ABSTRACT
The brief and exclusive catalogue will give no cheer to educators seeking assurance that knowledge is intrinsically good, and Moore does go on to say that knowledge has 'little or no value by itself' though it is a constituent of the highest goods. Pieces of knowledge have intrinsic worth in isolation: but they gain worth as parts of wider bodies of knowledge, contributing to a pattern of mutually explanatory and illuminating facts. Knowledge gains worth from the cognitive richness of its objects. Knowledge gains worth by being about something that itself has worth. Thus knowledge about a particular work of art may rate low on because of that work's stark simplicity but score highly on because of its aesthetic merit. As for actually using these criteria to grade the comparative worths of different items or areas of knowledge, he finds the task prohibitively complex–made especially so by the shifting state of human knowledge.
