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Under Moore's Spell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Stephen Darwall
Stephen Darwall
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, [email protected]
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Abstract

As David Wiggins points out, although Ross is best known for opposing Moore's consequentialism, Ross comes very close to capitulation to Moore when he accepts, as required by beneficence, a prima facie duty to maximize the good. I argue that what lies behind this is Ross's acceptance of Moore's doctrine of agent-neutral intrinsic value, a notion that is not required by, but is indeed is in tension with, beneficence as doing good to or for others.

Type
10th Anniversary Symposium
Information
Utilitas , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , November 1998 , pp. 286 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

1 Wiggins, David, ‘The Right and the Good and W. D. Ross's Criticism of Consequentialism,’ this volume, 261–80Google Scholar. Ross, W. D., The Right and the Good, Oxford, 1930, p. 27Google Scholar. Further references to this work will be placed in the text thus: (RG, p. 27).

2 Ross, W. D., Foundations of Ethics, Oxford, 1939, p. 69Google Scholar. Cf. Moore, G. E., Ethics, New York, 1965, p. 73Google ScholarPubMed.

3 Wiggins, 268.

4 Ross, , Foundations of Ethics, p. 75Google Scholar.

5 It is important to Kant, of course, that rational persons also have a dignity, which can be respected or violated, in addition to a good that can be promoted or hindered. In a narrow sense of ‘respect’, Kant's (perfect) duty of respect contrasts with the (imperfect) duty of love or beneficence. There is a broader sense, however, in which respecting another's dignity calls for both respect (in the narrow sense) and love or beneficence, since both are involved in treating the other as an end in herself.

6 Although Kant is not the classical thinker who is primarily in the back of his mind, Wiggins evidently feels some of the force of this picture when he writes that the ‘beneficent person is one who helps X, or rescues Y’ (274).

7 For a systematic elaboration and defence of this Kantian claim, see Anderson, Elizabeth, Value in Ethics and Economics, Cambridge, MA, 1993, p. 26Google Scholar. I have argued in a series of papers that the very idea of a person's welfare or good is to be understood in terms of the idea of caring about, or valuing, an individual for her own sake. The idea, roughly, is that what it is for something, X, to be good for someone, S, is for it to make sense (to be rational or warranted) for anyone (perhaps S herself) to want X for S's for S's sake. See my ‘Self-Interest and Self-Concern,’ in Self-Interest, ed. Paul, Ellen F., Cambridge, 1997Google Scholar, and Social Philosophy & Policy, xiv (1997)Google Scholar; ‘Empathy, Sympathy, Care,’ Philosophical Studies, lxxxix (1998)Google Scholar; and ‘Valuing Activity’ Human Flourishing, ed. Paul, Ellen F., Cambridge, forthcomingCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Except, perhaps, as the conclusion of an argument that doing so is the fairest adjudication of the claim each makes on us as a person.

9 Moore, G. E., ‘The Conception of Intrinsic Value,’ Philosophical Studies, London, 1922Google Scholar; repr. in G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, rev. edn., ed. and intro. Thomas Baldwin, Cambridge, 1993.

10 ‘What, then, is meant by “my own good”? In what sense can a thing be good for me? It is obvious, if we reflect, that the only thing which can belong to me is something which is good, and not the fact that it is good. When therefore, I talk of anything I get as “my own good,” I must mean either that the thing I get is good, or that my possessing it is good’ (Principia Ethica, p. 150). On this basis, Moore famously argues the egoism is self-contradictory (pp. 151–3).

11 That is, he means the first of the two things Moore says can sensibly be meant by ‘a person's good’ in the passage quoted in n. 10.

12 Or, I would argue, the forms of consequentialism that are under discussion in such contemporary philosophers as Parfit, Nagel, and Scheffler.

13 Principia Ethica, p. 34.