Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Irony, Naïveté, and Moore
- 1 Simplicity, Indefinability, Nonnaturalness
- 2 Good's Nonnaturalness
- 3 The Paradox of Ethics and Its Resolution
- 4 The Status of Ethics: Dimming the Future and Brightening the Past
- 5 The Origin of the Awareness of Good and the Theory of Common Sense
- 6 Moore's Argument Against Egoism
- 7 The Diagnosis of Egoism and the Consequences of Its Rejection
- 8 Moore's Practical and Political Philosophy
- 9 Moore's Cosmic Conservatism
- 10 Cosmic Conservatism II
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Moore's Cosmic Conservatism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Irony, Naïveté, and Moore
- 1 Simplicity, Indefinability, Nonnaturalness
- 2 Good's Nonnaturalness
- 3 The Paradox of Ethics and Its Resolution
- 4 The Status of Ethics: Dimming the Future and Brightening the Past
- 5 The Origin of the Awareness of Good and the Theory of Common Sense
- 6 Moore's Argument Against Egoism
- 7 The Diagnosis of Egoism and the Consequences of Its Rejection
- 8 Moore's Practical and Political Philosophy
- 9 Moore's Cosmic Conservatism
- 10 Cosmic Conservatism II
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Dialectic of Innocence
In Principia's final chapter, “The Ideal,” Moore completes his project of revolutionary conservatism by responding to skeptical-philosophical challenges to commonsense casuisitic knowledge. He maintains that a fissure in the thought of philosophers similar to the one that causes them to lose sight of the truth about good also causes them to lose sight of the truth about the good. He attempts to provide philosophers with the means to repair that fissure so that they may once again fully trust their everyday judgments about the good things the world has to offer. Despite his warning against overestimating the value of unity in ethics, this makes Principia the expression of a unifying vision and a special kind of moral prophecy. Moore's is a work of cosmic conservatism. For no one, least of all philosophers, is it possible to compartmentalize neatly one's way of understanding the world and one's way of being in the world. By exposing to them their tendency to falsify the entirety of moral reality, Moore gives philosophers the chance no longer to fall prey to their own subterfuge. Showing them that the world as it is has enough of value to make life worth living, he enables them to escape from the perpetual state of disappointment with the world they have considered to be the badge of their superiority.
Upon nurturing, the sense of disappointment philosophers suffer from becomes the fundament of profoundly reformist religious and political philosophies we shall call ideologies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- G. E. Moore's Ethical TheoryResistance and Reconciliation, pp. 172 - 189Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001