Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-fqc5m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T12:37:56.833Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Moore's Cosmic Conservatism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Brian Hutchinson
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
Get access

Summary

The Dialectic of Innocence

In Principia's final chapter, “The Ideal,” Moore completes his project of revolutionary conservatism by responding to skeptical-philosophical challenges to commonsense casuisitic knowledge. He maintains that a fissure in the thought of philosophers similar to the one that causes them to lose sight of the truth about good also causes them to lose sight of the truth about the good. He attempts to provide philosophers with the means to repair that fissure so that they may once again fully trust their everyday judgments about the good things the world has to offer. Despite his warning against overestimating the value of unity in ethics, this makes Principia the expression of a unifying vision and a special kind of moral prophecy. Moore's is a work of cosmic conservatism. For no one, least of all philosophers, is it possible to compartmentalize neatly one's way of understanding the world and one's way of being in the world. By exposing to them their tendency to falsify the entirety of moral reality, Moore gives philosophers the chance no longer to fall prey to their own subterfuge. Showing them that the world as it is has enough of value to make life worth living, he enables them to escape from the perpetual state of disappointment with the world they have considered to be the badge of their superiority.

Upon nurturing, the sense of disappointment philosophers suffer from becomes the fundament of profoundly reformist religious and political philosophies we shall call ideologies.

Type
Chapter
Information
G. E. Moore's Ethical Theory
Resistance and Reconciliation
, pp. 172 - 189
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×