Foreword

• Published in: The Journal of value inquiry Vol. 37; no. 3; p. 297
• Main Author: Magnell, Thomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Nature B.V 01.07.2003
• Subjects: Ethics; Philosophers; Philosophy
• ISSN: 0022-5363; 1573-0492

Outside of moral philosophy, he came to be best known as a champion of common sense for his defense of the material world, literally with a bit of hand waving. Within moral philosophy, much of what has made him the influential figure that he became can only be described as being at some remove in conceptual space from the notion of common sense, however loosely that notion might be applied. The first chapter of Principia Ethica remains a stimulating discussion of fundamental conceptual concerns of value for moral philosophers, and elements of that chapter enter298 FOREWORDinto the arguments of most of the articles by the authors for this issue of the Journal of Value Inquiry.Moore argues that goodness is a simple, non-natural property, and that the word good itself is, strictly speaking, naturalistically indefinable. Lacking reason to think that we haveFOREWORDmissed some plausible candidate of naturalistic definition, we have no reason to think that there is a naturalistic definition that can turn the semantically open question into a semantically closed question. [...]we must conclude that goodness is not a natural property and that good is not naturalistically definable.The open-question argument itself leaves us with a negative conclusion about what goodness is not.