Daily Inspiration Quote by George Edward Moore

Moore is needling a temptation that feels modern: the urge to treat morality like a user manual. If “all moral laws” are only forecasts of “good effects,” then ethics collapses into a kind of social engineering - do X because it yields Y. The line is written with the clipped confidence of an analytic philosopher, but it carries a polemical edge. Moore is not cheerleading that reduction; he’s setting it up as the sort of plausible-sounding move that quietly evacuates morality of what makes it moral.

The subtext is a warning about smuggling “good” in through the back door. You can describe effects all day - pleasure, stability, reduced suffering, greater flourishing - but the moment you call those effects “good,” you’ve already made a value judgment that can’t be derived from the description alone. That’s Moore’s larger project in Principia Ethica: to resist the “naturalistic fallacy,” the habit of defining moral terms (good, right) in terms of natural or psychological properties (pleasant, desired, approved). His famous “open question” maneuver presses the point: even if an action produces pleasure, it still makes sense to ask, “Yes, but is it good?”

Contextually, Moore is pushing back against late-19th-century utilitarian confidence and the growing prestige of scientific explanation. The quote works because it sounds like a neat, deflationary insight - morality as prediction - while actually exposing a category mistake. It forces the reader to notice how easily “ought” gets disguised as “will,” and how moral language becomes persuasive precisely when it pretends to be merely factual.