Moore's Moral Philosophy

First published Wed Jan 26, 2005; substantive revision Thu Mar 25, 2010
G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica of 1903 is often considered a revolutionary work that
set a new agenda for 20
th
-century ethics. This historical view is hard to sustain,
however. In metaethics Moore's non-naturalist position was close to that defended by
Henry Sidgwick and other late 19
th
-century philosophers such as Hastings Rashdall,
Franz Brentano, and J.M.E. McTaggart; in normative ethics his ideal
consequentialism likewise echoed views of Rashdall, Brentano, and McTaggart.
But Principia Ethica presented its views with unusual vigor and force. In particular, it
made much more of the alleged errors of metaethical naturalism than Sidgwick or
Rashdall had, saying they vitiated most previous moral philosophy. For this reason,
Moore's work had a disproportionate influence on 20
th
-century moral philosophy and
remains the best-known expression of a general approach to ethics also shared with
later writers such as H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross, and C.D. Broad.
1. Non-naturalism and the Open-Question Argument
2. Metaethical Innovations
3. Impersonal Consequentialism
4. The Ideal
5. Influence
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1. Non-naturalism and the Open-Question Argument
Moore's non-naturalism comprised two main theses. One was the realist thesis that
moral and more generally normative judgements like many of his contemporaries,
Moore did not distinguish the two are objectively true or false. The other was the
autonomy-of-ethics thesis that moral judgements are sui generis, neither reducible to
nor derivable from non-moral, that is, scientific or metaphysical judgements. It
follows that our knowledge of moral truths is intuitive, in the sense that it is not
arrived at by inference from non-moral truths but rests on our recognizing certain
moral propositions as self-evident.
Moore expressed the realist side of his non-naturalism by saying that fundamental
moral judgements ascribe the property of goodness to states of affairs. Like others of
his time, he seems to have taken this realism for granted; he certainly did not defend it
extensively against anti-realist alternatives. In this he was doubtless influenced by the
grammar of moral judgements, which have a standard subject-predicate form. But it
may also be relevant that, at least early on, the only subjectivist view he seems to have
been aware of was the naturalist one according to which to say x is good is to report
the psychological fact that one approves of x. In his 1912 book Ethics he showed that
this view does not allow for moral disagreements, since my report that I approve
of x and your report that you disapprove of it can both be true (Ethics 5861). Late in
life he encountered the non-cognitivist emotivism of C.L. Stevenson, which says that
moral judgements express rather than report feelings and therefore can conflict. He
initially conceded that this anti-realist view had as good a claim as his own to be true
(A Reply to My Critics 54445), but shortly after reverted to his earlier non-
naturalism, saying he could not imagine what had induced him to consider
abandoning it (Ewing, G.E. Moore 251).
Especially in Principia Ethica, Moore spent much more time defending his other non-
naturalist thesis, of the autonomy of ethics, which he expressed by saying the property
of goodness is simple and unanalyzable, and in particular is unanalyzable in non-
moral terms. This meant the property is non-natural, which means that it is distinct
from any of the natural properties studied by science. Views that denied this
committed what he dubbed the naturalistic fallacy, which he found in hedonists
such as Jeremy Bentham, evolutionary ethicists such as Herbert Spencer, and
metaphysical ethicists such as T.H. Green. Moore's main argument against their view
was what has come to be known as the open-question argument. Consider a
particular naturalist claim, such as that x is good is equivalent to x is pleasure. If
this claim were true, Moore said, the judgement Pleasure is good would be
equivalent to Pleasure is pleasure, yet surely someone who asserts the former means
to express more than that uninformative tautology. The same argument can be
mounted against any other naturalist proposal: even if we have determined that
something is what we desire to desire or is more evolved, the question whether it is
good remains open, in the sense that it is not settled by the meaning of the word
good. We can ask whether what we desire to desire is good, and likewise for what is
more evolved, more unified, or whatever (Principia Ethica6269). Sidgwick had used
the same argument against Bentham and Spencer, but only in passing; Moore made it
central to his metaethics.
The open-question argument was much discussed in the 20
th
century and met with
many objections. One said the argument's persuasiveness depends on the paradox of
analysis: that any definition of a concept will, if successful, appear uninformative. If
an analysis does capture all its target concept's content, the sentence linking the two
will be a tautology; but this is hardly a reason to reject all analyses. Moore could
respond that in other cases accepting a definition leads us to see that the sentence
affirming it, while seeming informative, in fact is not. But this does not happen in the
case of good Even if we agree that only pleasure is good, no amount of reflection
will make us think Pleasure is good equivalent to Pleasure is pleasure. Another
objection, made later in the century, said the argument cannot support Moore's
conclusions about the distinctness of goodness as a property. Science, the objection
runs, uncovers many non-analytic property identities; for example, water is identical
to H
2
O even though the terms water and H
2
O are not synonymous. By analogy,
the property of goodness could be identical to that of pleasure even if good and
pleasure have different meanings. Again, however, Moore could respond. The
property of being water is that of having the underlying structure, whatever that is, of
the stuff found in lakes, rivers, and so on; when this structure turns out to be H
2
O, the
latter property fills a gap in the former and makes the two identical. But this
explanation does not extend to the case of goodness, which is not a higher-level
property with any gap needing filling: to be good is not to have whatever other
property plays some functional role. If goodness is analytically distinct from all
natural properties, it is metaphysically distinct as well. It is worth noting, however,
that Moore did not explain the open-question argument in the way later non-
cognitivists would. Following Hume, they said that moral judgements are intrinsically
motivating, so sincerely accepting x is good requires a commitment or at least some
motivation to pursue x if that is possible. But then no definition of good in purely
natural terms can ever succeed, since it cannot capture the term's action-guiding force;
nor can an evaluative conclusion be validly inferred from premises none of which
have such force. Whatever the merits of this Humean explanation, Moore did not give
it. On the contrary, the question whether moral judgements are intrinsically
motivating is not one on which he expressed clear views or apparently thought very
important.
2. Metaethical Innovations
The main elements of Moore's non-naturalism moral realism and the autonomy of
ethics had been defended earlier by Sidgwick and were well known when Moore
wrote. But Moore did add two innovations. One was his view that the fundamental
moral concept is that of goodness, which he expressed by saying that goodness is
simple and unanalyzable, even in moral terms. This had not been Sidgwick's view.
