Principles of Ethics (Century Library)

Author: (English) Moore
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: As I see it, in ethics, as in all philosophical disciplines, the difficulties and controversies that fill its history are primarily due to a very simple reason: attempting to answer without first precisely discovering what question you hope to answer. Even if philosophers strive to identify the very question they are exploring before attempting to answer it, I don’t know to what extent this error would be eliminated, because the work of analysis and distinction is often extremely difficult: we often fail to complete the necessary discovery, even though we do attempt to do so. Nevertheless, I tend to think that decisive attempts are often sufficient to ensure success; therefore, as long as such an attempt is made, many of the striking difficulties and controversies in philosophy would disappear. However, it seems that philosophers generally do not make this attempt; and regardless of whether this is due to negligence, they always strive to prove that "yes" or "no" can answer all questions. But for such questions, both answers are incorrect, because in fact they are thinking of several questions, some of which have the correct answer "no," while others have "yes." In this book, I have tried to clearly distinguish the two types of questions that moral philosophers usually claim to address. But as I have shown, they almost always confuse not only these two but also mix them with other questions. The first type of question can be expressed in the following form: What things should exist for themselves? The second type of question can be expressed in the following form: What actions should we take? I have tried to demonstrate that when we explore whether a thing should exist for itself, whether it is good in itself, or whether it has intrinsic value, we are actually exploring what about that thing; and when we explore whether we should take a certain action, whether it is a right action or an obligation, we are actually exploring what about that action.