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Moore summer reading

Two things that you ought to know if you ever want to teach for CTY are: (1) it’s a thrilling, challenging, wonderful experience that changes the lives of nearly everyone involved in it for the better; and (2) you will have almost no time whatsoever to yourself for six weeks, and certainly no time to follow the news. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for you is a question I leave to you and your god.

But though I may be in no position to offer any timely analysis, I do at least have time to offer some analysis. So, hot off the presses from October 1903, I’m glad to announce that the completed transcription of Chapter V of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica is now available online from the Fair Use Repository. This chapter is Moore’s treatment of Ethics in Relation to Conduct, and it highlights one of the odder parts of Moore’s ethical system. Moore was, as I’ve mentioned before (in GT 2005-06-01 and GT 2005-06-28) a sharp critic of utilitarianism, and has given the philosophical tradition what I think is one of the loveliest arguments ever given against it. But he wasn’t a critic of consequentialism; in fact, he seems to have regarded consequentialism as more or less obviously true, and a direct consequence of properly distinguishing things good as ends from things good only as means. Although he alludes to this early on, it’s Chapter V that does the real heavy lifting for the argument. If Moore’s arguments go through, then it will turn out that no human action is good as an end in itself, but rather that actions are good only insofar as they are the causes of good effects. But unlike most consequentialists, Moore does not think there is any reason, other than prejudice, to start out assuming that the kinds of effects that are relevant for moral questions are effects on human consciousness at all, let alone the specific effects of promoting happiness (or pleasure, or satisfaction) and minimizing misery (or pain, or frustration). In fact, he takes himself to have shown already (with the Open Question Argument) that there’s no reason, other than prejudice, to start out assuming that you can characterize the quality that all good effects have in common in any terms except the bare fact that they are indeed good. (N.B.: That doesn’t mean that it can’t be the case; Moore thinks that the OQA proves only that if there is some non-ethical property that all good effects in fact have in common, that’s a substantive, synthetic finding about ethics, which will have to be justified by an appeal to ethical intuitions, rather than logical analysis of ethical terms. His discussion in Chapter III is intended to give some ethical reasons why even if there is such a property, it can’t be pleasantness; his positive reasons for thinking that there isn’t any such common quality will have to wait until the forthcoming transcription of Chapter VI.)

The upshot of all this is that although I think Moore goes seriously astray in his argument in Chapter V, he can’t be engaged on the same terms that most criticisms of consequentialism work from–because most criticisms of consequentialism are criticisms of utilitarianism and Moore is no utilitarian. Since he defends, at some length, the intrinsic value of many things (beauty, knowledge, friendship, some character traits, etc.) against utilitarian attempts to treat them as mere means, he can easily stand with anti-consequentialists during most of the common criticisms of utilitarianism–that it requires you to be willing to approve of injustice or lies in principle if there is enough of a pay-off in pleasure, for example; since Moore defends the intrinsic value of many things besides pleasure he is not at all committed to that; since Moore, in Chapter V, so sharply distinguishes the question of what ought to exist from what we ought to do, he may have an easier time than most ethicists would agreeing with Bernard Williams’ criticism that utilitarianism seems to obliterate me and my projects in favor of rigidly impersonal rule-following. If there’s something that Moore’s doing wrong here–and I think that there certainly is–it probably won’t be successfully picked out by most of the arguments that pick out something wrong with more familiar forms of consequentialism.

From here, the transcription will continue with the final chapter, Chapter VI: The Ideal, in which Moore attempts to give his full positive discussion of the sorts of things which are good in themselves. I hope to keep up my pace of 1-2 sections per day (although I probably won’t be able to begin until tomorrow). If you want to keep up with the progress of the transcription, you can subscribe to the Atom feed of Chapter VI, which will be updated as each section is completed. Onward to the ultimate end!