For him the central moral concept had been ought, and he defined good in terms of
ought, more specifically, as what one ought to desire. Principia Ethica took the
exactly opposite view, defining ought in terms of good, so one ought to do x
literally means x will produce the most good possible (7677, 19698). Moore was
quickly persuaded by Bertrand Russell that this last view is vulnerable to his own
open-question argument: in saying one ought to do what will produce the most good
we do not mean what will produce the most good will produce the most good. In
later work he therefore held that ought is a distinct moral property from good, and in
an uncompleted Preface to a planned second edition of Principia Ethica allowed that
it would not affect the essence of his non-naturalism if good were defined in moral
terms, say, as what one ought to desire. But he continued to prefer the view that good
is a simple concept, and there was vigorous debate on this topic in years to come, with
Brentano, Broad, and A.C. Ewing defending reductive analyses similar to Sidgwick's
while Ross held a non-reductive view like Moore's. On the Moorean view judgements
about the goodness of states of affairs are not shorthand for judgements about how we
ought to respond to those states; they are independent judgements that explain why we
ought so to respond.
Moore's second innovation was his view that the intrinsic value of a state of affairs
can depend only on its intrinsic properties, properties it has apart from any relations to
other states. Earlier writers had distinguished between goodness as an end, which they
also called intrinsic or ultimate goodness, and goodness as a means, saying the former
cannot rest just on a state's causally producing goods outside itself. But they seemed
to allow that goodness as an end can depend on other relational properties; thus they
talked as if a belief's being true, which is necessary for its being knowledge, can
increase its value, while a pleasure's being that of a bad person can make it worse.
Moore did not explicitly state his more restrictive view that intrinsic goodness can
depend only on intrinsic properties until The Conception of Intrinsic Value of 1922,
but it nonetheless guided Principia Ethica at two points. One was that book's specific
formulation of the principle of organic unities, to be discussed below. The other was
its testing for a state's intrinsic value by the method of isolation, which involves
asking whether a universe containing only that state and no other would be good
(Principia Ethica 142, 14547, 236, 256); the point of this method was precisely to
insulate judgements of intrinsic value from facts about a state's external relations.
Moore's strict view was adopted by some later writers such as Ross, while others
argued that a better theory of value results if intrinsic goodness can depend on some
relations. But Moore was the first to raise this issue clearly.
These two innovations, though not trivial, do not affect the core of a non-naturalist
metaethics. But some critics charge that Moore did change that view fundamentally,
and for the worse. They say that Sidgwick's non-naturalism was comparatively
modest, holding only that there are truths about what people ought or have reason to
do that we can know by reflection. But Moore, the objection runs, supplemented this
modest view with an extravagant metaphysics of non-natural properties inhabiting a
supersensible realm and a mysterious faculty of intuition that acquaints us with them.
These additions opened non-naturalism to entirely avoidable objections and so led to
its early demise.
These charges are hard to sustain, however. Principia Ethica actually downplayed the
metaphysical side of its non-naturalism, saying that goodness has being but does not
exist, as numbers do not exist, and in particular does not exist in any supersensible
reality (16163, 17476). Nor did its explicit talk of properties mark a significant
departure from Sidgwick: surely if the latter thought people ought to pursue pleasure,
he thought pleasure has the property of being something people ought to pursue.
Moore was similarly modest in his epistemology, saying several times, as Sidgwick
also had, that by calling our knowledge of basic moral truths intuitive he means
only that it was not derived by inference from other knowledge; he likewise denied
that moral intuition was infallible, saying that in whatever way we can cognize a true
proposition, we can cognize a false one (Principia Ethica 36, 193). Moore did
sometimes make bald assertions of self-evidence, as in his claim in Ethics that it is
self-evident that the right is always what most promotes the good (112), and some
critics have found this baldness troubling. But the contrast with earlier non-naturalists
such as Sidgwick should again not be overdrawn. It is arguable that Sidgwick, too,
gave most weight to intuitions about abstract moral principles like those Moore cited
in Ethics, citing more concrete judgements only in ad hominem arguments against
opponents. And Moore often argued in more complex ways. In Principia Ethica he
defended his claim that beauty on its own is good by appealing to intuitions about a
very specific beautiful world, and criticized the view that only pleasure is good by
arguing that it conflicts with other things we believe (13247). Moore likewise
insisted that before we make judgements of self-evidence we must make sure the
propositions we are considering are clear; failure to do so, he claimed, explained
much of the disagreement about ethics. And he took note of common opinions to the
extent of trying to explain away divergent views when he found them. Overall his
approach to establishing moral truths was very similar to Sidgwick's, appealing to
intuitive judgements that can be made at different levels of generality and that must be
brought into a coherent whole. This is not to say that his non-naturalism was beyond
objection. Any such view holds that there are truths independent of natural and logical
ones and knowable by some non-empirical means, and many find this pair of claims
unacceptable. But Moore's version of the view was arguably no more objectionable
than others. If Sidgwick's non-naturalism did not involve a problematic metaphysics
and epistemology, neither did Moore's; if Moore's was hopelessly extravagant, so was
a supposedly more modest one like Sidgwick's.
A final important feature of Moore's metaethics was its reductionism about normative
concepts. Like Sidgwick, the Moore of Principia Ethica held that there was just one
basic normative concept, though he thought it was good rather than ought; like Ross,
the later Moore held that there were just two. But this conceptual reductionism, which
was common throughout the period from Sidgwick to Ross, contrasts sharply with the
multitude of concepts recognized in much present-day ethics. First, Moore and his
contemporaries took as basic only the thin concepts good and ought rather than
thick concepts such as courage and generosity; the latter, they held, combined a thin
concept with some more or less determinate descriptive content. They were also
reductive about the thin concepts. They did not distinguish between moral oughts and
prudential or rational ones, holding that there is only the single, moral ought; this is
why for them egoism was a moral view, not a challenge to morality from outside it.
Nor did they recognize different types of value. For them goodness was a property
only of states of affairs and not, as Kantians hold, of persons and other objects. They
likewise did not accept the late 20
th
-century idea that there is a distinct concept of
well-being, or of what is good for a person; instead, they defined a person's good
as what is simply good and located in his life. Nor did they distinguish between moral
and non-moral goodness, holding that the former is just ordinary goodness when
possessed by certain objects, such as traits of character. The result was that all
normative judgements could be expressed using the two concepts good and ought,
which were therefore the only ones one needed. To some this conclusion will mean
that Moore and his contemporaries ignored important conceptual distinctions; to
others it will mean they avoided tedious conceptual debates. But it did free them to
discuss substantive questions about what is in fact good and right. On this topic
Moore's views, though not entirely novel, were again strikingly stated.
