Can Ethical Terms Be Defined? :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Can Ethical Terms Be Defined? The answer might seem obvious. Ethical terms can be defined because they have been. "Good" means pleasure; "good" means utility; "good" means self-realisation, or self interest and so on. Classical moral philosophy philosophers have apparently had no difficulty at all in defning terms like "good". It was just this multitude of different 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 "triangle" 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 representation of what we are talking about. We aren't able to see goodness, or point to it, at least in the same way. Furthermore when we define "triangle" as "an enclosed 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 made a mistake such as would be the case if we defined a triangle as a four sided figure; rather the error 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 isn't, all purported definitions of "good" commit this fallacy. "Good" h e concludes is indefinable This does not mean however that the term "good" 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.