MooreOQA.md

Moore's Open Question argument(OQA)

Moore's open question argument argues that "good" resists definition.

G.E. Moore (1873-1958)

• 1925-1939: Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge
• Key text: Principia Ethica (1903)
• considered as the Mather(Mother and Father intertwined, still binary tho) of contemporary metaethics
• Argues: Good is indefinable, it is simple, irreducable non-natural and non-metaphysical(?) property that is knowable through intuition.

Open and Closed Questions

In the form of:

Is a particular X, y ?

If we think the answer is clear to us then it is called "closed". If not it is called "open"

1. Examples of closed questions.

   1. Is a female fox a vixen ?
   2. Is a bachelor married ?
   3. Is a polygon with 4 sides a quadrilateral ?

2. Examples of open questions

   1. Should a preacher vote Republican ?
   2. Was Gandhi the greatest politican ever lived ?
   3. Is playing video games a sport ?

3. Further look:

   Moore belives: If we can define "X"(a polygon with 4 sides) as "y"(e.g: quadrilateral), and understand what "X" and "y" means, the answer will be closed in the above form. if we can't define "X" and "y", then the answer will be open.

Is X, good ?

Moore believes that we can always generate open questions with every definiton of good.

1. Examples:

   1. Definition: "Good is desireable for me"
      "Glambling is desirable for me, is gambling good ?"
      The answer is not obvious, understanding "Glambling is desirable" and "good" doesn't settle the mattter

   2. Definition: "Good is having this gene"
      "I have this gene, Am I good ?"
      or If people tell u "I am good", will you think I have this gene ?

   3. Definition: "Good is doing what makes god happy ?"
      "If god wants you to kill a sheep for sacrifice, is it good to do it ?"
      We need to think about animal suffering/right and the nature of God

2. Good is not definable

   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 am asked "How is good to be defined ?" My answer is that it cannot be defined and that is all I have say about it. (Moore [1903] 1993:58)

   Zie is not saying it is hard to define good. Zie is saying that it is impossible to define good. We a priori know that no one will be able to define good.

Naturalistic Fallacy

People usually relates OQA to natrualistic fallacy.

1. Assume OQA is valid: "Good" means "good" and "good" alone
2. Meaning of a term is its referent

Then Good can only have 1 referent (Because it means "good" alone), which is "the property of goodness". It cannot be other referent that can be described using other words e.g. "Pleasure". Therefore the property of good is not reducible to other property.

This is an othological claim in goodness

1. Definiton of Naturalistic fallacy

   The act of reducing good to ANY other property.

   Moore believes that using OQA (and philosophy of language at the time): Mill(and Bentham), Kant, Rousseau, Spencer, Spinoza and Aristotle had all committed the naturalistic fallacy

   1. Bad naming

      Because it has nothing to do with natural property. If you reduce good to something non-natural (e.g."What God tells me to do"), you still commited the naturalistic fallacy. LMAO

Problems

1. Is open question a trick ?

   If we ask a normal person "if x is a seven-sides polygon, is that a heptagon?"

   They will think the question is open but actually its just because they are bad at math.

   How are you sure that we are good at morality at the first place ?

   Maybe we are just dummies to think that "Happy is pleasure" is open.

   If a person truly believes that "the best moral action is the action that maximise pleasure and minimize pain", then when asked "If x maximise pleasure and minimize pain, is it a morally good action ?" This person can say "Well! Duh" To this person, it is a closed question.

   To say that it is not a closed question is just begging the question at the first place. Not an argument, just an assertion

   1. Reply

      Our reactions (intuitively) to people who reply "I dont know math vs I don't know what is good" is different. (very weak tbh)

      It seems popular view on morality is important than popular view on maths (by intuition ? very weak tbh)

2. need to assume that conceptual analysis are useless

   Can conceptual analysis tell us informative and unobvious stuff ?

   1. Paradox of analysis

      1. Conceptual analysis seems to bring us new information
         e.g: Knowledge is JTB seems to tell us that true beliefs is not enough as knowledge

      2. Conceptual analysis cannot possibly bring us new information

         We already need to know the meaning of the concept. Or else:
         e.g. how will we know that JTB is really knowledge ? Blind guess ?

         We already know the meaning, so analysis should not give us anything informative.

      This paradox affects all conceptual analysis, not only metaethics (the above example is epistemolgy)

   2. Paradox of analysis is not really a paradox

      Compare to we know how to ride a bike. We might only know HOW but not really the physics behind or the physiology of cycling This physics or physiology can then be used to teach us more about riding a bike

      Same thing here: We know what a concept means but doesn't mean we can articulate what it means.
      We can analysis our usage of the concept and yield infromative and interesting

   3. Relation with the paradox and Moore's OQA

      The analysis of good can tell us something informative and unobvious. So when we arrived at open questions, further conceptual analysis of goodness can be done to yield something that is unobvious from our initial definition.

3. Not all true definition needs to be true by definition

   1. Water as H2O

      Consider the definitions: Water is H2O

      • What does water mean ? A liquid in normal temperature that is favorless and odorless that covers about 70% of the surface area of the Earth

      • What does H2O mean ? A molecule that contains 2 hydrogen atom and 1 oxygen atom

      Does that tell you Water is H2O ? No. We need to know it empirically.

   2. Back to Goodness

      If we say good is X something like water is H2O then OQA is wrong.

      To say that they are similar, it is either that:

      1. There is empirical evidence to establish that "good" picks out something natural/observable
      2. Good is something that will cause something that is relevant to goodness

4. Furthermore

   There are more problems for OQA. However people still think Moore got something right ?

The hardship of defining goodness

1. Try ? Approach: Combination of everything desirable

   Definition: "Good is what give us pleasure and what we desire and what God says and what makes society works and…"

   Weird for athiest to say something good would mean they believe in a God. We don't seem to use good to denote a massive set of stuffs.

2. Listing good things doesn't mean it is definable

   To say this we need to assume that we can identify "good" only when we already have the definition of good.

   However this is not true. e.g: We don't need to define love to know we love someone, or the definition of art to know we are creating art.

3. Good is not definable by intuition ?

   By intuition it seams like good is not definable

   OQA seems like a challenge more than a knock-down argument

   1. Motivational challenge

      If you hold internalism on motivation, then motivation seems to vanish for us when good is defined.

      This captured a practical sense of morality: motivations.

      OQA seems to suggest that morality is practical hence it cannot be defined.

Influence: Rise of non-cognitivism

OQA then sparked the dominance of non-cognitivism to capture this motivation aspect of moral judgement.
Because beliefs (cognitivism) doesn't (usually) motivate.

If moral claims are non-belief state such as desires, it is easy to explain why they motivate us.