3. Impersonal Consequentialism
Moore's normative view again comprised two main theses. One was impersonal
consequentialism, the view that what is right is always what produces the greatest
total good impartially considered, or counting all people's good equally. The other
was the ideal or perfectionist thesis that what is good is not only or primarily pleasure
or desire-satisfaction, but certain states whose value is independent of people's
attitudes to them. Moore recognized several such states, but in Principia Ethica said
famously that by far the most valuable thingsare certain states of consciousness,
which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the
enjoyment of beautiful objects (237). According to his ideal consequentialism, what
is right is in large part what most promotes loving personal relationships and aesthetic
appreciation by all persons everywhere.
Principia Ethica took the consequentialist part of this view to be analytically true,
since it defined the right as what most promotes the good. But once Moore abandoned
this definition, he had to treat the consequentialist principle as synthetic and did so
in Ethics, which allowed that deontological views which say some acts that maximize
the good are wrong are perfectly coherent. But even there he did not argue at length
for consequentialism, simply announcing that it is self-evident (112). This in part
reflected common assumptions of his time, when a majority of philosophers accepted
some consequentialist structure. But it may also be relevant that the only alternative
he considered in Ethics was an absolute deontology like Kant's, according to which
some acts such as killing and lying are wrong no matter what their consequences. His
major ethical works did not consider a moderate deontology such as would later be
developed by Ross, in which deontological prohibitions of killing and lying often
outweigh considerations of good consequences but can themselves be outweighed if
enough good is at stake. It is not clear what Moore's response to such a moderate
deontology would have been.
Principia Ethica also took the impartialism of its view to be analytic, and in particular
claimed that egoism, which says that each person should pursue only his own good, is
self-contradictory. (Despite his interest in personal love, Moore never considered the
intermediate view that Broad would call self-referential altruism, according to which
each person should care more about the good of those close to him, such as his family
and friends.) Sidgwick had argued that if an egoist confines himself to saying that
each person's pleasure is good from that person's point of view, he cannot be argued
out of his position. But Moore said this concept of agent-relative goodness is
unintelligible (Principia Ethica 14853), and that conclusion does follow from his
view that goodness is simple and unanalyzable. If goodness is a simple property, how
can a state such as person A's pleasure have it from one point of view but not another?
(Compare squareness. An object cannot be square from one point of view but not
from another; it either is square or not.) All that can be meant by talk of the good
for a person is what is simply good and located in him; and simple goodness gives
everyone equally reason to pursue it. In Ethics Moore abandoned this argument,
saying that egoism cannot be proven false by any argument, even though he thought
its falsity was self-evident (99100). But it is not clear how he could make this
concession if he still held that goodness is a simple property. Perhaps he was tacitly
allowing, as he would in the draft Preface to Principia Ethica, that it would not
centrally damage his position if good were analyzed in terms of ought, as it had been
by Sidgwick. There is no contradiction in saying that what each person ought to desire
is different, say, just his own pleasure. But if all oughts derive from a simple property
of goodness, as Moore always preferred to hold, then all oughts must be impartial.
In applying this view, Moore gave it the form of what today is called indirect or
two-level consequentialism. In deciding how to act, people are not to assess
individual acts for their specific consequences; instead, they should follow certain
general moral rules such as Do not kill and Keep promises, which are such that
adhering to them will most promote the good over time. This policy will sometimes
mean not performing the act with the best individual outcome, but given our human
propensity to error its consequences will be better in the long run than trying to assess
acts one by one. This indirect consequentialism had again been defended earlier, by
Sidgwick and even John Stuart Mill, but Moore gave it a more conservative form,
urging adherence to the rules even in the face of apparently compelling evidence that
breaking them now would be optimific. Principia Ethica made the surprising claim
that the relevant rules would the same given any commonly accepted theory of the
good, for example, given either hedonism or its own ideal theory (207). This claim of
extensional equivalence for different consequentialist views was not new; T.H. Green,
F.H. Bradley, and McTaggart had all suggested that hedonism and ideal
consequentialism have the same practical implications. But Moore was surely
expressing the more plausible view when in Ethics he doubted that pleasure and ideal
values always go together (145). And even when he accepted the equivalence claim,
he remained intensely interested in what he called the primary ethical question of
what is good in itself (Principia Ethica 207; see also 78, 128). Like Green, Bradley,
and McTaggart, he thought the central philosophical question was
what explained why good things are good, i.e., which of their properties made them
good. That was the subject of his most brilliant piece of ethical writing, Chapter 6
of Principia Ethica on The Ideal.
4. The Ideal
One of this chapter's larger aims was to defend value-pluralism, the idea that there are
many ultimate goods. Moore thought a key bar to this view was the naturalistic
fallacy. He assumed, plausibly, that philosophers who treat goodness as identical to
some natural property will usually make this a simple property, such as just pleasure
or just evolutionary fitness, rather than a disjunctive property such as pleasure-or-
evolutionary-fitness-or-knowledge. But then any naturalist view pushes us toward
value-monism, or the view that only one state is good. Once naturalism is dropped,
however, we can see what Moore thought self-evident: that there are irreducibly many
goods. Another bar to value-pluralism was excessive demands for unity or system in
ethics. Sidgwick had used such demands to argue that only pleasure can be good,
since no theory with a plurality of ultimate values can justify a determinate scheme for
weighing them against each other. But Moore, agreeing here with Rashdall, Ross, and
others, said that to search for unity and system, at the expense of truth, is not, I
take it, the proper business of philosophy (Principia Ethica 270). If intuition reveals
a plurality of ultimate goods, then an adequate theory must recognize that plurality.
According to a famous part of Principia Ethica one of those goods is the existence of
beauty. Arguing against Sidgwick's view that all goods must be states of
consciousness, Moore asked readers to imagine a beautiful world with no minds in it:
is this world's existence not better than that of a horribly ugly world (13536)? In
answering yes, he anticipated some present-day environmental ethics, which likewise
holds that there can be value in features of the natural environment apart from any
awareness of them. But he did not insist on this view. Later in Principia Ethica he
said that beauty on its own at most has little and may have no value, and in Ethics he
denied that beauty on its own has value. There he held, with Sidgwick, that all
intrinsic goods involve some state of consciousness (10304, 148, 153). But he
continued to hold that the existence of beauty that actually exists and causes the
appreciation is better than an otherwise similar appreciation of beauty that does not
exist.
Moore also gave some weight to the hedonic states of pleasure and pain. He thought
the former a very minor good, saying that pleasure on its own at most has limited and
may have no value. But pain was a very great evil, which there was a serious duty to
prevent (Principia Ethica 26061, 27071). His view therefore involved an
asymmetry, with pain a much greater evil than pleasure was a good. This had not been
the traditional view; most hedonists had held that a pleasure of a given intensity was
exactly as good as a pain of the same intensity was evil. But Moore thought it
intuitively compelling that the pain was worse; if that made the theory of value less
systematic, so much the worse for system.
