“If I am asked, ‘What is good?’ my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter.”
George Edward Moore joined Trinity College, Cambridge, intending to study classics, before being drawn increasingly toward philosophy. Cambridge at the end of the nineteenth century was a fertile place for such a conversion. Moore met Bertrand Russell, joined the Cambridge Apostles, a secretive society of the university’s sharpest young minds, and found himself immersed in arguments about ethics, knowledge, metaphysics, and th purpose of life.
The first half of Principia Ethica is an argument against the attempt to define goodness in terms of some other property. Some philosophers identified ‘good’ with pleasure. Others connected it with desire, happiness, evolutionary development, or what was supposedly “natural” for human beings. Moore believed all of these theories confused two different questions. We can discover that something gives us pleasure and still sensibly ask whether that pleasure is good.
