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The field of philosophy provides people with many challenges in different spheres, including ethics which specialists and thinkers attempt to solve. George Moore is one the most notable English philosophers of the 20th century who made many contributions to philosophy and became one of the founders of the analytical approach. The “open question” is a philosophical phenomenon which provides the basis for Moore’s idea of non-naturalism.
Specifically, Moor’s open question is a part of the larger open-question argument developed by Moore, which, in turn, forms the foundation for his non-natural philosophy. The core belief of Moore was that, in the world, there are moral properties which actually exist objectively, yet they have a form of non-natural property (Nuccetelli, 2021). As a result, Moore claimed it was incorrect to consider certain phenomena as good only based on the fact they bring pleasure. The open-question argument plays a major role in the explanation of the non-natural approach of Moor. Essentially, by utilizing the open-question argument, Moore attempted to defend his non-natural approach and stated that it was impossible to relate good to any type of natural property since it would entail an open question.
The open-question argument consists of several steps and ultimately enables Moore to conclude that good should denote non-natural property. Moore offers to relate good to a certain natural property, for instance, pleasure. The next step involves making an assumption that if a certain action brings pleasure, then it is good. For example, a person may say that consuming sugar is pleasurable and therefore good. Thus, if one asks whether eating sugar which brings pleasure is good, such a question will be viewed as meaningless because it will not offer any new information. In other words, when natural property, pleasure, is identical to the moral one, goodness, the question “Sugar is pleasant, yet is it good?” is a closed one. Moore believes that an open question, providing valuable information, cannot equate natural and moral properties. Therefore, the correct open question would be a simple one, “Is sugar good?” which would provide new information. Based on the argument, Moore concluded that good, a moral property, could not be identical to a natural property such as pleasure.
As a result, due to the fact that an open question is possible only when good does not equal a natural property, Moore stated it should denote a non-natural one. Nevertheless, the argument of Moore is not considered universally correct since there are many perspectives which counter it. For instance, the most plausible objection to Moore’s argument is the idea that Moore utilized the beginning the question fallacy. In other words, Moore assumed a conclusion for one of his argument premises, namely, the part where he states, “Is X good?” is an open question. Moore did not make any attempt to prove that such a question was indeed an open one. Thus, in his argument, Moore simply assumed that all-natural properties can not be equal to moral ones and proved that they could not be reduced to them. Based on the aforementioned fact, the non-natural approach of Moore cannot be viewed as correct.
The open question argument is an attempt of George Moore, an English philosopher, to prove that natural properties cannot be reduced to moral ones. Moore stated that asking a question about two properties which were predetermined to be identical would be meaningless. At the same time, some philosophers assume that Moore engaged in the begging the question fallacy by assuming one of his premises to contain an open question.
Reference
Nuccetelli, S. (2021). The Routledge guidebook to Moore’s Principia Ethica. Routledge.
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