Previously…

Other news

For those of you who just can’t get enough fin-de-siècle English philosophy, you’re in luck. Not only is the transcription of Principia Ethica nearing completion, but you may also be interested to know that:

  1. I’ve also found and transcribed G. E. Moore’s review of Franz Brentano’s The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong, which appeared in the International Journal of Ethics in the same month that Principia Ethica was published; Moore refers to Brenatno’s book and his review of it in the Preface to Principia Ethica, where he says that he discovered the book after completing PE but found [in it] opinions far more closely resembling my own, than those of any other ethical writer with whom I am acquainted. The review singles out Brentano for praise mainly because of Brentano’s parallel emphasis on the irreducibility of good (The great merit of this view over all except Sidgwick’s is its recognition that all truths of the form This is good in itself are logically independent of any truth about what exists), but offers some criticism of Brentano’s attempt to define good in terms of other ethical predicates (as that which it is right to love). Also, apparently, the translation sucked, but that was Cecil Hague’s fault, not Brentano’s.

  2. I’ve transcribed several articles from the April 1895 issue of Mind, and will probably finish transcribing the rest of the contents within the next several days. I picked that issue out in particular because it had Lewis Carroll’s fantastic three-page essay, What the Tortoise said to Achilles; the issue also features some rather mediocre material from Bradley, an apology for the Common Sense school of Scottish philosophy by Henry Sidgwick, an early book review by Bertrand Russell (not yet online), and an interesting introductory essay on Hindu Logic by S. N. Gupta.

  3. I hear tell that the court scribes of the Austro-Athenian Empire have also been hard at work, with three new transcriptions of essays from Herbert Spencer’s 1902 book Facts and Comments. In addition to his essay Patriotism, which Roderick made available online a while ago, you can now also find his (sadly topical) denunciations of war, empire, and its corrosive effects on civilization in Imperialism and Slavery, Re-barbarization, and Regimentation.

Just a reminder: just because something’s old doesn’t mean it’s not topical; and just because something’s not topical doesn’t mean it’s not good. So, enjoy!

Libertarians for Protectionism

It’s always so cute to see self-proclaimed libertarians engaging in the most egregious sorts of protectionist argument when it comes to intellectual property restrictions. Consider the recent exchange on patents and copyrights over at Catallarchy, in which we are apparently supposed to grant drug companies and record labels the power to violently halt competition because (1) they have high sunk costs, and (2) they’d have to rethink their business strategy on a free market.

For example, here’s Joseph Weisenthal:

Matt, it’s been estimated that it takes approximately $500 Million dollars to develop the average drug, although that number can swing wildly. If companies were simply allowed to copy a compound and produce it as soon as a drug became available, the cost would fall roughly to the cost of current production, but that doesn’t suffice when you have up to 15 years of previous R&D expense to recoup.

The cost theory of value just doesn’t cut it, here bra, and yes, if drugs did fall to this level, there would be little reason to spend the enormous amounts of money, and spend the time to develop the compound.

And so, if patent protectionism is withdrawn, pharmaceutical research and development may have to be done by somebody other than for-profit pharmaceutical companies!

On a similar note, here’s Brandon Berg, adding an appeal to pity for the poor record companies on top of the protectionist argument:

What about the record companies who fund the production of their albums? People like to think of them as some sort of parasitic middlemen, but they’re not. They provide the capital and take on the risk that most musicians can’t afford. If profits fall, then recording studios will decide not to fund albums by musicians whom they think are less likely to be successful.

And so, if copyright protectionism is withdrawn music companies might have to rethink their current business model!

O tempora! O mores!

Economics lesson for the day: protectionism doesn’t work. Markets do.

Ethics lesson for the day: the world doesn’t owe you a living, even if you’re very smart or very creative. Honest people try to find a new way to make a living if the old way can’t work without the use of government force. Clever people find out new ways of making useful things, if they realize they can’t make an honest living in the old ways.

Logic lesson for the day: before you have a successful reductio ad absurdam the conclusion of the lemma must actually be absurd.

