Nietzsche’s position on ethical matters contrasts starkly with that of Sidgwick, the last major figure of 19th-century British ethics treated in this article. Sidgwick believed in objective standards of moral judgment and thought that the subject of ethics had over the centuries made progress toward these standards. He regarded his own work as building carefully on that progress. Nietzsche, on the other hand, wished to sweep away everything since Greek ethics—and not keep much of that either. The superior types would then be free to create their own values as they saw fit. Western ethics from the beginning of the 20th century
As discussed in the brief survey above, the history of Western ethics from the time of the Sophists to the end of the 19th century shows three constant themes. First, there is the disagreement about whether ethical judgments are truths about the world or only reflections of the wishes of those who make them. Second, there is the attempt to show, in the face of considerable skepticism, either that it is in one’s own interest to do what is good or that, even if it is not necessarily in one’s own interest, it is the rational thing to do. And third, there is the debate about the nature of goodness and the standard of right and wrong. Since the beginning of the 20th century these themes have been developed in novel ways, and much attention has also been given to the application of ethics to practical problems. The history of ethics from 1900 to the present will be considered below under the headings metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Metaethics
As mentioned earlier, metaethics deals not with the substantive content of ethical theories or moral judgments but rather with questions about their nature, such as the question whether moral judgments are objective or subjective. Among contemporary philosophers in English-speaking countries, those defending the objectivity of moral judgments have most often been intuitionists or naturalists; those taking a different view have held a variety of different positions, including subjectivism, relativism, emotivism, prescriptivism, expressivism, and projectivism. Moore and the naturalistic fallacy
At first the scene was dominated by the intuitionists, whose leading representative was the English philosopher G.E. Moore (1873–1958). In his Principia Ethica (1903), Moore argued against what he called the “naturalistic fallacy” in ethics, by which he meant any attempt to define the word good in terms of some natural quality—i.e., a naturally occurring property or state, such as pleasure. (The label “naturalistic fallacy” is not apt, because Moore’s argument applied equally well, as he acknowledged, to any attempt to define good in terms of something supernatural, such as “what God wills.”) The “open-question argument,” as it came to be known, was in fact used by Sidgwick and to some extent by the 18th-century intuitionists, but Moore’s statement of it somehow caught the imagination of philosophers during the first half of the 20th century. The upshot was that for 30 years after the publication of Principia Ethica, intuitionism was the dominant metaethical position in British philosophy.
G.E. Moore, detail of a pencil drawing by Sir William Orpen; in the National Portrait Gallery, LondonCourtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
The aim of the open-question argument is to show that good is the name of a simple, unanalyzable quality. The argument itself is simple enough: it consists of taking any proposed definition of good and turning it into a question. For instance, if the proposed definition is “Good means whatever leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” then Moore would ask: “Is whatever leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number good?” Moore is not concerned with whether the answer is yes or no. His point is that, if the question is at all meaningful—if a negative answer is not plainly self-contradictory—then the definition cannot be correct, for a definition is supposed to preserve the meaning of the term defined. If it does, a question of the type Moore asks would seem absurd to anyone who understands the meaning of the term. Compare, for example, “Do all squares have four equal sides?”
The open-question argument does show that naturalistic definitions do not capture all that is ordinarily meant by the word good. It would still be open to a would-be naturalist, however, to argue that, though such naturalistic definitions do not capture all that is ordinarily meant by the word, this does not show that such definitions are wrong; it shows only that the ordinary usage of good and related terms is muddled and in need of revision. As to the utilitarian definition of good in terms of pleasure, it is questionable whether Mill really intended to offer a definition in the strict sense; he seems instead to have been more interested in offering a criterion by which one could ascertain whether an action was good or bad. As Moore acknowledged, the open-question argument does not show that pleasure, for example, is not the sole criterion of the goodness of an action. It shows only that this fact—if it is a fact—cannot be known merely by inspecting the definition of good. If it is known at all, therefore, it must be known by some other means.
Although Moore’s antinaturalism was widely accepted by moral philosophers in Britain and other English speaking countries, not everyone was convinced. The American philosopher Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957), for example, argued (in his General Theory of Value [1926]) that there is no such thing as value until a being desires something, and nothing can have intrinsic value considered apart from all desiring beings. A novel, for example, has no value at all unless there is a being who desires to read it or to use it for some other purpose, such as starting a fire on a cold night. Thus, Perry was a naturalist, for he defined value in terms of the natural quality of being desired—or, as he put it, being an “object of an interest.” His naturalism is objectivist, despite this dependence of value on desire, because whether an object has value does not depend on the desires of any single individual. Even if one does not desire this novel for any purpose at all, the novel will have some value so long as there is some being who does desire it. Perry believed that it followed from his theory that the greatest value is to be found in whatever leads to the harmonious integration of the desires or interests of all beings.
The open-question argument was taken to show that all attempts to derive ethical conclusions from anything not itself ethical in nature are bound to fail, a point related to Hume’s remark about writers who move from “is” to “ought.” Moore, however, would have considered Hume’s own account of morality to be naturalistic, because it defines virtue in terms of the sentiments of the spectator. Modern intuitionism