Journal of Philosophical Investigations

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Shahid Beheshti University,

Abstract

One of the fundamental questions about Moore's ethical intuitionism is that what role the intuition plays in the formation of ethical concepts and judgments. In this paper, I have scrutinized Moore's answer by an analytic method, and by differentiating the two meanings of “Intuition” in his views, i.e. the intuition of the property of “Goodness”-which I have called “Intuition (I)”- and the intuition of the propositions containing the predicate “Good”-which I have called “Intuition (II)”-I have reached these results: 1) Intuition (I) influences on the formation of ethical concepts by the concept of “Goodness” as the cause of the ethical concepts; 2) Intuition (I) influences on the formation of ethical judgments by the simple concept of “Goodness”; 3) Intuition (II) influences on the formation of the complex ethical concepts by the simple predicate “Good”; 4) Intuition (II) , by virtue of the self-evidence and necessary truth of the propositions containing the predicate “Good”, influences on the formation of other propositions or judgments.

Keywords

  • Ewing, Alfred Cyril; Ethics (1960); London: The English Universities Press.
  • Moore, George Edward; Principia Ethica (1993), edited by Thomas Baldwin; Second edition; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Moore, George Edward; Ethics (1965); New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Runes, Dagobert D. (ed.) (1962); Dictionary of Philosophy; Second edition; Paterson/New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams & Co.
  • Shaw, William H. (1995); Moore on Right and Wrong: The Normative Ethics of G.E.Moore; Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  • Sylvester, Robert Peter (1990); The Moral Philosophy of G. E. Moore; Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  • Warnock, Jeoffrey James (1985); Contemporary Moral Philosophy; Hong Kong: The Macmillan Press.
CAPTCHA Image