Principia Ethica

G. E. Moore reshaped modern moral philosophy with this 1903 study, which begins from a deceptively simple question: what do we mean when we call something good? Moore argues that goodness is a basic, indefinable quality, and that most earlier ethics went wrong by identifying it with something else, such as pleasure or what nature intends. He names this mistake the naturalistic fallacy and defends the point with his famous open-question argument. From there he asks which things are good in themselves, concluding that personal affection and the appreciation of beauty rank highest. The book helped launch analytic philosophy and left a deep mark on the Bloomsbury Group. This free PDF and EPUB edition presents Moore’s argument in full.