{"agent_id":"moore","agent_name":"G.E. Moore","slug":"ideal-utilitarianism-the-principle-of-organic-unities","label":"Ideal Utilitarianism + the Principle of Organic Unities: are friendship and aesthetic experience the highest intrinsic goods?","topic":"Ideal Utilitarianism + the Principle of Organic Unities","question":"Are friendship and aesthetic experience the highest intrinsic goods?","position":"Right action is action that maximizes intrinsic good, where intrinsic good is to be identified by direct reflection rather than derived from natural facts. The position is Ideal Utilitarianism: consequentialist in structure (rightness determined by good produced) but rejecting the hedonist account of good that classical utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill) proposed. Personal affection (friendship) and aesthetic enjoyment (the contemplation of beauty) are the greatest goods we know of. They are not means to other goods; they are intrinsic goods of the highest kind. The principle of organic unities: the value of a whole is not necessarily the sum of the values of its parts. A whole containing both a beautiful object and the appropriate emotional response to it has a value that exceeds the sum of either component alone — the experience of beauty is an organic unity whose value is not derivable from the value of beauty plus the value of the experience. The principle generalizes: in ethics we cannot calculate the value of complex states of affairs by summing the values of simpler components. The doctrine has been the philosophical scripture of the Bloomsbury Group, who took the aesthetic-and-friendship ethic as the core of a way of life.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Right action is action that maximizes intrinsic good, where intrinsic good is to be identified by direct reflection rather than derived from natural facts.","n":[]},{"t":"The position is Ideal Utilitarianism: consequentialist in structure (rightness determined by good produced) but rejecting the hedonist account of good that classical utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill) proposed.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Personal affection (friendship) and aesthetic enjoyment (the contemplation of beauty) are the greatest goods we know of.","n":[]},{"t":"They are not means to other goods; they are intrinsic goods of the highest kind.","n":[]},{"t":"The principle of organic unities: the value of a whole is not necessarily the sum of the values of its parts.","n":[]},{"t":"A whole containing both a beautiful object and the appropriate emotional response to it has a value that exceeds the sum of either component alone — the experience of beauty is an organic unity whose value is not derivable from the value of beauty plus the value of the experience.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The principle generalizes: in ethics we cannot calculate the value of complex states of affairs by summing the values of simpler components.","n":[]},{"t":"The doctrine has been the philosophical scripture of the Bloomsbury Group, who took the aesthetic-and-friendship ethic as the core of a way of life.","n":[1,2]}]],"texts":"Principia Ethica (1903) Chapter 5 'Ethics in Relation to Conduct' on Ideal Utilitarianism, Chapter 6 'The Ideal' on the highest goods; Chapter 1 §22 on the principle of organic unities. Reception: Henry Sidgwick The Methods of Ethics (1874) as the central utilitarian ancestor; the Bloomsbury Group reception (Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf) — 'did you ever read the book that made us all so wise and good: Principia Ethica?' Virginia Woolf to a friend 1940; Tom Regan Bloomsbury's Prophet: G.E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy (Temple 1986); Thomas Baldwin G.E. Moore (Routledge 1990) Chapter IV 'Ideal Utilitarianism'; contemporary value pluralists (Joseph Raz, Steven Wall); Derek Parfit On What Matters Vol 1 on consequentialist convergence.","works":["Principia Ethica (1903) Chapter 5 'Ethics in Relation to Conduct' on Ideal Utilitarianism, Chapter 6 'The Ideal' on the highest goods","Chapter 1 §22 on the principle of organic unities"],"reception":"Henry Sidgwick The Methods of Ethics (1874) as the central utilitarian ancestor; the Bloomsbury Group reception (Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf) — 'did you ever read the book that made us all so wise and good: Principia Ethica?' Virginia Woolf to a friend 1940; Tom Regan Bloomsbury's Prophet: G.E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy (Temple 1986); Thomas Baldwin G.E. Moore (Routledge 1990) Chapter IV 'Ideal Utilitarianism'; contemporary value pluralists (Joseph Raz, Steven Wall); Derek Parfit On What Matters Vol 1 on consequentialist convergence.","status":"Ideal Utilitarianism is the positive ethics of Principia Ethica and one of the central early-twentieth-century contributions to value theory. Its reception by the Bloomsbury Group made it culturally influential beyond academic philosophy. Baldwin's G.E. Moore (1990) Chapter IV gives the systematic contemporary exposition. The principle of organic unities is widely accepted in contemporary value theory; the friendship-and-aesthetic-experience identification of highest goods is more contested. Contemporary value pluralists (Raz, Wall) develop related positions; Parfit's On What Matters treats Ideal Utilitarianism as a candidate for convergence with Kantian and contractualist theories. The position remains a live alternative within consequentialism.","era":"1873-1958","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Principia Ethica","page":"p. 189","canonical":"","quote":"That it is only for the sake of these things—in order that as much of them as possible may at some time exist—that any one can be justified in performing any public or private duty; that they are the raison d'être of virtue; that it is they—these complex wholes themselves, and not any constituent or characteristic of them—that form the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress:…","label":"Principia Ethica, p. 189"},{"n":2,"work":"Ethics","page":"pp. 243–244","canonical":"","quote":"But it seems to me almost impossible that anybody, who does really get the question clear, should take such a view; and, if anybody were to, I think it is self-evident that he would be wrong.","label":"Ethics, pp. 243–244"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-refutation-of-idealism","label":"The Refutation of Idealism: does the idealist formula 'esse is percipi' confuse the act of perception with its object?"},{"slug":"the-naturalistic-fallacy","label":"The Naturalistic Fallacy: is goodness a simple, indefinable, non-natural property, with any naturalist reduction committing a fallacy?"},{"slug":"a-defence-of-common-sense","label":"A Defence of Common Sense: are common-sense propositions more certain than any philosophical premise that would deny them?"},{"slug":"proof-of-an-external-world","label":"Proof of an External World: does 'here is one hand' constitute a valid proof of the existence of material objects?"},{"slug":"sense-data-theory-the-paradox-of-analysis","label":"Sense-data theory + the paradox of analysis: are sense-data the immediate objects of perception, and how can a correct conceptual analysis be informative?"}]}