Darryl F. Wright

G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica has exerted almost unparalleled influence upon the moral philosophy of the twentieth century. Yet, ironically, the central doctrines of this work have remained something of a mystery. This circumstance is due, in my judgment, to a failure to regard Moore's early philosophy--the philosophy he developed in the years just before and after the turn of the century--as a more or less unified whole, within which the moral philosophy of the Principia forms one part systematically connected with others. ;Focusing upon the metaethical themes of Principia Ethica's first four chapters, I reconstruct Moore's position in the light of a study of some of his largely-forgotten early papers and their context in the philosophy of nineteenth-century Britain. I argue that Moore's 1899 essay "The Nature of Judgment," written as a response to the logical views of the Oxford idealist F. H. Bradley, sets in place certain key metaphysical, epistemological, and logical theses upon which Moore subsequently relies in the Principia. I then trace the central developments in Moore's emerging realist philosophy from this essay through the 1903 classic, "The Refutation of Idealism." The hallmark of the latter work, I argue, is a general theory of consciousness that becomes crucial to Moore's defense of his views about the nature of value, as well as to Moore's philosophic methodology. ;Based on the results of examining Moore's early non-ethical writings, the second half of the dissertation develops interpretations of Moore's main conceptions of value, of the so-called "naturalistic fallacy," and of the much-discussed "open-question" argument of the Principia's first chapter. Particular attention is given to Moore's diagnosis, in chapter four, of the causes of the "naturalistic fallacy" among his predecessors and contemporaries. ;The dissertation concludes with a brief comparison of Moore's position in metaethics with that of his contemporary and fellow realist Ralph Barton Perry. The well-known differences between Moore's nonnaturalism and Perry's naturalism in metaethics stem, I argue, from intriguing and much deeper differences between the two philosophers over how a realist response to idealism should proceed

G. E. Moore’s early essay, “The Nature of Judgment,” makes common cause with F. H. Bradley’s Principles of Logic against British empiricism’s characteristic view of judgment. But primarily it attacks positions Bradley and the empiricists share. I develop a fuller analysis of both aspects of “The Nature of Judgment” than has appeared. Bradley’s rejection of empiricist nominalism, I argue, enables him to develop what Moore considers a superior account of judgment to empiricism’s. But positions carried over from empiricism require Bradley to seek all judgments’ truth conditions in existing circumstances, a result intolerable to Moore, who views mathematical and ethical judgments as being true independently of the world. Moore abandons Bradley’s vestigal empiricism, arguing that it leads invariably to self-contradiction. I reconstruct this argument, and draw out of it an unrecognized tension between the anti-empiricist and the anti-idealist themes of Moore’s early writings.

Those familiar with Ayn Rand's ethical writings may know that she discusses issues in metaethics, and that she defended the objectivity of morality during the heyday of early non-cognitivism. But neither her metaethics, in general, nor her views on moral objectivity, in particular, have received wide study. This article elucidates some aspects of her thought in these areas, focusing on Rand's conception of the way in which moral values serve a biologically based human need, and on her account of moral values as both essentially practical and epistemically objective in a sense fundamentally continuous with the objectivity of science. The bearing of her epistemological writings on her ethical thought is emphasized throughout, and her epistemology is defended against a line of criticism inspired by John McDowell's criticism of the so-called “myth of the given.”