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"If I am asked, "What is good?" my answer is that good is good and that is the end of the matter. Or if I'm asked, "How is good to be defined?" my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it". G.E. Moore, "Principia Ethica" Indeed it does appear that this is all Moore has to say about it. The absence of any acceptable "proof" that his position is more tenable than that of the ethical naturalists or metaphysicians makes it necessary for him to make this point so forcibly. The quotation above is the meta-ethical equivalent of the maxim of Bishop Butler's on the title page of "Principia Ethica", "Everything is what it is, and not another thing."; We are here concerned with meta-ethics, that is, the meaning of ethical terms, rather than with ethics proper which, as that branch of philosophy which deals with human behaviour, might be described as the practical application of philosophical ideas. It was only within the field of meta-ethics that G.E.Moore was at all influential. His "ethical" comments to the effect that since no one can know for sure what is good, it is probably wisest to keep to the moral conventions of the society one happens to live in, rather than to rely on one's individual "intuition" which one has no means of testing, were obviously of little help or interest to the moral philosopher or even an interested outsider who was truly concerned with the question of good actions and right behaviour. It is interesting that Moore objected to naturalism on the grounds that it offered no real reason, or even any reason at all, for any ethical principle and was nevertheless the cause of people accepting unsound principles. Yet G. J. Warnock pointed out in "Contemporary Moral Philosophy" that Moore on questions of "what is good?" claimed that reason had no place in the answer, while on questions of "what is right?" merely defined right as that which leads to the greatest good, near utilitarian consideration of the consequences of particular actions. Moore expended much of his energy in refuting what he described as the "naturalistic fallacy" so perhaps we should not expect too much from him. He did at least open the way for his successors to show how non-naturalism, or "intuitionism" as it came to be regarded, applied to the study of ethics. Moore holds as the basis of his theory that "good" is a simple notion like "yellow" which is indefinable, rather than a complex notion like "horse" which has many different characteristics which can be enumerated. "Good" is thus one of the ultimate terms of reference used in defining anything and so the question "What do you mean when you say that something is good?" is among the unintelligible questions which often confront philosophers. Since the most usual type of truth is one "which asserts a relation between two existing things", many philosophers assume that ethical truths conform to this pattern although, Moore asserts, they quite obviously do not. This misconception is the basis of the "naturalistic fallacy". In the fallacy, good is defined either by reference to a natural object (hence Ethical Naturalism, as Bentham and Mill) or to an object only inferred to exist in a suppressible real world (hence Metaphysical Ethics, as in Socrates and Bradley). It is an attempt to overcome the gulf between the "is" (that is, a statement of empirical fact) and the "ought" (or ethical conclusion) . The fallacy can be said to occur at three separate points: firstly, in defining a non-natural property like goodness in terms of a natural one; secondly, in defining one property in terns of another with which it is not identical and thirdly, in attempting to define the indefinable.
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