While many ideal consequentialists treated knowledge as intrinsically good, in some
cases supremely so, Principia Ethica did not, claiming that knowledge is a necessary
component of the larger good of appreciating existing beauty but has little or no value
in itself (24748). Again Ethics may have reversed this view, citing knowledge
several times as one ideal good that may be added to the hedonist's good of pleasure
(34, 14647). But Moore never saw any intrinsic value in achievement, for example in
business or politics, or indeed in any active changing of the world. As John Maynard
Keynes said, his chief goods were states of mind that were not associated with action
or achievement or with consequence. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of
contemplation and communion, largely unattached to before and after (Keynes,
My Early Beliefs, 83).
The first of these goods was the appreciation of beauty, which for Moore combined
the cognition of beautiful qualities with an appropriately positive emotion toward
them, such as enjoyment or admiration. We listen to music, say, hear beautiful
qualities in it, and love those qualities. But the value here was entirely contemplative;
Moore saw no separate worth in what the romantics had especially valued, the active
creation of beauty. Moore might claim that an artist must understand and love his
work's beauty if he is to create it, perhaps even more than someone who merely
enjoys it; but the value in the artist's work is still not distinctively creative. In
characterizing the good of aesthetic contemplation Moore gave a further reductive
analysis, this time of beauty as that the admiring contemplation of which is good in
itself (Principia Ethica 24950). Beauty, too, was not a distinct normative concept
but analyzable in terms of goodness. He did not notice, however, that this definition
again seemed to open him to an open-question argument, since it reduced the claim
that it is good to contemplate beauty to the tautology that it is good to contemplate
what it is good to contemplate.
Though Moore in Principia thought beauty good in itself, he did not insist on this
view when valuing the appreciation of beauty; the latter might be good even if the
former was not. But he still thought the existence of beauty makes a significant
difference to value. More specifically, he thought the admiring contemplation of
beauty that actually exists and causes one's contemplation is better than an otherwise
similar contemplation of merely imaginary beauty, and better by more than can be
attributed to the existence of the beauty on its own. This view involved an application
of his principle of organic unities, according to which the value of a whole need not
equal the sum of the values its parts would have on their own (Principia Ethica 78
80). If state x on its own has value a, and state y on its own has value b, the whole
combining them need not have value a + b; it may have more or less. This principle
had been accepted by Idealists such as Bradley, who gave it a characteristically anti-
theoretical formulation. They said that if x and y combine to form the whole x-plus-y,
their values, like their very identities, are dissolved in that larger whole, whose value
cannot be computed from that of its parts. It was Moore's contribution to accept the
principle in a way that rejected this anti-theoretical stance and allowed computation,
though exactly how it did depended on his view that a state's intrinsic value can
depend only on its intrinsic properties.
This strict view implies that when x and y enter into the relations that constitute the
whole x-plus-y, their own values cannot be changed by those relations. Moore
recognized this, saying, The part of a valuable whole retains exactly the same value
when it is, as when it is not, a part of that whole (Principia Ethica 81). Any
additional value in the whole x-plus-y must therefore be attributed to it as a distinct
entity from its parts, and with the relations between those parts internal to it. Moore
called this additional value the value of a whole as a whole, and said it needed to be
added to the value in the parts to arrive at the whole's value on the whole 0
(Principia Ethica 26364). Thus, if x and y have values a and b on their own, and x-
plus-y has value c as a whole, the value of x-plus-y on the whole is a + b + c. (The
value of the whole is therefore not equal to the sum of the values of its parts, but is
equal to a sum of which those values are constituents.) This holistic formulation of
the principle of organic unities is not the only possible one. One could relax the
conditions on intrinsic value so it can be affected by external relations, and say that
when x and y enter into a whole their own values change, so that, say, x's value
becomes a + c. This variability formulation can always reach the same final
conclusions as the holistic one, since whatever positive or negative value the latter
finds in the whole as a whole the former can add to one of the parts. But the two
formulations locate the additional value in different places, and sometimes one and
sometimes the other gives the intuitively better explanation of an organic value.
Moore, however, was forced by his strict view of intrinsic goodness to use only the
holistic formulation. In the aesthetic case, he held that the admiring contemplation of
beauty considered apart from the existence of its object always has the same
(moderate) value a, while the existence of beauty always has the same (minimal)
value b. But when the two are combined so a person admiringly contemplates beauty
that exists and causes his contemplation, the resulting whole has the significant
additional value c as a whole. The existence of the beauty is therefore necessary for
the significant value c, but that value is not intrinsic to it, belonging instead to the
larger whole of which it is part.
Moore made several other uses of the principle of organic unities, including in
response to an argument of Sidgwick's for hedonism. Sidgwick had claimed that there
would be no value in a world without consciousness and, more specifically, pleasure,
and had concluded that therefore pleasure is the only good. Given Principia Ethica's
view about the value of beauty, Moore rejected the premise of Sidgwick's argument,
but he also argued that, even granting that premise, Sidgwick's conclusion does not
follow. It might be that pleasure is a necessary condition for any value, but that once
pleasure is present, other states such as the awareness of beauty or love increase the
value of the resulting whole even though alone they have no worth (Principia
Ethica 14445). And of course this was precisely Moore's later view. Another
application of the principle was in explicating claims about desert. Moore endorsed
the retributive view that when a person is morally vicious it is good if he is punished,
and he expressed this view by saying that although the person's vice is bad and his
suffering pain is bad, the combination of vice and pain in the same life is good as a
whole, and sufficiently so to make the situation on the whole better than if there were
vice and no pain (Principia Ethica26364). This is in fact a point where Moore's
holistic formulation of the principle is especially appealing. The alternative variability
view must say that when a person is vicious, his suffering pain switches from being
purely bad to purely good. But this implies that the morally appropriate response to
deserved suffering is simple pleasure, which does not seem right; the better response
mixes satisfaction that justice is being done with pain at the infliction of pain, as
Moore's view implies.
Moore's other chief good of personal love also involved admiring contemplation, but
now of objects that are not just beautiful but also intrinsically good (Principia
Ethica 251). Since for Moore the main intrinsic goods were mental qualities, such
love involved primarily the admiring contemplation of another's good states of mind.
In so characterizing love Moore was applying one of four recursive principles he used
to generate higher-level intrinsic goods and evils from an initial set of such goods and
evils. The first such principle says that if state x is intrinsically good, admiringly
contemplating, or loving, x for itself is also intrinsically good. Thus, if person A's
admiringly contemplating beauty is good, person B's admiringly contemplating A's
admiration is a further good, as is C's admiration of B's admiration, and so on. A
second principle says that if x is intrinsically evil, hating x for itself is intrinsically
good; thus, B's feeling compassionate pain at A's pain is good. And two final
principles say that loving for itself what is evil, as in sadistic pleasure in another's
pain, and hating for itself what is good, as in envious pain at his pleasure, are evil.
Though Moore stated these four principles separately, they all make morally
appropriate attitudes to intrinsic goods and evils further goods and morally
inappropriate attitudes further evils. The principles were by no means unique to
Moore; they had been defended earlier by Rashdall and Brentano and would be
defended later by Ross. But Moore's formulation was in one respect distinctive.
Rashdall and Ross called the higher-level values they generated virtues and vices, as
indeed it is plausible to do; surely benevolence and compassion are virtuous and
sadism vicious. But Moore defined the virtues instrumentally, as traits that cause
goods and prevent evils, and said that as such they lacked intrinsic worth (Principia
Ethica 22026).
The recursive principles are clearly relevant to personal love, which centrally involves
concern for another's good. But Moore's particular application of the principles led to
a curiously restricted picture of love. First, as in the aesthetic case, he took the main
valuable attitude to be contemplative, involving the admiration of another's already
existing good qualities rather than any active engagement with them. This applied
even to the love of another's physical beauty. Though he did think this a crucial part of
love, he took it to involve mere passive admiration of another's beauty, as it were from
the other side of the room. There was no desire to possess or interact physically with
her beauty, that is, no active eroticism. And the same point applied more generally:
the loving attitude was one of appreciating goods in another's life rather than acting to
produce or help her achieve them. One did not do anything for or with a loved one;
one simply admired. Moreover, the list of admired goods was seriously truncated. It
did not include pleasure or happiness, since that was not a significant good, nor even
knowledge or achievement. Instead, it centered on another's admiring contemplation
of beauty, as if the supreme expression of love were What fine taste in music you
have. Finally, Moore took the qualities one admired in a loved one to be simply and
therefore impartially good. But this meant his account had no room for the special
attachments many take to be central to personal love. If I love a friend for
qualities x, y, and z, and a stranger comes along with the same qualities to a higher
degree, then on Moore's theory I should love the stranger more. This is not to say that
a more adequate account of love cannot be constructed with the same basic structure
as Moore's; it can. It will hold that personal love involves a wider range of positive
attitudes, including actively promoting as well as contemplating, to a wider range of
goods, including happiness, knowledge, and achievement, and where those goods in a
loved one's life have greater value from a lover's point of view than do similar states
of strangers. But Moore was prevented from giving this account by other features of
his view: his general emphasis on contemplative forms of love, his restricted list of
initial intrinsic goods, and his strict impartialism about value.
5. Influence
Despite not containing many large new ideas, Moore's ethical writings, and
especially Principia Ethica, were extremely influential, both outside and within
philosophy. Outside philosophy their main influence was through the literary and
artistic figures in the Bloomsbury Group, such as Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and
Leonard and Virginia Woolf, several of whom had come under Moore's influence
while members with him of the Apostles society at Cambridge. They were most
impressed by the last chapter of Principia Ethica, whose identification of aesthetic
appreciation and personal love as the highest goods very much fit their predilections.
Many of them the gay men in particular sexualized Moore's account of love,
adding an erotic element not present in his formulations. And by their own later
admission, they tended to ignore the impartial consequentialism within which Moore
embedded those goods, and so concentrated on pursuing them in their own lives rather
than encouraging their wider spread in society. Also important for Principia Ethica's
extra-philosophical appeal was its brash iconoclasm, its claiming, however,
inaccurately, to sweep away all past moral philosophy. This tone entirely fit its time,
when the death of Victoria had led many in Britain to think a new, more progressive
age was beginning.
The book's influence within philosophy was even greater. On the normative side,
views close to its ideal consequentialism remained prominent and even dominant
through the 1930s, though it is hard to know how far this is attributable to Moore,
since similar views had been widely accepted before him. In metaethics his non-
naturalism likewise remained dominant for several decades, though here Moore
played a larger role, especially for later generations, because of the vigor with which
he presented the view. He said more about its metaphysics than predecessors such as
Sidgwick had, if only by making explicit its commitment to non-natural properties.
And he defended it more extensively, by placing more weight on the open-question
argument. When Sidgwick had noticed Bentham or Spencer equating goodness with a
natural property such as pleasure, he thought it a minor slip that in charity should be
ignored; Moore thought it vitiated the philosopher's entire system. By so emphasizing
the two elements of non-naturalism its realism and commitment to the autonomy of
ethics Moore helped initiate a sequence of developments in 20
th
-century
metaethics.
The first reaction to non-naturalism, other than simple acceptance, came from
philosophers who accepted the autonomy of ethics but, often under the influence of
logical positivism, rejected its moral realism, holding that there are no facts other than
natural facts and no modes of knowing other than the empirical and the strictly
logical. They therefore developed various versions of non-cognitivism, which hold
that moral judgements are not true or false but express attitudes (emotivism) or issue
something like imperatives (prescriptivism). These views allow for moral
disagreement, since attitudes and imperatives can oppose each other. They also, their
proponents claimed, give a better explanation of the open-question argument, since
they find a distinctive emotive or action-guiding force in moral concepts and
judgements that is not present in non-moral ones. Non-cognitivism can also explain
why morality matters to us as it does. Non-naturalism implies that moral judgements
concern a mysterious type of property, but why should facts about that property be
important to us or influence our behavior? If such judgements express deep-seated
attitudes, the question answers itself.
A still later generation turned against non-cognitivism, in part for flouting the
grammar of moral judgements and our natural response to them, both of which
suggest realism, but also for a reason shared with non-naturalism. When Moore and
the other non-naturalists defended substantive moral judgements, they often said
baldly that the judgements were self-evident, so anyone who denied them was morally
blind. To the later generation this was unacceptably dogmatic, and the failing was
even more plainly present in non-cognitivism, which pictured moral debate as the
mere venting of emotions or issuing of commands. These philosophers therefore
sought an account of ethics that would better allow for rational moral discussion.
While many alternatives were canvassed, one that came to prominence in the late
1950s was a neo-Aristotelian view according to which, if it is true that one ought, say,
to relieve others' pain, this is because doing so will contribute to one's own flourishing
as a human being. Since such flourishing was to be understood in terms of humans'
biological nature, this view at least implicitly challenged the autonomy of ethics.
Many of its partisans also rejected the calculating side of Moore's consequentialism,
which identified right acts by adding up the goods and evils in their effects. Moral
principles, they said, cannot be codified or theorized in that way. And even
philosophers who did accept calculation tended to reject Moore's ideal
consequentialist values as unacceptably extravagant; if right acts promoted goods,
those had to be less contentious and more empirically measurable ones such as
preference-satisfaction. By the 1960s, it seems fair to say, Moore's moral philosophy
was about as dead as it is possible to be. It was still important to read Principia
Ethica, as having started the sequence of developments that led to the current views,
but from the standpoint of those views Moore's approach to ethics was hopelessly
mistaken.
