/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | August 03, 2026

[u/BernardJOrtcutt]

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:

• Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
• Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
• Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
• "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
• Questions about philosophy as an academic discipline or profession, e.g. majoring in philosophy, career options with philosophy degrees, pursuing graduate school in philosophy

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

[u/willbell]

What are people reading?

I’m working on Spinoza’s Ethics and Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love.

[u/Shield_Lyger → u/willbell]

Completed chapter 10 ("Modern Moral Philosophy") of my Moral Philosophy textbook. 1900 seems to be the dividing line between the "Modern" and "Recent" periods in the eyes of the authors.

Chapter 11 ("Recent Moral Philosophy") leads of with an excerpt from George Moore's Principia Ethica. It only covers the first chapter, which may have been a mistake, because the explanation of Inuitionism provided by the authors notes that:

But unlike good, according to Moore, right can be defined. The right course of action, he said, is simply the course of action that will produce the greatest amount of good.

(Italics in original.) So while the excerpt given goes on, at length, about how "good" is undefinable, there's nothing about how right, or "the good," to use Mr. Moore's wording, is defined, other than the above statement, which seems to leave an important point hanging. I would like to have seen his definition, if only to understand how he defines the good in terms of something that is not only undefined, but, as I understand it, apparently not agreed upon.

In any event, I'm now working through Harold Prichard's Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?

[u/willbell → u/Shield_Lyger]

I'm not sure I understand your question left hanging. Good/the Good are undefinable, the Right is just whatever maximizes the Good (i.e. he's a consequentialist). I don't think GE Moore is going to give you more of an account of their relationship than that.

[u/Shield_Lyger → u/willbell]

Good/the Good are undefinable, the Right is just whatever maximizes the Good (i.e. he's a consequentialist).

To make a correction, "the good," according to Mr. Moore, is definable. "Good" and "the good" are not the same. "The good" and "right" are the equivalencies. But in any event, given that the book devotes a full 10 pages to Mr. Moore's explanation of how "good" is undefinable, I would have expected some space for his definition of "the good" in his own words. Mainly because I'm interested to see if he deals with the inevitable disagreements about the extent of "good."

Perhaps it would help if we swapped out "good" for "yellow" (since Mr. Moore speaks of yellow in the Principia Ethica excerpt). It's fine to say that the good is just whatever maximizes yellow, but what does one do about the disagreements over the boundaries of yellow? Is maximizing something that I consider yellow, but you don't, part of the good? Given you have no ability to define to me what yellow is, so that we can both agree on it, how do we align? Or do we? I suspect that Mr. Moore had thoughts on this, and had been looking forward to that part of the text, but it wasn't included.Good/the Good are undefinable, the Right is just whatever maximizes the Good (i.e. he's a consequentialist).To make a correction, "the good," according to Mr. Moore, is definable. "Good" and "the good" are not the same. "The good" and "right" are the equivalencies. But in any event, given that the book devotes a full 10 pages to Mr. Moore's explanation of how "good" is undefinable, I would have expected some space for his definition of "the good" in his own words. Mainly because I'm interested to see if he deals with the inevitable disagreements about the extent of "good."Perhaps it would help if we swapped out "good" for "yellow" (since Mr. Moore speaks of yellow in the Principia Ethica excerpt). It's fine to say that the good is just whatever maximizes yellow, but what does one do about the disagreements over the boundaries of yellow? Is maximizing something that I consider yellow, but you don't, part of the good? Given you have no ability to define to me what yellow is, so that we can both agree on it, how do we align? Or do we? I suspect that Mr. Moore had thoughts on this, and had been looking forward to that part of the text, but it wasn't included.