G.E. Moore and the humanism of Bloomsbury

Today, 4 November, is the 153rd birthday of the philosopher G.E. Moore. You may not know his name, but you probably know the wide circle of influential friends he inspired: Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group.

Moore was an acclaimed philosopher whose humanist writings on ethics without a god inspired devoted followers, and in 1935 he became President of the Ethical Union (today’s Humanists UK). So the story of Bloomsbury is partly our story too. Here is a friendly guide to the freethinking, art-loving, argumentative circle he helped to shape.

Who was G.E. Moore?

George Edward Moore was born in Upper Norwood, south London, in 1873. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, at 18 and took first-class honours in Classics and Moral Sciences. He became a Fellow in 1898 and in 1903 published Principia Ethica, the book that made his name.

Moore returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in 1911, and his standing as a moral philosopher grew rapidly. He was President of the Aristotelian Society from 1918 to 1919, edited the journal Mind from 1921 to 1947 and became Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic at Cambridge in 1925. In 1951 he was awarded the Order of Merit.

In 1935 Moore became President of the Ethical Union. The Union had long chosen leading thinkers for the role, and Moore was an obvious fit. As the Union later put it, he was ‘an ethical philosopher in the Utilitarian tradition, close to Sidgwick in analytical acumen’, and he had written the volume on Ethics for the Home University Library, a popular series of short introductions for general readers. He served for two years, handing over to the philosopher Cecil Delisle Burns in 1937.

His presidency came at an uneasy but intensely productive time for the Ethical Union. In March 1936 it held a public conference at Conway Hall on ‘The Relation of the State to Religion’, prompted by the Nazi regime’s attempt to found a new state religion in Germany. With fascism on the march, the Union urged members to consider whether the state should keep ‘a strict neutrality’ on religion. With the Depression still biting, its 1935 summer conference took on ‘The Ethical Factor in Economic Thought’. And in 1936 it marked fifty years since Stanton Coit had launched the Ethical movement in England, now with a philosopher of Moore’s stature at its head.

Friends remembered his gentle charm and total integrity. The humanist writer Hector Hawton recalled that Bertrand Russell, his fellow alumnus of the Cambridge Apostles and a Vice President of the Ethical Union, once asked Moore whether he had ever told a lie. Moore replied ‘Yes’, which Hawton suspected was the only untruth he ever uttered.

Principia Ethica

Moore’s great question was simple: what do you mean by that?

In a 1969 issue of The Humanist (today’s Humanists UK News), Merle Tolfree said it meant nobody in Moore’s Cambridge circle could get away with sloppy thinking. ‘No one could get away with loose or meaningful jargon,’ wrote Merle Tolfree, describing the influence of Moore and Russell.

In Principia Ethica (1903), Moore asked that question about morality itself. His answer was that ‘good’ can’t be defined or proved. We simply recognise it, the way we recognise a colour. So no church or holy book could tell you what was good: you had to look and judge for yourself.

When Moore looked, he found that the best things in life are human ones: ‘the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects’. In other words, friendship and beauty.

That was a radical idea in its time. Victorians were taught that being good meant doing your duty. Moore said duty only mattered because it made room for friendship and beauty. Good lives came first; rules came second.

To young Edwardian readers at Cambridge, this declaration felt like a window flung open. Leonard Woolf remembered it like this:

‘The tremendous influence of Moore and his book on us came from the fact that they suddenly removed from our eyes an obscuring accumulation of cobwebs, and curtains … substituting for the religious and philosophical nightmares, delusions, hallucinations, in which Jehovah, Christ, and St. Paul, Plato, Kant, and Hegel had entangled us, the fresh air and pure light of plain common sense.’

The humanists of Bloomsbury

Moore’s young admirers first came together at Cambridge, in the secretive discussion society known as the Apostles. Many later spoke to the freethinking Cambridge Heretics, founded in 1909 to protest against compulsory chapel. By about 1912 they had a London base in Bloomsbury. Many of them were non-religious. Here are just some of the humanists of Bloomsbury.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

One of the world’s most famous novelists, and Bloomsbury’s most famous member, Woolf was the daughter of one of Humanists UK’s founding members, Leslie Stephen, was a second-generation humanist.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)Novelist, essayist and lifelong humanist.Read on Humanist Heritage →

Leonard Woolf (1880–1969)

Virginia’s husband, an humanist in his own right from the age of fourteen, co-founded the Hogarth Press and late in life became an ‘honorary associate’ of the Rationalist Press Association (now Humanists UK).

The Hogarth PressThe printing press of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.Read on Humanist Heritage →

E.M. Forster (1879–1970)

The novelist who wrote ‘I do not believe in Belief’ said his early religious feelings had vanished partly because of ‘the general spirit of questioning that is associated with the name of G. E. Moore’. He later became President of the Cambridge Humanists and a Vice President of Humanists UK.

E.M. Forster (1879–1970)Novelist and longtime Vice President of the British Humanist Association.Read on Humanist Heritage →

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)

As a famous economist, an older Keynes described Moore’s ethics as ‘my religion under the surface’. He turned his love of beauty, also inspired by Moore, into public policy as the first Chair of what became Arts Council England.

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)The economist, arts patron and Bloomsbury humanist.Read on Humanist Heritage →

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

A close friend to several members of the Bloomsbury Group, the famous philosopher Bertand Russell said Moore had helped him climb ‘back to common sense’. Russell became a President of Cardiff Humanists and a Vice President of Humanists UK.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)Philosopher, campaigner, and Moore’s friend and ally.Read on Humanist Heritage →

Moore’s legacy

Both through his own writings and through the creative works he inspired through his friends and dveotees, Moore’s influence on British intellectual and popular culture was significant. New Humanist editor Hector Hawton thought he ‘changed the direction of philosophical thinking’ more than even Bertrand Russell did. His ideas had shaped the novels of Woolf and Forster, Keynes’s support for the arts, and the public image of artists and intellectuals in the Edwardian period.

Moore’s life and works showed that a good and ethica life can be found in friendship, a love of beauty, and trying to approach questions with a clear head: thinking through what it is we mean and trying to have good reasons for the things we believe to be true.