/lit/ - Literature

>>15247796
he looks like he fucked a women before taking that picture

what is his argument against utilitarianism?

>>15247796
Nah, but Immanuel Kant did several hundred years before this guy was even a twinkle in his daddy's ballsack

>>15247833
/thread ;)

>>15247831
My understanding from reading him:

He argued that all attempts to equate goodness with some natural property fail because we can still meaningfully ask whether that natural property is good.
A meaningful question (ie. an open question) is one that is unanswerable from the words alone. ‘Is marriage fun?’ for example.
A meaningless question (ie. a closed question) is one that is answerable from the words alone. ‘Is a bachelor an unmarried man?’
Moore argued that any time we take a natural property, X, and define it as good, we can still ask the question ‘Is it true that X is good’ meaningfully, which means the natural property is not analytically equivalent to good. The syllogism goes as follows:
1: If X is (analytically equivalent to) good, then the question "Is it true that X is good?" is meaningless.
2: The question "Is it true that X is good?" is not meaningless (i.e. it is an open question).
Conclusion: X is not (analytically equivalent to) good.
This is because if X were defined as good, the question would be closed, since it would be the same as asking ‘Is it true that good is good?’. Since most of us view the question ‘Is it true that pleasure is good’ as an open question, we must be thinking of separate concepts when we think of pleasure and goodness, and therefore pleasure (and all other natural properties) cannot be equivalent to goodness.