Forty years later the situation is more favorable to Moore. A growing body of
philosophers now defend non-naturalism, some claiming to do so with less ontological
extravagance than Moore, but all embracing some account of moral truth that
separates it from scientific truth. In normative ethics, too, there is increasing sympathy
for accounts of the good with an ideal or perfectionist content, and admiration for
particular features of Moore's view, such as his valuing of personal love and his
principle of organic unities. Even Moore's style of defending moral claims, which so
outraged philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s, is in effect the standard style of
contemporary normative ethics, though it tends to take a more complex and
circumspect form. Whereas Moore sometimes claimed that certain moral propositions
are self-evident when considered on their own, philosophers today are more likely to
give coherence arguments, appealing to intuitive judgements at different levels of
generality and if possible on different topics, to arrive at an overall position with
intuitive support at many points. But the basis of this more complex procedure, which
Moore also sometimes used, is essentially the same appeal to intuitive moral
judgements. And it is possible to see it as, not arrogant, but philosophically modest.
Moore and his contemporaries from Sidgwick in the 1870s to Ross in the 1930s
believed that if one asked, for example, why we should relieve others' pain, there was
no answer: we simply should. The duty to promote others' good was an underivative
one for which no deeper explanation could be given and which could only be
recognized by intuition. In taking this stance they assumed that the more grandiose
justifications offered by philosophers, such as the neo-Aristotelian argument that
benefitting others is necessary for one's own flourishing, or the Kantian argument that
maxims contrary to it cannot be universalized, can never succeed. There is no moral
philosopher's stone, or no way of escaping the need for direct moral judgement. Their
moral methodology therefore reflected a modest belief about what philosophy can
accomplish in normative ethics, as against the intuitive reflection that is also
exercised, if less systematically, by non-philosophers. This philosophical modesty
freed them to look more closely at the details of substantive moral views than
philosophers seeking grand justifications usually do and to uncover more of their
underlying structure. In this respect contemporary ethics, which has spent several
decades remaking many of their discoveries, is returning to their path. This is another
way in which, however slowly, contemporary ethics is coming back to Moore.
6. Ethics
Abelard takes the rational core of traditional Christian morality to be
radically intentionalist, based on the following principle: the agent's intention alone
determines the moral worth of an action. His main argument against the moral
relevance of consequences turns on what has been called moral luck. Suppose two
men each have the money and the intention to establish shelters for the poor, but one
is robbed before he can act whereas the second is able to carry out his intention.
According to Abelard, to think that there is a moral difference between them is to hold
that the richer men were the better they could become this is the height of
insanity! Deed-centred morality loses any kind of purchase on what might have been
the case. Likewise, it cannot offer any ground for taking the epistemic status of the
agent into account, although most people would admit that ignorance can morally
exculpate an agent. Abelard makes the point with the following example: imagine the
case of fraternal twins, brother and sister, who are separated at birth and each kept in
complete ignorance of even the existence of the other; as adults they meet, fall in love,
are legally married and have sexual intercourse. Technically this is incest, but Abelard
finds no fault in either to lay blame.
Abelard concludes that in themselves deeds are morally indifferent. The proper
subject of moral evaluation is the agent, via his or her intentions. It might be objected
that the performance or nonperformance of the deed could affect the agent's feelings,
which in turn may affect his or her intentions, so that deeds thereby have moral
relevance (at least indirectly). Abelard denies it:
For example, if someone forces a monk to lie bound in chains between two women,
and by the softness of the bed and the touch of the women beside him he is brought to
pleasure (but not to consent), who may presume to call this pleasure, which nature
makes necessary, a fault?
We are so constructed that the feeling of pleasure is inevitable in certain situations:
sexual intercourse, eating delicious food, and the like. If sexual pleasure in marriage is
not sinful, then the pleasure itself, inside or outside of marriage, is not sinful; if it is
sinful, then marriage cannot sanctify itand if the conclusion were drawn that such
acts should be performed wholly without pleasure, then Abelard declares they cannot
be done at all, and it was unreasonable (of God) to permit them only in a way in
which they cannot be performed.
On the positive side, Abelard argues that unless intentions are the key ingredient in
assessing moral value it is hard to see why coercion, in which one is forced to do
something against his or her will, should exculpate the agent; likewise for
ignorancethough Abelard points out that the important moral notion is not simply
ignorance but strictly speaking negligence. Abelard takes an extreme case to make his
point. He argues that the crucifiers of Christ were not evil in crucifying Jesus. (This
example, and others like it, got Abelard into trouble with the authorities, and it isn't
hard to see why.) Their ignorance of Christ's divine nature didn't by itself make them
evil; neither did their acting on their (false and mistaken) beliefs, in crucifying Christ.
Their non-negligent ignorance removes blame from their actions. Indeed, Abelard
argues that they would have sinned had they thought crucifying Christ was required
and did not crucify Christ: regardless of the facts of the case, failing to abide by one's
conscience in moral action renders the agent blameworthy.
There are two obvious objections to Abelard's intentionalism. First, how is it possible
to commit evil voluntarily? Second, since intentions are not accessible to anyone other
than the agent, doesn't Abelard's view entail that it is impossible to make ethical
judgements?
With regard to the first objection, Abelard has a twofold answer. First, it is clear that
we often want to perform the deed and at the same time do not want to suffer the
punishment. A man wants to have sexual intercourse with a woman, but not to commit
adultery; he would prefer it if she were unmarried. Second, it is clear that we
sometimes want what we by no means want to want: our bodies react with pleasure
and desire independently of our wills. If we act on such desires, then our action is
done of will, as Abelard calls it, though not voluntarily. There is nothing evil in
desire: there is only evil in acting on desire, and this is compatible with having
contrary desires.
With regard to the second objection, Abelard grants that other humans cannot know
the agent's intentionsGod, of course, does have access to internal mental states, and
so there can be a Final Judgement. However, Abelard does not take ethical judgement
to pose a problem. God is the only one with a right to pass judgement. Yet this fact
doesn't prevent us from enforcing canons of human justice, because, Abelard holds,
human justice has primarily an exemplary and deterrent function. In fact, Abelard
argues, it can even be just to punish an agent we strongly believe had no evil
intention. He cites two cases. First, a woman accidentally smothers her baby while
trying to keep it warm at night, and is overcome with grief. Abelard maintains that we
should punish her for the beneficial example her punishment may have on others: it
may make other poor mothers more careful not to accidentally smother their babies
while trying to keep them warm. Second, a judge may have excellent (but legally
impermissible) evidence that a witness is perjuring himself; since he cannot show that
the witness is lying, the judge is forced to rule on the basis of the witness's testimony
that the accused, whom he believes to be innocent, is guilty. Human justice may with
propriety ignore questions of intention. Since there is divine justice, ethical notions
are not an idle wheelnor should they be, even on Abelard's understanding of human
justice, since they are the means by which we determine which intentions to promote
or discourage when we punish people as examples or in order to deter others.