Chapter IV and much, much Moore…

This is old news, but I was too busy packing for my temporary relocation to upstate New York to put a post up about it at the time: the transcription of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica proceeds apace, and this time I have not one, but three milestones to announce (!):

  1. Chapter III, Moore’s extended treatment of hedonism, which I mentioned around the time I was halfway through with it, is now completely transcribed. I’d already finished Moore’s dissection of naturalistic hedonism (that is, hedonism supported by the naturalistic fallacy, as in, for example, Mill’s Utilitarianism); the new passages carry on with Moore’s discussion of Sidgwick and intuitionistic hedonism (that is, hedonism supported by an appeal to ethical intuitions). I think this actually contains some of the best material in all of Moore’s work — including one of my favorite arguments in all of philosophy, the Two Planets argument against ethical hedonism. (It may seem like an intuition-pump, but it’s a beautiful intuition-pump. And also, actually, a successful one: many people worry that he’s just begging the question, but I’d argue that Moore completely refutes hedonism, and that the argument ought to be convincing whether your intuitions about the planets line up with Moore’s or not. Maybe I’ll go into the reasons why here a bit later.)

  2. Chapter IV, Moore’s discussion of what he calls Metaphysical Ethics, is also completely transcribed. This is one of the chapters where Moore’s partisan aims come through a bit more clearly than you might hope; the goal is honorable enough — to show that his British Idealist contemporaries are actually guilty of the same sort of fallacy that constitutes the naturalistic fallacy when used by naturalists, and that the fallacy is no less fallacious when good is reduced to some set of supernatural properties rather than some set of natural properties — but the effort to count some coup against British Idealists who cited their Continental predecessors ends up in a very weak bit of criticism against Kant, who never did anything to deserve it. (Unfortunately, this would not be the last time that this happened to Kant — and especially not to Hegel — among the Analytics.) Still, the chapter is well worth reading, and on somewhat firmer ground when Moore is doing philosophy (i.e., when he examines the conceptual contours of the doctrines he sets out) than when he is doing scholarship (i.e., when he starts making claims about where those doctrines came from).

  3. Finally, you may notice a technical change that I took a few days off from transcribing to implement: the text of the documents is now stored in machine-readable feeds and processed by a PHP script that I wrote for the purpose. Aside from some minor aesthetic improvements I made along the way, the main upshot of this for you is that you can now read and cite the text not only by chapter, but also by individual section (as I did above when I cited §50) or even by ranges of sections (such as, for example, the characterization of the naturalistic fallacy and the Open Question Argument in §§10–13). Of course, you can still read chapter-by-chapter if you prefer.

Next up is the transcription of Chapter V, Moore’s discussion of right and wrong conduct; a bit of the work has already begun and I’m trying to keep along at a steady clip of at least one passage per day. How well I’m able to keep up with that depends on how hectic my work schedule turns out to be; but if you’re interested in keeping up with the process, and happen to have an Atom/RSS newsreader handy, you can do so by subscribing to the Atom feed for Chapter V.

Let me know about any typos that you spot. Read; cite; enjoy!

Other things: Chapter III of Principia Ethica is now online

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve been on something of a break from writing here for the past few weeks (due partly to travel, partly to lack of motivation, and partly to wanting to spend some quiet time away from it). I don’t know whether I’ll feel like picking up on the rate of posting in the near future; I do know that I’ll probably be taking more time off about a month from now when I head off for summer work in New York (same thing as last year: I’ll be working for the Center for Talented Youth, TA’ing two courses in Logic for extremely gifted 12-16 year olds).

I’m trying to wean myself off posting Sorry I’m not posting posts; but my purpose here is a bit different anyway. While I may not have the drive to post much right now, I do at least have the energy to copy out things that people smarter than I am once wrote. Thus, I’ve been making some substantial progress in transcribing the third chapter of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica for online reading and citation. It’s not complete yet (Chapter III is one of the longest chapters in the book), but I am mostly keeping up a pace of a section a day or more; which means that if I keep a steady pace the chapter should be complete in under three weeks. (Knock on wood.)

