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This chapter traces Moore's attempts — beginning in Principia Ethica up though his 1922 ‘The Conception of Intrinsic Value’ — to characterize the difference between natural and non-natural properties, finding the most plausible characterization in terms of a distinctive kind of non-logical supervenience relation that links the property of goodness to the natural properties upon which it supervenes. The problem with the appeal to a kind of non-logical supervenience is that it does not really help us to understand the idea that goodness is supposed to be non-natural: the property of being yellow does not logically follow from a characterization of those properties upon which it supervenes, but yellow is a paradigm natural property for Moore. Based on certain textual clues, the chapter proposes that Moore mis-described the distinction he sought to capture in his natural/non-natural properties distinction. What Moore was after is more aptly put as a distinction between description and evaluation; a distinction central to expressivist views. So why wasn't Moore an expressivist? Expressivists generally agree with Moore that there is a conceptual gap between the descriptive and the evaluative. It is argued that for the Moorean, this gap is a gap between properties, while for the expressivist it is not.

According to one dimension of the generalist tradition, moral principles are built into the very meaning of moral predicates. They are analytic truths, and thus anyone who is in fact competent with a given moral concept is (perhaps implicitly) committed to the associated principle that spells out the object to which the concept applies. On this view, certain moral principles are constitutive of moral thought and judgment; this view is called ‘constitutive generalism’. This chapter defends a form of generalism and it argues against constitutive generalism by deploying a version of G. E. Moore’s Open Question Argument.

This chapter advocates a return to Moorean independence. One dominant metaethical trend is moral epistemology naturalized. Another metaethical trend has been conceptual analysis, often called ‘analytic ethics’. It is argued that both trends are philosophically misguided. Ethics naturalized is un-philosophical in lacking the kind of supreme generality and abstractness that is distinctive of philosophical inquiry; it takes human beings to occupy moral centre stage. By contrast, we find in Moore a kind of cosmological ethics, focused on the value of all things in the universe as a basis for ethical inquiry. Moreover, ethics naturalized lacks competence in that its scientific pretensions are at odds with how philosophers go about their business. Analytic ethics, on the other hand, which is explicitly concerned with armchair, intuitive judgments about meanings, cannot overcome the lack of competence signaled by the philosophical lessons about conceptual analysis found in Kant, Quine, and Wittgenstein. In light of these failures, the chapter advocates returning to the cosmological orientation of Moore's ethics, which can be properly understood as avoiding the traditional metaethical debate between realism and anti-realism, as well as avoiding the battery of objections to the effect that Moore's ethics is not relevant to action. Such a return to a Moorean view of ethics would represent a version of ‘ethics dehumanized’: cosmological in its focus and thus properly philosophical.

This essay explores the notion of intrinsic value. It is argued thata richly sentient life being a certain wayis the only possible subject of a defensible judgement of intrinsic value. One consequence of this thesis is a disagreement with G. E. Moore regarding the intrinsic value of a beautiful world devoid of sentience, a famous thought experiment from hisPrincipia Ethica. But a more important consequence is the underlining of an intimate connection between the notion of a richly sentient life and the very idea of intrinsic value.

This chapter sketches a theory of intrinsic value that aims to incorporate certain elements of Moore's theory, but which goes beyond it in important ways while also avoiding commitment to many of Moore's controversial normative and metaethical views. Moore held that experiences, and non-experiential items such as art works, can be the bearers of intrinsic value. By contrast, the chapter defends experientialism — according to which the bearers of intrinsic value are concrete experiences — partly by arguing that it is experiences that seem to have the kind of Aristotelian ‘finality’ and thus ‘choiceworthiness’ that is appropriate for anything's having intrinsic value. In order to accommodate the Moorean idea that items such as art works are in some sense ‘good in themselves’ (and not merely instrumentally good), the notion of inherent value is introduced; a species of value that is possessed by something whenever an appropriate experience of it is intrinsically good. A painting, for example, can be inherently good because an appropriate aesthetic experience of that object is itself intrinsically good. The concepts of intrinsic and inherent value, along with a Moorean principle of organic unities (suitably broadened), provide the basis for a nuanced theory of value whose merits include the recognition and explanation of a wide range of intuitively plausible value judgments, as well as contributing to a general theory of practical reason.

This chapter begins by noting that the 20th century beneficiary of the open question argument has been (rather ironically) the class of non-realist views, including non-cognitivism and expressivism. It contends that Moore did not properly diagnose the openness of the relevant questions about goodness; it is not simplicity versus complexity, and it is not indefinability versus definability. Rather, it is the normativity involved in moral judgments and concepts that keeps Moorean questions open and blocks definitions of ‘good’; the same sort of normativity that keeps questions open in relation to concepts like ‘plus’, ‘mass’, and ‘triangle’. The issue of normativity in semantics, epistemology, and ethics is basically the same. ‘How can features of the world establish conditions under which it makes sense for us to think that there are ways we ought to conduct ourselves (with regard to our actions, our speech, or our beliefs) and other ways which ought not to be followed?’ A clear implication of this line of argument is that those working in metaethics have often laboured under the mistaken assumption that moral terms like ‘good’ are especially problematic.