There is a sense, then, in which the only certifiable sin is acting against one's
conscience, unless one is morally negligent. Yet if we cannot look to the intrinsic
value of the deeds or their consequences, how do we determine which acts are
permissible or obligatory? Unless conscience has a reliable guide, Abelard's position
seems to open the floodgates to well-meaning subjectivism.
Abelard solves the problem by taking obedience to God's willthe hallmark of
morally correct behaviour, and itself an instance of natural lawto be a matter of the
agent's intention conforming to a purely formal criterion, namely the Golden Rule
(Do to others as you would be done to). This criterion can be discovered by reason
alone, without any special revelation or religious belief, and is sufficient to ensure the
rightness of the agent's intention. But the resolution of this problem immediately leads
to another problem. Even if we grant Abelard his naturalistic ethics, why should an
agent care if his or her intentions conform to the Golden Rule? In short, even if
Abelard were right about morality, why be moral?
Abelard's answer is that our happinessto which no one is indifferentis linked to
virtue, that is, to habitual morally correct behaviour. Indeed, Abelard's project in
the Collationes is to argue that reason can prove that a merely naturalistic ethics is
insufficient, and that an agent's happiness is necessarily bound up with accepting the
principles of traditional Christian belief, including the belief in God and an Afterlife.
In particular, he argues that the Afterlife is a condition to which we ought to aspire,
that it is a moral improvement even on the life of virtue in this world, and that
recognizing this is constitutive of wanting to do what God wants, that is, to live
according to the Golden Rule, which guarantees as much as anything can (pending
divine grace) our long-term postmortem happiness.
The Philosopher first argues with the Jew, who espouses a strict observance moral
theory, namely obedience to the Mosaic Law. One of the arguments the Jew offers is
the Slave's Wager (apparently the earliest-known version of Pascal's Wager). Imagine
that a Slave is told one morning by someone he doesn't know whether to trust that his
powerful and irritable Master, who is away for the day, has left instructions about
what to do in his absence. The Slave can follow the instructions or not. He reasons
that if the Master indeed left the instructions, then by following them he will be
rewarded and by not following them he will be severely punished, whereas if the
Master did not leave the instructions he would not be punished for following them,
though he might be lightly punished for not following them. (This conforms to the
standard payoff matrix for Pascal's Wager.) That is the position the Jew finds himself
in: God has apparently demanded unconditional obedience to the Mosaic Law, the
instructions left behind. The Philosopher argues that the Jew may have other choices
of action and, in any event, that there are rational grounds for thinking that ethics is
not a matter of action in conformity to law but a matter of the agent's intentions, as we
have seen above.
The Philosopher then argues with the Christian. He initially maintains that virtue
entails happiness, and hence there is no need of an Afterlife since a virtuous person
remains in the same condition whether dead or alive. The Christian, however, reasons
that the Afterlife is better, since in addition to the benefits conferred by living
virtuously, the agent's will is no longer impeded by circumstances. In the Afterlife we
are no longer subject to the body, for instance, and hence are not bound by physical
necessities such as food, shelter, clothing, and the like. The agent can therefore be as
purely happy as life in accordance with virtue could permit, when no external
circumstances could affect the agent's actions. The Philosopher grants that the
Afterlife so understood is a clear improvement even on the virtuous life in this world,
and joins with the Christian in a cooperative endeavour to define the nature of the
virtues and the Supreme Good. Virtue is its own reward, and in the Afterlife nothing
prevents us from rewarding ourselves with virtue to the fullest extent possible.
7. Theology
Abelard held that reasoning has a limited role to play in matters of faith. That he gave
reasoning a role at all brought him into conflict with those we now call anti-
dialecticians, including his fellow abbot Bernard of Clairvaux. That the role he gave
it is limited brought him into conflict with those he called pseudo-dialecticians,
including his former teacher Roscelin.
Bernard of Clairvaux and other anti-dialecticians seem to have thought that the
meaning of a proposition of the faith, to the extent that it can be grasped, is plain;
beyond that plain meaning, there is nothing we can grasp at all, in which case reason
is clearly no help. That is, the anti-dialecticians were semantic realists about the
(plain) meaning of (religious) sentences. Hence their impatience with Abelard, who
seemed not only bent on obfuscating the plain meaning of propositions of the faith,
which is bad enough, but to do so by reasoning, which has no place either in grasping
the plain meaning (since the very plainness of plain meaning consists in its being
grasped immediately without reasoning) or in reaching some more profound
understanding (since only the plain meaning is open to us at all).
Abelard has no patience for the semantic realism that underlies the sophisticated anti-
dialectical position. Rather than argue against it explicitly, he tries to undermine it.
From his commentaries on scripture and dogma to his works of speculative theology,
Abelard is first and foremost concerned to show how religious claims can be
understood, and in particular how the application of dialectical methods can clarify
and illuminate propositions of the faith. Furthermore, he rejects the claim that there is
a plain meaning to be grasped. Outlining his method in the Prologue to his Sic et non,
Abelard describes how he initially raises a question, e.g. whether priests are required
to be celibate, and then arranges citations from scriptural and patristic authorities that
at least seem to answer the question directly into positive and negative responses.
(Abelard offers advice in the Prologue for resolving the apparent contradictions
among the authorities using a variety of techniques: see whether the words are used in
the same sense on both sides; draw relevant distinctions to resolve the issue; look at
the context of the citation; make sure that an author is speaking in his own voice
rather than merely reporting or paraphrasing someone else's position; and so on.) Now
each authority Abelard cites seems to speak clearly and unambiguously either for a
positive answer to a given question or for a negative one. If ever there were cases of
plain meaning, Abelard seems to have found them in authorities, on opposing sides of
controversial issues. His advice in the Prologue amounts to saying that sentences that
seem to be perfect exemplars of plain meaning in fact have to be carefully scrutinized
to see just what their meaning is. Yet that is just to say that they do not have plain
meaning at all; we have to use reason to uncover their meaning. Hence the anti-
dialecticians don't have a case.
