Russell's moral philosophy (original) (raw)

Russell remains famous as a logician, a metaphysician, and as a philosopher of mathematics, but in his own day he was also notorious for his social and political opinions. He wrote an immense amount about practical ethics-women's rights, marriage and morals, war and peace, and the vexed question of whether socialists should smoke good cigars. (They should.) And unlike present-day practical ethicists (with a few notable exceptions such as Peter Singer) he was widely read by the nonphilosophical public. (See for instance Phillips 2013, which details Russell's successes as a popular moralist in the 1950s.) But though Russell was famous as a moralist and famous as a philosopher, he does not have much of a reputation as a moral philosopher in the more technical sense of the term. Until very recently, his contributions to what is nowadays known as ethical theory-meta-ethics (the nature and justification, if any, of moral judgments) and normative ethics (what makes right acts right etc)were either unknown, disregarded or dismissed as unoriginal. Key texts on the history of twentieth century ethics-Warnock's Ethics Since 1900 (1978), Urmson's The Emotivist Theory of Ethics (1968), Milller's Contemporary Metaethics: an Introduction (2013) and Schroeder's Non-Cognitivism in Ethics (2010)-say nothing, or next to nothing, about Russell, at least in his capacity as a moral philosopher. It is only very recently-in the last fifteen years or so-that ethical theorists have begun to pay attention to him. (See Pigden 2003, 2007 and Potter 2006, though L.W. Aiken 1963 anticipated Potter and Pigden by about forty years.) Perhaps Russell would not have repined, since he professed himself dissatisfied with what he had said "on the philosophical basis of ethics" (RoE: 165/Papers 11: 310). But since he took an equally dim view of what he had read on that topic, the fact that he did not think much of his own 1. The Open Question Argument and its Aftermath: Moore's Influence on Russell 2. Desire, Motivation and the Open Question Argument: Did Russell Influence Moore? 2.1. The Open Question Argument versus the Barren Tautology Argument 2.2. Wrestling With Desire: the Young Russell's Adventures in Meta-Ethics 2.3. Why the Open Question Argument? 3.