Christine Korsgaard surveys several ways of warranting ethics (Hobbes, Puffendorff, Moore, Ross, Nagel, Hutcheson, Hume, Mill, Williams). She chooses a neo‐Kantian approach. But Goodman finds her solution suppositious and her problematic artificial. Ethics, he argues, needs no justification. The dependence of all values on God does not imply an arbitrary authority. Indeed, monotheism finds incoherent the notion that divine authority would be arbitrary. Goodman engages critically with exponents of Jewish legal positivism and with Hare regarding divine command ethics, arguing against the ideas of original sin and the inadequacy of the Mosaic law.

This chapter argues that the legacy in question is that the force of the open question argument, together with the rejection of the Moorean idea that there are non-natural properties, motivate two related claims: the no normative truth value thesis, according to which no normative sentences have truth value; and the expressivist thesis, that in uttering or thinking a normative sentence, what one does is express a favourable or unfavourable attitude toward the object of evaluation. The chapter explores two main sources of reason for rejecting the first thesis: appeals to minimalism about truth, and the so-called Frege–Geach problem. It argues that appeals to minimalism about truth are ultimately circular. However, the Frege–Geach problem represents a more serious challenge to those who embrace the no normative truth value thesis. Attempts — particularly by expressivists — to rebut this challenge falter, but rather than embrace the Moorean position (or any metaethical position that would countenance the property goodness, or rightness), the chapter denies the claim that ‘is good’ is a logical predicate. Rather, sentences of the form, ‘A is good’ are semantically incomplete and thus ‘is good’ is not (in the requisite sense) a logical predicate. Normative claims that predicate goodness or rightness in a way, as when someone claims that so and so is a good baseball player or that a certain move in chess was the right move to make, are predicating genuine properties that are arguably natural. If this is correct, then Moore's open question argument has misled philosophers to fix upon the pseudo-property of goodness.

Explores the S‐use sensitivity of proof, arguing that there is no clear separation between an epistemic and non‐epistemic notion of proof, but that epistemology is involved in what actually entails what (which is thus an occasion‐sensitive matter). It defends a view of G. E. Moore.

This chapter offers a partial defence of Scanlon's buck-passing account of the relation between base properties, goodness, and practical reasons. Jonathan Dancy and Roger Crisp have both argued that even if Scanlon's buck-passing account is superior to the Moorean account, there are other contending accounts that Scanlon does not consider. Against Dancy and Crisp, Stratton–Lake and Hooker argue that these proposed accounts, although genuine alternatives to the Moorean and buck-passing accounts, are nevertheless deeply problematic and do nothing to harm the case for Scanlon's account. Regarding Scanlon's two arguments, the authors find that the parsimony argument, once clarified, does offer some support for the buck-passing view, but that the appeal to value pluralism does not. Finally, they defend Scanlon's account against an ‘open question’ worry about the relation between the fact that something has reason-giving properties and its goodness.

This introduction describes the background and legacy of Austin’s thought, going beyond the standard picture of him as an effectively obsolete ‘doyen of ordinary language philosophy’. It situates Austin’s philosophy in its original intellectual milieu, focusing in particular on the significance of his immediate predecessors, G. E. Moore and H. A. Prichard. It then looks at the various ways in which Austin’s ideas have been appropriated by speech act theorists (via Grice and Searle), by performativity theorists (via Derrida and Butler), in discussions of pornography and free speech (via Hornsby and Langton), and by others such as Quentin Skinner, H. L. A. Hart, Stanley Cavell, Charles Travis, and Mark Kaplan. Finally it provides an overview of the remaining chapters of the book.

This chapter presents a three-part response to radical scepticism, a response which mirrors in key respects the ‘commonsense’ proposal often ascribed to G. E. Moore (and which is regarded with almost wholesale derision). Here this chapter calls this anti-sceptical proposal, Mooreanism. The first part of this anti-sceptical response is to focus on an everyday proposition which we paradigmatically take ourselves to know, such as that one has two hands, and to insist that we do indeed know this proposition. The second part of the response is to note that since this everyday proposition is manifestly inconsistent with the target radical sceptical hypothesis, it follows that if one knows the everyday proposition, then one must know the denial of the radical sceptical hypothesis as well. Finally, the third part of the response is the extraction of the antisceptical conclusion that one knows the denial of the target radical sceptical hypothesis, in this case that one is not a brain-in-a-vat.

This chapter challenges one aspect of Moore's view. In his critical remarks about egoism as a theory of motivation, Moore argued that the notion of ‘good-for’, which figures in claims about this or that activity or pursuit being (non-morally, intrinsically) good for an individual, is incoherent. The chapter argues that Moore is mistaken and defends an account of the good-for relation modeled on the interpersonal relation of successful loving. Success in an interpersonal loving relationship is characterized by the same general sorts of features as the relation involved in something's being good for an individual; part of her personal good. The property good-for is a second-order relational property that is realized in a person's life when she stands in the right sort of relation to some pursuit or activity. The chapter defends this view in two ways. First, it appeals to certain dualities of human nature and experience. On the one hand, we are biological creatures who can discover what is good for us, as when one discovers that she has a natural talent for music and proceeds to develop her musical talent, so that playing music becomes part of her personal good. But on the other hand, we are autonomous agents for whom our personal good is partly a matter of our own making; something invented rather than simply discovered. In order for playing music to be part of her personal good, the would-be musician must cultivate her talent. In this way she makes playing music part of her personal good. The account of personal good nicely accommodates such dualities in that the various relations involved in something's being good for oneself depend partly on facts about oneself that are beyond one's control, but also partly on what one does. The second way the chapter defends its view is by responding to certain possible Moorean objections.