Chapter III contains Moore’s extended treatment of ethical hedonism — that is, the theory that pleasure is the only thing good in itself (this is how Moore defines it, anyway; he claims that some hedonists might not agree to the formulation explicitly but that they have to rest on it at least implicitly for their arguments to go through). The first part of the chapter is an addendum to his treatment of naturalistic ethics in Chapter II: he attacks arguments for hedonism based on the naturalistic fallacy, using John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism as an example. (The case is mostly pretty convincing, although I think he is unfair to Mill toward the end and doesn’t adequately discuss Mill’s notion of goods that are desired as parts of happiness.)

That’s as far as I’ve gotten in my transcription of the chapter so far; but if you want a preview of what’s to come in the next few days, Moore goes on to consider whether hedonism can be defended on grounds of ethical intuitions, once defenses based on the naturalistic fallacy have been set aside. He argues no; this involves what I think are some of the best arguments in the book and a long consideration of Sidgwick (Moore’s ideas about the proper methods of ethical philosophy owe a lot to Sidgwick’s intuitionism; but Sidgwick thought that intuitionist methods supported hedonism, and Moore thinks they decisively refute it). Finally, he wraps up with some rather brief and unfair polemics against the two ethical schools that seem most commonly to be based on hedonist arguments–Egoism and Utilitarianism.

There’s a lot to complain about in the chapter, but also a lot to love; it’s certainly something that anyone engaging in ethics or moral psychology ought to read and engage with. Read, cite, and be merry!

Further reading

Saturday Poetry Blogging: Canción del jinete (1923)

April is the poet’s month.

Today is the last day of the Ministry of Culture’s celebration of National Poetry Month. Across the border at D.E.D. Space, Diane has some parting thoughts:

Some final thoughts on poetry…

Why read it? Because a poem can do two things for you. It can cause you to have a moment–and a lifetime–of joy over language. And it can say for you what you yourself have not found adequate words, or maybe any words, to express. Such is the nature of art, that we are enriched by both the medium and the message.

When people say they do not like poetry, they are denying the language, and they are denying their connection with the rest of the world.

— D.E.D. Space 2005-04-30: National poetry month–Day 30

The poem selected for this weekend leans on that connection with the rest of the world; it comes from the gay Andalusian poet, playwright, and political martyr, Federico García Lorca (1898-1936). It was written in 1923 and is sometimes titled Canci?@c3;b3;n de jinete (1860), evoking an era of smuggling through the Sierra Morena (the mountain range dividing Andalusia from northern Spain).

Canci?@c3;b3;n del jinete

C?@c3;b3;rdoba.
Lejana y sola.

Jaca negra, luna grande,
y aceitunas en mi alforja.
Aunque sepa los caminos,
yo nunca llegaré a C?@c3;b3;rdoba.

Por el llano, por el viento,
jaca negra, luna roja.
La muerte me está mirando
desde las torres de C?@c3;b3;rdoba.

¡Ay que camino tan largo!
¡Ay mi jaca valerosa!
¡Ay que la muerte me espera,
antes de llegar a C?@c3;b3;rdoba!

C?@c3;b3;rdoba.
Lejana y sola.

Here’s a translation, mostly fairly literal, but also attempting to preserve something like the music of García Lorca’s Spanish.

The Rider’s Song

Cordoba.
Lonely in the distance.

A black nag, the giant moon
And olives in my saddlebag.
Even if I know the way,
I never will reach Cordoba.

Over the plain, into the wind,
A black nag, the red moon.
The Reaper is watching for me
From up in the towers of Cordoba.

Oh, such a long road!
Oh, my valient nag!
Oh, but the Reaper awaits me
Before I ever reach Cordoba.

Cordoba.
Lonely in the distance.

National Poetry Month 2005 selections

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