Can Ethical Terms Be Defined? :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Can Ethical Terms Be Defined? The answer cleverness seem obvious. Ethical terms can be defined because they have been. Good means diversion good means utility good means self-realisation, or self interest and so on. genuine moral philosophy philosophers have apparently had no difficulty at all in defning terms like good. It was just this multitude of contrastive and incompatible definitions however, which led Moore to have some doubts about whether philosophers knew what they were doing when they attempted to define good. Is it really possible to define good as one might define trilateral or horse? Are there not some important differences? Moore is convinced that there are. In the first place, when we define triangle or horse we know what we are defining in the sense that we can see or at least formulate an empirical authority of what we are talking about. We arent able to see goodness, or point to it, at least in the same way. Furthermore when we define triangle as an enclose three sided plane figure, it makes no sense to ask, but is an enclosed three sided plane figure a triangle? not at least if we know what we are talking about, i.e. a triangle. But if we define good as pleasure for instance, it does seem to make sense to ask but is pleasure (really or always) good? Moore is convinced that it makes sense to ask this question, not merely because we may happen to be ignorant of what goodness is, and have thus do a mistake such as would be the case if we defined a triangle as a four sided figure rather the mistake occurs because we have confused two quite different kinds of things with one another. We have confused a natural property (pleasure) with a non natural property (good). He calls this kind of error a naturalistic fallacy. Since it is bound to occur whenever we attempt to identify good with something that isnt, all purported definitions of good commit this fallacy. Good he concludes is unnameable This does not mean however that the term goo d is meaningless. On the contrary it is no more meaningless than the term yellow which is also indefinable in the requisite sense. Still the question remains. What does good then refer to ? Certainly not to any sensed property like yellow. It refers, according to Moore, to an intuited and unanalysiable property of goodness which some things have and others do not have.