G. E. Moore's Intuitionism. a Highly Implausible Meta-Ethical Position

Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous, grade: 71, Trinity College Dublin (The Department of Philosophy), course: TSM Philosophy, language: English, abstract: This paper will aim to outline G. E. Moore's defence in "Principia Ethica" of the view that goodness and consequently moral truth is indefinable. This paper will firstly outline a picture of the autonomous indefinable nature of goodness through Moore's open-question argument and naturalistic fallacy and will then proceed to critique this characterisation by highlighting the subsequent problematic consequences that accompany the proposed indefinability. The paper will then detail Moore's ensuing intuitive meta-ethical theory after which I will argue that the meta-ethical picture that Moore constructs is entirely implausible due to the proposed self-evident nature of moral truths and the vague faculty of intuition that it implies.