Moore’s Open Question and Moral Normativity: A Reply to Paul Bloomfield

In his so-called Open Question Argument, Moore (1903) argues that the concept of "good" cannot be defined on the basis of natural concepts as well as non-natural ones. Following Darwall, Gibbard and Railton (1992), Paul Bloomfield has explained the non-reducibility of the concept of good based on its normativity. Moreover, he claims that the normativity is commensurable and similar to the so called normativity of meaning. According to Wittgenstein's rule following argument, meaning is normative, namely, expressions' meaning have action-guiding role; in other words, meaning normatively constrains an expression's use in language. Our aim in this paper is to consider Bloomfield's claim and compare normativity in ethics with the normativity of meaning. In order to do so, we will elucidate the open question argument and the normativity of meaning. We will then reconstruct Bloomfield's argument, and finally argue that, contra Bloomfield, the normativity in ethics and the normativity of meaning are not similar.