ABSTRACT
A charitable reading of principles 1 and 2 requires putting G. E. Moore’s conflation of concepts and properties in Principia at work to his advantage by interpreting the analysis at issue in them as involving bans on certain semantical analyses of concepts, rather than on metaphysical analyses of properties. Moore thought of its moral component as concerning the performance of one’s duty. Since Duty itself is a complex concept, analyzable in consequentialist terms as the act or omission that in a circumstance maximizes Goodness, Aristotle’s virtues have only “external rightness” in the sense that they are not ultimate ends. Moore was less tentative about charging John Stuart Mill with the commission of the naturalistic fallacy. Moore would agree that evolution “has very little” to say to ethics when it comes to offering an adequate criterion of right conduct or helping to solve any major disagreement among the doctrines of philosophical ethics.
