Principia Ethica Paperback - 1920

From the publisher

MR. MOORE'S "Principia Ethica" affords repeated illustration of the qualities which have distinguished his earlier and more fugitive contributions to philosophy; it is eminently ingenious and acute, and no less eminently irritating and, as it must appear to readers not convinced of- the truth of its author's peculiar tenets, wrong-headed. To some extent, no doubt, irritation is bound to be caused by any book which has at once the courage to assail traditionally established views and the ability to make the assault formidable; in Mr. Moore's case, however, one has to regret certain faults of manner and temper which are quite gratuitously provoking. Mr. Moore, who is on the whole more appreciative of Plato than of any other moralist old or new, is obviously and laudably anxious to advance the cause of clear thinking by the application of the Socratic elenchus to the confusions and ambiguities of popular philosophising on ethics. But he unfortunately forgets that the Socratic elenchus, to be tolerable, needs the accompaniment of Socratic urbanity. Unlike his great prototype he comes before us not as the modest searcher after truth in quest of fellow-seekers, but as a philosopher with a readymade system of his own and a profound contempt for his predecessors in the craft. We learn from his preface that his results are "prolegomena to any future ethics that can possibly pretend to be scientific," and after so bold a boast we may be excused a sense of disillusionment if the results to which we are conducted strike us as neither convincing nor significant enough to merit their author's encomium. With regard to Mr. Moore's very summary treatment of the moralists, the curious character of the statements he makes about Hobbes and Hegel justifies a doubt as to the extent of his acquaintance with some at least of the objects of his scorn. And there is a singular passage with reference to the supposed teaching of Christ, who fares no better than Mill or Kant at Mr. Moore's hands, which strongly suggests that Mr. Moore sat down to refute the Sermon on the Mount without concerning himself to ascertain precisely what that sermon teaches. It would probably be unjust to ascribe this unamiable attitude of mind altogether to that kind of self-satisfaction which Plato, in a passage Mr. Moore will remember, attributes to the half-fledged dialectician. Partly it seems to be explained by defective knowledge, but mainly perhaps by a constitutional deficiency in the sympathetic power of seeing under the confusions and mistakes of other men the fruitful ideas they are dimly struggling to express. It is characteristic of Mr. Moore's acute but narrow type of mind that his method of controversy is always to limit the position of his opponent to the logical minimum of meaning that can be put upon his words, to the entire exclusion of those fertile suggestions which often constitute the most precious part of a philosopher's work....
-- The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, Volume 97