Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

The Moore the Merrier

Gary Cox opens up G.E. Moore’s ethics, and his open question argument.

The branch of moral philosophy with the fancy-sounding title ‘meta-ethics’ is most fundamentally concerned with questions of meaning and reality in ethics. To cut a very long story short, there are basically two types of meta-ethicists: those who believe that there are objective moral facts or, at least, that there are objective means of establishing that an action is right or wrong, and those who don’t. The latter believe instead that morality, however it may be dressed up, is actually just a matter of taste, a basic matter of approval or disapproval. Not surprisingly, the first group of philosophers are known as moral realists, the latter as moral subjectivists.

David Hume and GE Moore by Essa Sameteh
Portrait by Essa Samateh 2021 Essa’s Instagram page is crise60

Humean Morality

Most famous amongst moral subjectivists is the great Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume (1711-1776).

…