Footnote eu42

eu42. An area of philosophy in which the "science" paradigm is open to question is ethics, or moral philosophy. In his groundbreaking book Principia Ethica (Cambridge 1903), G.E. Moore attacked "the naturalist fallacy" and thereby administered the coup de grace to British utilitarianism.

There is no "intrinsic difficulty in the contention that 'good' denotes a simple and indefinable quality." Another such primal quality is color, says Moore.

Consider yellow, for example. We may try to define it, by describing its physical equivalent; we may state what kind of light-vibrations must stimulate the normal eye, in order that we may perceive it. But a moment’s reflection is sufficient to shew that those light-vibrations are not themselves what we mean by yellow. They are not what we perceive. Indeed, we should never have been able to discover their existence, unless we had first been struck by the patent difference of quality between the different colours. The most we can be entitled to say of those vibrations is that they are what corresponds in space to the yellow which we actually perceive.

Yet a mistake of this simple kind has commonly been made about 'good.' It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not other, but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the naturalistic fallacy and of it I shall now endeavour to dispose.

Of course, Moore is not leveling an attack against science, per se. But he is making clear that philosophers can enter into areas of thought where science is, it is argued, inapplicable. That is to say, there is room in philosophy for practitioners who spend little time on so-called scientific matters, such as the Natural Philosophy of the physicists.

Moral Non-Naturalism (Stanford Enc. of Phil.)
https://archive.vn/hFpZR

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