I don't know, Bill, but the reason may be that the argument is only convincing with respect to meaning, but not fact. We can always meaningfully ask whether something that brings pleasure is good, which clearly enough shows that we cannot mean (!) that it brings pleasure when we say that it is good. But perhaps we are mistaken, and the good and the pleasurable are in fact (!) identical. Since the important issue seems to be what the good in fact is, and not what we mean by it, Moore's argument can be said to fail.

I don't know, Bill, but the reason may be that the argument is only convincing with respect to meaning, but not fact. We can always meaningfully ask whether something that brings pleasure is good, which clearly enough shows that we cannot mean (!) that it brings pleasure when we say that it is good. But perhaps we are mistaken, and the good and the pleasurable are in fact (!) identical. Since the important issue seems to be what the good in fact is, and not what we mean by it, Moore's argument can be said to fail.

Well put. If one reads the Principia carefully it becomes clear that the only thing which Moore will accept as a valid definition of 'good' is something with a one-to-one correspondence with 'good' as regards its meaning. In other words, only analytic statements about 'good' can truly be valid. Oddly, Moore seems to care more about semantics and definitions than he does ontology. For all of his rejection of Idealism he embraces an understanding of reality framed solely in terms of concepts and propositions. He never engages the real or the metaphysical. It is all about words for him.

Yes, and that's why I have never quite understood why he has been so influential. Most of his arguments strike me as decidedly weird and implausible, perhaps because they are, or rather he is, so obsessed with the surface of things.

David, I think that there is an interesting contrast between Hume's Treatise having "fallen stillborn from the presses" and the incredibly laudatory statements that were made about the Principia Ethica in its heyday. Whereas the former still contains much that is, in William James' terms, "a live issue", most of what one finds in the Principia has been realised to be terribly flawed (even by Moore).

The problem back of or behind the basic problem with the OQA is the sort of defintions which Moore held forth as being most significant. He said:

The most important sense of “definition” is that in which a definition states what are the parts which invariably compose a certain whole; and in this sense “good” has no definition because it is simple and has no parts (§ 8, p. 9)

This quite simply is not what we mean by "definition". It generally means to describe, make clear, express the essential nature of a thing, but not to reduce a thing to its component parts. A definition tells what a thing is.

Moore's nominalistic sense of the word "definition" combines with his denial of any but analytical statements regarding 'good' as being valid and creates a false measure of what is and is not a definition of 'good'. If we accept the rules which he sets forth then his argument is irrefutable, but there seems no reason to accept the notion that only analytical statements are valid as regards the 'good'.

I've read Regan's older defense of the OQA, but I was unaware of Strandberg's paper - I will take a look at it. Thank you for mentioning it. Why do you say that Kripke is mostly responsible?

Hello David,

I was unaware of the straw men of which you speak. I have not encountered these sorts of arguments about Moore. For the most part I find that there is an affection and a respect for him in the field. However, here are a few Moore fans and what they have to say about Principia.

Thomas Baldwin his friend, biographer, and succesor as editor of the journal Mind:

Why on earth should we care about the abstract ‘goodness’ of states of affairs if the possession of this goodness is as detached from all our recognisable concerns as Moorean goodness turns out to be? Furthermore, as to whether we were denoting the same property by our use of good would be unanswerable. Moore’s confidence that ‘we are all aware of a certain simple quality, which (and not anything else) is what we mainly mean by the term “good” (PE p. 38) is just naïve, and Mary Warnock is right to observe in this connection that there is a crucial disanalogy between ‘good’ and ‘yellow’, in that we can give an ostensive definition of the latter, but not the former. (Baldwin, 1990, p. 76)

He also says:

…he soon realised that his presentation of the main thesis of PE – that there is a fallacy, ‘the naturalistic fallacy’, in almost all previous ethical theories – was wretchedly confused, and it was probably because he was never confident that he could remove these confusions that he returned so little to the subject…In 1912 he published his little book Ethics; Moore later preferred this to PE (“it seems to me to be much clearer and far less full of confusions and invalid arguments’ – PGEM p. 27).(Baldwin, 1990, p. 67-68)

Bernard Williams says of the Naturalistic Fallacy:

It is hard to think of any other widely used phrase in the history of philosophy that is such a spectacular misnomer. In the first place it is not clear why those criticized were committing a fallacy (which is a mistake in inference) as opposed to making what in Moore’s view was an error, or else simply redefining a word. More important, the phrase appropriated to a misconceived purpose the useful word “naturalism.” A naturalistic view of ethics was previously contrasted with a supernaturalistic view, and it meant a view in which ethics was to be understood in worldy terms, without reference to God or any transcendental authority. It meant the kind of ethical view that stems from a general attitude that man is a part of nature. Aristotle’s outlook is naturalistic in this sense…(Williams, 1985, p. 121)

Donald Regan writes:

G. E. Moore's position in the moral philosophy canon is paradoxical. On the one hand, he is widely regarded as the most influential moral philosopher of the twentieth century. On the other hand, his most characteristic doctrines are now more often ridiculed than defended or even discussed seriously. (Regan, 2003, p. 651)

And Iris Murdoch, who expresses a great fondness for him in The Sovereignty of Good must nonetheless comment of him that:

“A great deal has happened since he wrote, and when we read him again it is startling to see how many of his beliefs are philosophically unstatable now… (Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 2001, p. 3).

I agree with you that his Principia was significant. He (pretty much) created the field of Meta-Ethics single-handedly. His work and its impact upon his world has had far reaching consequences in a direction that he could not have anticipated, and which impacted the field of ethics (in England anyway) for the next hundred years after it was published.