The argument thus far has been principally about the development of Keynes's epistemological thinking and the implications of this for his later economics. However, Keynes's earliest philosophical thinking concerned the ethics of Moore's Principia Ethica, and his subsequent thinking about ethics clearly remained a fundamental dimension of his overall thought, as his recent biographers have shown (Skidelsky, 1983, 1992; Moggridge, 1992). An important matter that thus remains to be investigated in an examination of Keynes's philosophical development is how Keynes's ethics and policy thinking developed together with his changing epistemological commitments. Here it will be argued that just as the developments in Keynes's epistemological thinking had important implications for his later economics, so the developments in Keynes's ethical thinking had important implications for his later view of economic policy. More specifically, it will be argued that some of Keynes's most far-reaching long-term policy proposals, as they emerged at the end of The General Theory and in his later wartime statements, can be seen to have emerged only upon the resolution of a “favorite” dilemma Keynes early encountered in the view of ethics he advanced in critique of Moore, namely, the dilemma of how to reconcile being good and doing good.

In what follows, this early dilemma will first be briefly reviewed, setting it forth this time in relation to the critique of Moore's ethics advanced by the emotivist philosophers of the logical positivist movement in the 1930s.