with what promotes survival and adaptation. Theological ethicists identified it with what God commands. And Kantian ethicists, while not exactly defining good in naturalistic terms, treated it as amenable to analysis through the structure of rational willing. What all these approaches shared was the conviction that "good" is not a primitive, irreducible term but can be broken down into more basic components.

Moore, a young Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a central figure in the intellectual circle that included Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, set out to demolish this conviction. Principia Ethica was not a contribution to applied ethics or a defense of any particular moral position. It was a work of metaethics — an inquiry into the nature of moral concepts and the logical structure of moral reasoning. Moore's central thesis was that "good" is a simple, unanalyzable, non-natural property. It cannot be defined in terms of any natural property (pleasure, desire, survival) or any metaphysical property (what God commands, what reason demands). Any attempt to do so commits what Moore called the "naturalistic fallacy" — the error of identifying a moral property with a non-moral one.

The intellectual context in which Moore wrote was shaped by two important developments. The first was the rise of analytic philosophy, which Moore and Russell were in the process of creating at Cambridge. The analytic method emphasized clarity, logical analysis, and attention to the actual meanings of words, and it was suspicious of the grand metaphysical systems that had dominated nineteenth-century philosophy. Moore applied this method to ethics with devastating effect, showing that many of the confident claims of previous ethical theorists rested on elementary confusions about the meaning of "good." The second development was the influence of David Hume's distinction between "is" and "ought" — the observation that one cannot validly derive a statement about what ought to be the case from statements about what is the case. Moore's naturalistic fallacy can be seen as a formalization and extension of Hume's insight, though Moore himself framed it in terms of definition and meaning rather than logical derivation.

Principia Ethica had an impact that extended far beyond academic philosophy. Moore's emphasis on the intrinsic value of beauty, friendship, and personal relationships profoundly influenced the Bloomsbury Group — the circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey — and through them shaped the cultural climate of early twentieth-century Britain. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Principia Ethica as the most influential work of moral philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, a work that defined the agenda for metaethics for decades and whose arguments, whether accepted or rejected, could not be ignored.

Meaning and Interpretation

The statement "good is good, and that is the end of the matter" is Moore's way of saying that the concept of good is primitive — it cannot be analyzed into more basic components, and any attempt to define it in terms of something else is a philosophical error. To understand the force of this claim, it helps to consider the analogy Moore himself used: the analogy with color terms.

Moore argued that "good" is like "yellow" in an important respect. If someone who has never experienced the color yellow asks you what yellow is, you cannot define it for them. You can point to yellow things — a lemon, the sun, a daffodil — and you can describe the physical properties that cause the sensation of yellow (light of a certain wavelength striking the retina). But you cannot explain what yellow is to someone who has not experienced it. "Yellow" is a simple, unanalyzable quality, known only by direct acquaintance. The same, Moore argued, is true of "good." You can point to good things — friendship, beauty, virtue — and you can describe the natural properties that good things tend to have. But you cannot define "good" in terms of those natural properties, because "good" is a distinct, simple quality that is known by direct moral intuition, not by analysis.

This analogy supports Moore's claim that any attempt to define "good" in naturalistic terms commits the naturalistic fallacy. If someone defines "good" as "pleasurable," they are making the same kind of error as someone who defines "yellow" as "light of wavelength 580 nanometers." The definition may be extensionally correct — things that are yellow do tend to reflect light of that wavelength — but it is not an analysis of what yellow is. Similarly, things that are good may tend to be pleasurable, but that does not mean that "good" means "pleasurable." The two concepts are distinct, and conflating them is a philosophical mistake.

Moore supported this claim with what has become known as the "open question argument." For any proposed naturalistic definition of "good" — say, "good means pleasurable" — we can always meaningfully ask, "but is pleasure really good?" If the question remains open — if it is a genuine question rather than a trivial tautology — then "good" cannot mean the same thing as "pleasurable." If "good" meant "pleasurable," then asking "is pleasure good?" would be like asking "is a triangle three-sided?" — not an open question but a matter of definition. The fact that "is pleasure good?" remains a meaningful, substantive question shows that "good" and "pleasurable" are not synonymous. And since this argument works for any natural property we might propose as a definition of "good" — pleasure, desire, survival, evolutionary fitness — we must conclude that "good" is indefinable in naturalistic terms.

The philosophical implications of Moore's argument are far-reaching. If "good" is a simple, non-natural property, then moral knowledge cannot be derived from empirical observation or scientific investigation. We know what is good not by studying the natural world but by direct moral intuition — by "seeing" the goodness of certain states of affairs in the same way that we see the yellowness of a lemon. This is moral non-naturalism: the view that moral properties are real, objective, and irreducible to natural properties, but that they are known through a faculty of moral intuition rather than through the methods of empirical science.

Moore's naturalistic fallacy has been connected to the broader is-ought problem identified by Hume. If "good" cannot be defined in terms of natural properties, then no set of factual statements — statements about what is the case — can logically entail a moral statement about what ought to be the case. There is always a conceptual gap between facts and values, and any attempt to bridge that gap by defining "good" in factual terms commits the naturalistic fallacy. This gap has structured twentieth-century metaethics, dividing philosophers into cognitivists (who believe moral statements express genuine truths) and non-cognitivists (who believe moral statements express attitudes or prescriptions rather than truths), and within cognitivism, between naturalists (who believe moral properties are natural properties) and non-naturalists (who follow Moore in treating them as irreducible).

Moore's position has not gone unchallenged. Some philosophers have argued that the open question argument is too powerful — that it would prove any concept to be indefinable, since for any proposed definition, we can always imagine someone asking "but is it really that?" Others have argued that Moore's analogy between "good" and "yellow" is misleading, since colors are sensory qualities known through perception while moral properties are known through a more complex process of reasoning and reflection. And still others have accepted Moore's critique of naturalistic definitions while arguing that "good" can be defined in non-natural, metaphysical terms — for example, as what God commands or what pure practical reason demands. These criticisms have not diminished the importance of Moore's argument. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Principia Ethica remains the starting point for virtually all serious work in metaethics, and that the naturalistic fallacy — whether or not Moore's specific formulation of it is accepted — has become a permanent fixture of moral philosophy, a challenge that any naturalistic or reductionist ethical theory must address.