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14 Am. J. Juris. 37 (1969)
A Proof of the Objectivity of Morals

handle is hein.journals/ajj14 and id is 43 raw text is: A PROOF OF THE OBJECTIVITY OF MORALS Renford Bambrough It is well known that recent British philosophy, under the leadership of G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein, has defended common sense and common language against what seems to many contemporary philosophers to be the paradoxes, the obscurities and the mystifications of earlier metaphysical philosophers. The spirit in which this work is carried on is well indicated by the titles of two of the most famous of Moore's own papers: A Defence of Common Sense and Proof of an External World. It can be more fully but still briefly described by saying something about Moore's defense of the commonsense belief that there are external material objects. His proof of an external world consists essentially in holding up his hands and saying, Here are two hands; therefore there are at least two material objects. He argues that no proposition that could plausibly be alleged as a reason in favor of doubting the truth of the proposition that I have two hands can possibly be more certainly true than that proposition itself. If a philosopher produces an argument against my claim to know that I have two hands, I can therefore be sure in advance that either at least one of the premises of his argument is false, or there is a mistake in the reasoning by which he purports to derive from his premises the conclusion that I do not know that I have two hands. Moore himself speaks largely in terms of knowledge and belief and truth and falsehood rather than of the language in which we make our common- sense claims and the language in which the skeptic or metaphysician attacks them, but his procedures, and still more the effects of his work, are similar to those of other and later philosophers who have treated the same topic in terms of adherence to or departure from common language. A so-called linguistic philosopher would say of the skeptic that he was using words in unusual senses, and that when he said that we do not know anything about the external world he was using the word know so differently from the way in which we ordinarily use it that his claim was not in conflict with the claim that we make when we say that we do know something about the external world. It is easy to see the kinship between Moore's method and the linguistic method, so easy that many more recent writers have failed to see that Moore's method is distinct from the linguistic method. Moore takes the words of the

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