Abstract

Principia Ethica set the agenda for analytical metaethics. Moore’s unrelenting focus on fundamentals both brought metaethics into view as a potentially separate area of philosophical inquiry and provided a model of the analytical techniques necessary to pursue it.1 Moore acknowledged that he wasn’t the first to insist on a basic irreducible core of all ethical concepts. Although he seems not to have appreciated the roots of this thought in eighteenth-century intuitionists like Clarke, Balguy, and Price, not to mention sentimentalists like Hutcheson and Hume, Moore gave full marks to Sidgwick. According to Moore, Sidgwick was the “only... ethical writer” to have clearly seen the irreducibility of ethics’ defining notion.2 Nevertheless, twentieth-century meta-.