Moore, Rashdall and Ross

Abstract

The present chapter will give some account of the development of axiological ethics in England. It is not possible to pass over the contributions of G. E. Moore, who, however much his discussions of the meaning of ‘good’, and his teachings concerning the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, may have made him the father of modern ‘meta—ethics’, was also one of the prime founders of axiology, concerned to construct an ordered map of the main ‘heads’ of value and disvalue, of the main sorts of things that are purely or admixedly good or bad. His contributions to this body of theory are mainly contained in the Principia Ethica of 1903; his later volume on Ethics (1912) and his various other writings on ethical and value-problems, including his very important ‘Reply to my Critics’ in the Schilpp volume on the Philosophy of G. E. Moore, do not discuss this kind of question to the same extent. Moore’s drawing up of such a map of values in the last chapter of Principia Ethica is not only an important philosophical effort — Principia Ethica together with Some Main Problems of Philosophy and Russell’s Principles of Mathematics are among the supreme products of British philosophising — it also set the tone for a most brilliant intellectual and aesthetic period, the true belle époque of Bloomsbury, which, with its odd mixture of subtle sophistication and naïve innocence, so much in key with the Art Nouveau and the Peace Palace and the other fantasies of the time, now appears, from the sad vista of our present debasements, as the last happy, lucid, hopeful breathing-space of civilised man.