there is a plurality of good objects which need have nothing in common. On
the practical side of ethics, Moore retains a Utilitarian theme in that the
goodness of particular actions is to be judged by their consequences. Here too
Moore turns Utilitarian arguments against their prior tradition, emphasizing
the extreme difficulty of knowing the consequences of actions except in the
very short run. Moore’s practical conclusions go against the grain of all the
previous ethicists, favoring neither religious ends, nor moral righteousness, nor
the political activism of the greatest good for the greatest number. Instead he
endorses personal aestheticism, suggesting that the highest goods are the im-
mediate experiences of passionate friendship and the contemplation of the
beautiful.
Most of Moore’s ingredients were available from his own teachers and
compatriots. Already in 1874 Sidgwick had modified Utilitarian ethics, recog-
nizing that moral principles cannot be deduced from descriptive statements.
While continuing to adhere to universal benevolence as a path to maximizing
happiness, Sidgwick concluded that motivation so to act is greatly affected by
moral intuitions and by beliefs in supernatural sanctions. Bradley had already
stressed the imprecision of the Utilitarian calculus; and of course in his system
the good, like everything else, is indefinable. Moore in effect uses Sidgwick and
Bradley against each other, playing up the portions of each that he wants
to reject: Sidgwick’s continuing focus on political and economic calculation,
Bradley’s moralism and his subsumption of ethics in the Idealist Absolute. Nor
are Moore’s practical conclusions novel; he merely defends with a more formal
argument the aestheticism promulgated by Pater and Wilde in the 1880s and
1890s, adding a somewhat more explicit endorsement of the cult of homosex-
ual affairs which had become popular at the time of Lytton Strachey. If
Principia Ethica made an immediate sensation, it was less because of its
originality than because it symbolized a shift in the old lineup of intellectual
oppositions.
Most of the creative developments in British philosophy, in all its branches,
were concentrated in this period within a single network, centered at Trinity
and King’s colleges, Cambridge (see Figure 13.2 above).The group structure of
creativity is familiar from other periods; in this case we have a wealth of
information which enables us to study how such a group was formed and the
dynamics of emotional energy that drove it.
Leading intellectuals are more elaborately connected by family linkages in
the generations from 1840 to 1920 than at virtually any other time in history:
there is an intermarrying network that links Russell, Moore, Keynes, Virginia
Woolf, and the Bloomsbury circle to the Thackerays, Macaulays, Darwins,
Maitlands, Trevelyans, Balfours, and many others. They are genuine cousins,
in-laws, and nephews, not merely the metaphorical kinfolk produced by mas-
ter-pupil lineages.^30
732 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths