On Moore – Thomas Baldwin in TLS:

‘Moore (who much disliked his forenames “George Edward”, and was always known as plain “Moore”) was born in Upper Norwood (south-east London) in 1873. His parents were Baptists, and there was a strong religious atmosphere at home which prompted him, as a young teenager, to feel that it was his duty to engage in evangelical activity despite a deep reluctance to do so. But a couple of years later Moore shed his religious beliefs and pronounced himself a “complete Agnostic”.
He was educated at Dulwich College, where he studied Latin and Greek, and in 1892 he won a scholarship to study Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Here his life changed: during his first year at Cambridge, his new friends and acquaintances introduced him to philosophical discussion and debate, and Moore was sufficiently excited and engaged by these discussions to add philosophy to his studies for the next two years. Bertrand Russell later described him: “In my third year I met G. E. Moore, who was then a freshman, and for some years he fulfilled my ideal of genius. He was in those days beautiful and slim, with a look almost of inspiration as deeply passionate as Spinoza’s”. Moore was invited to join the Apostles, a group of students and young academics devoted to the discussion of short philosophical papers, typically couched in a provocative idiom – Moore’s papers have titles such as “Are we hypocrites?” and “What is it to be wicked?”. After a few years, Moore became the leading figure in this group, some of whose younger members (many of whom would go on to participate in the Bloomsbury Set, such as Leonard Woolf, Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and John Maynard Keynes) became close friends.’

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‘Many of Moore’s arguments are altogether too brisk to do justice to the positions he opposed, but to his young contemporaries Moore’s new realist approach seemed to provide a liberation from the confusing fog of idealist philosophy. Russell, in particular, took his lead at this time from Moore – writing that “On fundamental questions of philosophy, my position, in all its chief features, is derived from G. E. Moore”. Indeed in his 1958 obituary notice for Moore, Russell still emphasized the importance of Moore’s early philosophy: “It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps. I think that the first published account of the new philosophy was Moore’s article in Mindon ‘The Nature of Judgment’ … I still think that this article gave conclusive proof of philosophical genius”.
Despite Russell’s comments, the most significant work Moore completed during this period was Principia Ethica (1903), his contribution to ethical theory. Moore here develops his early criticisms of Kant by arguing that just as rationalist definitions of the good are mistaken, so too are “naturalistic” definitions. These include definitions of the good in terms of pleasure, which, he claims, contain a fallacy (“the naturalistic fallacy”), whereby a substantive ethical principle – such as the claim that pleasure is the fundamental good – is treated as if it were true by definition. In fact, one can easily see that even if it is true, it is a contestable claim whose truth is an “open question”. Whether there really is a fallacy here is disputable – much depends on what a definition involves – but there is no doubt that Moore did here open up an important debate in ethical theory. As well as claiming that the good is indefinable, Moore also claimed that it is not a natural property at all. His reasoning here was that something’s goodness, (e.g. the goodness of a kind act), is not a simple natural property of the act which by itself makes the act good; instead its goodness is a feature which depends upon other properties of the thing without being definable in terms of them. This claim is widely accepted, but just what this non-specific dependence (or “supervenience”, as it is often now called) amounts to remains a matter of active debate. Putting these two points together, therefore, it is apparent that Moore provided a fresh start to debates concerning the nature of ethical concepts which continue today under the name “metaethics”. Moore’s ideas also proved attractive to the Bloomsbury Set. What appealed to them in his Principia Ethica was not the abstract discussion of the indefinability of good, but rather his account of the greatest goods – “the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects”. He held that “it is only for the sake of these things … that any one can be justified in performing any public or private duty”. As Keynes remarked later, this judgement is ignorant and elitist – it ignores the mundane values that are central to the demands of justice. But what one can say in defence of the Set’s enthusiasm for it (as expressed, for example, by Clive Bell in Civilisation) is that Moore’s “ideal” (as he himself called it) is an important personal ideal, and as such his articulation of it helped to contribute both to the Bloomsbury Set’s self-confidence and to the broader recognition of the value of art in British culture.’

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‘So while Moore was not an “ordinary language philosopher” in the manner of J. L. Austin, he did begin the task of elucidating the complex implications of ordinary language and its use – a task of enduring importance in contemporary philosophy. One nice example concerns utterances such as “It is raining, but I do not believe that it is”; Moore observed that although such an utterance is not self-contradictory (for it can be true both that it is raining and that I do not believe that it is) it is an absurd thing to say. So the challenge is to explain just what makes the utterance absurd – a challenge which remains a matter of active debate today. Wittgenstein called this puzzle “Moore’s Paradox” and wrote to Moore that it is an important discovery which shows that “logic isn’t as simple as logicians think it is”.
Moore and Wittgenstein had known each other since 1912; looking back over this long acquaintance Moore commented in 1942 that he felt that Wittgenstein “was much cleverer at philosophy than I was … but also more profound”. During the early 1930s, with Wittgenstein’s approval, Moore attended many of Wittgenstein’s lectures and took detailed notes. This relationship made it easy for the two of them to meet for philosophical discussions, and these discussions, often twice a week, became a central and enduring feature of their relationship. Despite Wittgenstein’s sometimes critical remarks to his friends about Moore, it is a striking fact that Moore was his preferred philosophical interlocutor. Their philosophical relationship is best exemplified by Wittgenstein’s response to Moore’s discussions of “common sense”, as represented by Moore’s “Defence of Common Sense” (1925) and his “Proof of an External World” (1939). These famous papers include passages which are unlike anything to be found elsewhere in twentieth-century philosophical discussion: Moore’s “defence” begins with a list of common sense truisms concerning one’s presence in the world whose truth he says we all know for certain. And his “proof” (which is the text of a lecture) ends with him holding up his hands to his audience and arguing that by displaying his hands in this way he was giving a “conclusive proof” of their existence and thereby of the existence of an external world. These passages are an important part of Moore’s enduring legacy: as Wittgenstein recognized, Moore is pointing to familiar features of our understanding of ourselves, concerning things that we take to be certain and the ways in which we normally prove something that is straightforward. But, Wittgenstein also observed, Moore is not so good at elucidating what is mistaken about the familiar sceptical challenges to common sense. In his notes On CertaintyWittgenstein comments: “Moore’s mistake lies in this – countering the assertion that one cannot know that, by saying ‘I do know it’”.

Read the complete article here.

Three things struck me. The claim that goodness and good are probably indefinable, interesting, especially in times when so many people don’t allow themselves to challenge their own convictions about what is good and what is not.
Most definitions of good are varieties on proclamations found in the bible or in Aristotle, important are always the exceptions.
Most people who hold dear beliefs about what is good and what is not are more than willing to exclude certain people from their convictions about what is good, which might be called moral convictions.
The question remains: under what circumstances are you willing to temporarily shut off your belief system about what is good? Who is outside the realm of this definition anyhow? I do good, but for you I make an exception.

It can rain and you cannot believe that it rains at the same time and that is an absurdity, but not necessarily untrue. I would say this is what is the conspiracy theory is all about. It rains but I don’t believe that it rains. The utterance is absurd but true as long as you keep in mind that it’s you who is not believing in the fact that it rains.
The problem in our contemporary culture is that more absurd things are being said than things that can be labeled non-absurd.

Common sense is that we accept our existence without feeling the need to prove our intuition. We don’t have to wave with our hands to show that we exist. There is no better confirmation of your own existence than pain, pleasure is for some reasons a less convincing confirmation.