There is a far more serious threat to the proper use of reason in religion, Abelard
thinks (Theologia christiana 3.20):
Those who claim to be dialecticians are usually led more easily to [heresy] the more
they hold themselves to be well-equipped with reasons, and, to that extent more
secure, they presume to attack or defend any position the more freely. Their arrogance
is so great that they think there isn't anything that can't be understood and explained
by their petty little lines of reasoning. Holding all authorities in contempt, they glory
in believing only themselvesfor those who accept only what their reason persuades
them of, surely answer to themselves alone, as if they had eyes that were unacquainted
with darkness.
Such pseudo-dialecticians take reason to be the final arbiter of all claims, including
claims about matters of faith. More exactly, Abelard charges them with holding that
(a) everything can be explained by human reason; (b) we should only accept what
reason persuades us of; (c) appeals to authority have no rational persuasive force. Real
dialecticians, he maintains, reject (a)(c), recognizing that human reason has limits,
and that some important truths may lie outside those limits but not beyond belief;
which claims about matters of faith we should accept depends on both the epistemic
reliability of their sources (the authorities) and their consonance with reason to the
extent they can be investigated.
Abelard's arguments for rejecting (a)(c) are sophisticated and subtle. For the claim
that reason may be fruitfully applied to a particular article of faith, Abelard offers a
particular case study in his own writings. The bulk of Abelard's work on theology is
devoted to his dialectical investigation of the Trinity. He elaborates an original theory
of identity to address issues surrounding the Trinity, one that has wider applicability
in metaphysics. The upshot of his enquiries is that belief in the Trinity is rationally
justifiable since as far as reason can take us we find that the doctrine makes senseat
least, once the tools of dialectic have been properly employed.
The traditional account of identity, derived from Boethius, holds that things may be
either generically, specifically, or numerically the same or different. Abelard accepts
this account but finds it not sufficiently fine-grained to deal with the Trinity. The core
of his theory of identity, as presented in his Theologia christiana, consists in four
additional modes of identity: (1) essential sameness and difference; (2) numerical
sameness and difference, which Abelard ties closely to essential sameness and
difference, allowing a more fine-grained distinction than Boethius could allow; (3)
sameness and difference in definition; (4) sameness and difference in property (in
proprietate). Roughly, Abelard's account of essential and numerical sameness is
intended to improve upon the identity-conditions for things in the world given by the
traditional account; his account of sameness in definition is meant to supply identity-
conditions for the features of things; and his account of sameness in property opens up
the possibility of there being different identity-conditions for a single thing having
several distinct features.
Abelard holds that two things are the same in essence when they are numerically the
same concrete thing (essentia), and essentially different otherwise. The Morning Star
is essentially the same as the Evening Star, for instance, since each is the selfsame
planet Venus. Again, the formal elements that constitute a concrete thing are
essentially the same as one another and essentially the same as the concrete thing of
which they are the formal constituents: Socrates is his essence (Socrates is what it is
to be Socrates). The corresponding general thesis does not hold for parts, however.
Abelard maintains that the part is essentially different from the integral whole of
which it is a part, reasoning that a given part is completely contained, along with other
parts, in the whole, and so is less than the quantity of the whole.
Numerical difference does not map precisely onto essential difference. The failure of
numerical sameness may be due to one of two causes. First, objects are not
numerically the same when one has a part that the other does not have, in which case
the objects are essentially different as well. Second, objects are numerically different
when neither has a part belonging to the other. Numerical difference thus entails the
failure of numerical sameness, but not conversely: a part is not numerically the same
as its whole, but it is not numerically different from its whole. Thus one thing is
essentially different from another when either they have only a part in common, in
which case they are not numerically the same; or they have no parts in common, in
which case they are numerically different as well as not numerically the same. Since
things may be neither numerically the same nor numerically different, the question
How many things are there? is ill-formed as it stands and must be made more
precise, a fact Abelard exploits in his discussion of the Trinity.
Essential and numerical sameness and difference apply directly to things in the world;
they are extensional forms of identity. By contrast, sameness and difference in
definition is roughly analogous to modern theories of the identity of properties.
Abelard holds that things are the same in definition when what it is to be one requires
that it be the other, and conversely; otherwise they differ in definition.
Finally, things are the same in property when they specify features that characterize
one another. Abelard offers an example to clarify this notion. A cube of marble
exemplifies both whiteness and hardness; what is white is essentially the same as what
is hard, since they are numerically the same concrete thing, namely the marble cube;
yet the whiteness and the hardness in the marble cube clearly differ in definitionbut
even so, what is white is characterized by hardness (the white thing is hard), and
conversely what is hard is characterized by whiteness (the hard thing is white). The
properties of whiteness and hardness are mixed since, despite their being different in
definition, each applies to the selfsame concrete thing (namely the marble cube) as
such and also as it is characterized by the other.
The interesting case is where something has properties that remain so completely
unmixed that the items they characterize are different in property. Consider a form-
matter composite in relation to its matter. The matter out of which a form-matter
composite is made is essentially the same as the composite, since each is the entire
material composite itself. Yet despite their essential sameness, they are not identical;
the matter is not the composite, nor conversely. The matter is not the composite, for
the composite comes to be out of the matter, but the matter does not come to be out of
itself. The composite is not the matter, since nothing is in any way a constitutive part
of or naturally prior to itself. Instead, the matter is prior to the composite since it has
the property priority with respect to the composite, whereas the composite is posterior
to its matter since it has the property posteriority with respect to its matter. Now
despite being essentially the same, the matter is not characterized by posteriority,
unlike the composite, and the composite is not characterized by priority, unlike the
matter. Hence the matter and composite are different in property; the
properties priority and posteriority are unmixedthey differ in property.
Now for the payoff. Abelard deploys his theory of identity to shed light on the Trinity
as follows. The three Persons are essentially the same as one another, since they are
all the same concrete thing (namely God). They differ from one another in definition,
since what it is to be the Father is not the same as what it is to be the Son or what it is
to be the Holy Spirit. The three Persons are numerically different from one another,
for otherwise they would not be three, but they are not numerically different from
God: if they were there would be three gods, not one. Moreover, each Person has
properties that uniquely apply to itunbegotten to the Father, begotten to the Son,
and proceeding to the Holy Spiritas well as properties that are distinctive of it, such
as power for the Father, wisdom for the Son, and goodness for the Holy Spirit. The
unique properties are unmixed in Abelard's technical sense, for the Persons differ
from one another in their unique properties, and such properties do not apply to God;
the distinctive properties are mixed, though, in that God is characterized by each (the
powerful God is the wise God is the good God). Further than that, Abelard holds,
human reason cannot go; but reason validates the analysis (strictly speaking only a
likeness or analogy) as far as it can go.