3) The Enigma of Chapter VI

Towards the end of the book, an enigmatic passage arrests our attention. Moore defines good as an objective predicate of value and then as an unanalysable predicate of value: It appears, at first sight, to be a strange coincidence, that there should be two different objective predicates of value, good and beautiful, which are nevertheless so related to one another that whatever is beautiful is also good.
But, if our definition be correct, the strangeness disappears; since it leaves only one unanalyzable predicate of value, namely good, while beautiful, though not identical with, is to be defined by reference to this, being thus, at the same time, different from and necessarily connected with it ¹.

What gives us pause here is that Moore seems, for the first time, to be attending to the problem of the relationship between the concepts of 'value' and 'good'. He contents himself with saying that one is a predicate of the other—which is of little help. For to be a predicate of something is simply to be linked to it by the verb 'to be'; and Moore gives us no indication of the nature of that link. As before, the link may be synthetic or analytic (in a tautology such as 'a cat is a cat', the predicate 'cat' is linked analytically to the subject 'cat').

Moore is telling us, then, no more than that some relationship holds between value and good. A relationship of synonymy? Of genus to species? He does not say. This is, nonetheless, the first time Moore explicitly addresses the relationship between the concepts of good and value—and we must be content with a non-answer.

4) The Clarifications in the Preface to the Second Edition

The preface to the second edition is of particular interest in that, some years after the publication of his work, Moore subjected it to critical scrutiny, and his remarkable intellectual integrity led him to repudiate several of his own ideas.

For the first time, he defines the relationship between value and good. It is a relationship of genus to species: It may, I think, also be expressed by saying that good is an intrinsic kind of value. When people talk of a thing's possessing 'intrinsic value', part of what they mean is, I think, always that it possesses a kind of value which has this property [being good] ².

To be clear: value is the broader class, which contains within itself, as a genus, the narrower class of good. A useful illustration: good is to value what a Granny Smith is to an apple, or what a waltz is to music.

Moore insists: Good and some other predicates [...] share with it the peculiarity that to ascribe them to things is to ascribe a kind of value to these things [...]. In saying this of Good, I am, therefore, I think, ascribing to it a very peculiar position among predicates ³.

Value is at last beginning to come into view, and Moore turns his attention to it. Yet this reflection ends almost immediately: he establishes only its relation to the concept of good, and never examines it for its own sake. It is remarkable that Moore should devote a hundred pages to defining the good—only to conclude that it cannot be defined—while devoting not a single line to value considered in itself. We learn that good is a kind of value, but this takes us no further, since we still do not know what value is in Moore's own thinking.

Above all, it remains unclear how Moore can maintain that good is a simple notion which, unlike complex notions, contains no other notion within it. For if good is a kind of value, it must contain within itself at least the notion of which it is one of the kinds: that of value. To return to our illustration: what would a Granny Smith be if it did not contain within itself the notion of an apple? What is a waltz if it has nothing to do with music?

This undermines Moore's central thesis, which is the subject of Chapter 1 of the Principia Ethica. Moore, however, appears not to notice. Yet, as though he had anticipated the difficulty, he puts forward an argument that might serve as an interesting line of defence.

He concedes that synonyms for 'good' can be found and substituted for it, and explicitly acknowledges—a significant step forward—that 'value' is one such synonym. He remains firm, however, on the following point: good can never be replaced by a concept that would analyse it. He thus draws a distinction between expressing the meaning of a term through other terms that contain an analysis of that meaning, and expressing the meaning of a term through other terms that do not.

Only the second is possible for 'good', in Moore's view: It may possibly be true that Good is unanalyzable, and therefore cannot be expressed by other words, which contain an analysis of it. But it is certainly not true that it cannot be expressed by other words, at all. [...] In English, we [use] other words or phrases as synonyms for 'good', in this sense. It is obvious, for instance, that the word 'desirable' is sometimes so used; and so also is the phrase 'intrinsically valuable', which I myself use for it later. It is therefore simply false that Good is different from any predicate which we express by words or phrases other than 'good' ⁴.

1. Ibid., chap. 6, §121
2. Ibid., Preface to the second edition, 4
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 3