5. The Moorite Philosopher

The Moorite Philosopher

THE GREATEST impact on Keynes’s life and values, the great conversion experience for him, came not in economics but in philosophy. A few months after Keynes’s initiation into the Apostles, G.E. Moore, a professor of philosophy at Trinity who had become an Apostle a decade earlier than Keynes, published his magnum opus, Principia Ethica (1903). Both at the time and in reminiscence three decades later, Keynes attested to the enormous impact that the Principia had had upon him and his fellow Apostles.

In a letter at the time of its publication, he wrote that the book “is a stupendous and entrancing work, the greatest on the subject” [Keynes’s italics], and a few years later he wrote to Strachey, “It is impossible to exaggerate the wonder and originality of Moore.… How amazing to think that only we know the rudiments of a true theory of ethic[s].” And, in a 1938 paper to the Bloomsbury Group, entitled “My Early Beliefs,” Keynes recalls that the Principia’s “effect on us, and the talk which preceded and followed it, dominated and perhaps still dominates, everything else.” He added that the book “was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a new renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on earth” (Skidelsky 1983, pp. 133–34; Keynes [1951] 1972, pp. 436–49). Very strong words about a book on technical philosophy!

What is their source? First was the personal charisma that Moore exercised upon the students at Cambridge. But beyond that personal magnetism, Keynes and his friends were attracted not so much to Moore’s doctrine itself as to the particular interpretation and twist that they themselves gave to that doctrine. Despite their enthusiasm, Keynes and his friends accepted only what they held to be Moore’s personal ethics (i.e., what they called Moore’s “religion”), while they totally rejected his social ethics (i.e., what they called his “morals”).

Keynes and his fellow Apostles enthusiastically embraced the idea of a “religion” composed of moments of “passionate contemplation and communion” of and with objects of love or friendship. They repudiated, however, all social morals or general rules of conduct, totally rejecting Moore’s penultimate chapter on “Ethics in Relation to Conduct.” As Keynes states in his 1938 paper,

In our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his [Moore’s] religion was that it made morals unnecessary. … We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists. (Keynes [1951] 1972, pp. 142–43)

Shrewd contemporary observers perceptively summed up the attitude of Keynes and his fellow Apostles. Bertrand Russell wrote that Keynes and Strachey twisted Moore’s teachings; they “aimed at a life of retirement among fine shades and nice feelings, and conceived of the good as consisting in the passionate mutual admirations of a clique of the elite” (Welch 1986, p. 43). Or, as Beatrice Webb neatly observed, Moorism among the Apostles was “nothing but a metaphysical justification for doing what you like—and what other people disapprove of” (ibid.).

The question then arises, how seriously did this immoralism, this rejection of general rules that would restrict one’s ego, mark Keynes’s adult life? Sir Roy Harrod, a disciple and hagiographical biographer, insists that immoralism, as with any other unpleasant aspect of Keynes’s personality, was only an adolescent phase, quickly outgrown by his hero.

But many other aspects of his career and thought confirm Keynes’s lifelong immoralism and disdain for the bourgeoisie. Moreover, in his 1938 paper, delivered at the age of 55, Keynes confirmed his continuing adherence to his early views, stating that immoralism is “still my religion under the surface. … I remain and always will remain an immoralist” (Harrod 1951, pp. 76–81; Skidelsky 1983, pp. 145–46; Welch 1986, p. 43).

In a notable contribution, Skidelsky demonstrates that Keynes’s first important scholarly book, A Treatise on Probability (1921), was not unrelated to the rest of his concerns. It grew out of his attempt to copper rivet his rejection of Moore’s proposed general rules of morality. The beginnings of the Treatise came in a paper, which Keynes read to the Apostles in January 1904, on Moore’s spurned chapter, “Ethics in Relation to Conduct.” Refuting Moore on probability occupied Keynes’s scholarly thoughts from the beginning of 1904 until 1914, when the manuscript of the Treatise was completed.

He concluded that Moore was able to impose general rules upon concrete actions by employing an empirical or “frequentist” theory of probability, that is, through observation of empirical frequencies we could have certain knowledge of the probabilities of classes of events. To destroy any possibility of applying general rules to particular cases, Keynes’s Treatise championed the classical a priori theory of probability, where probability fractions are deduced purely by logic and have nothing to do with empirical reality. Skidelsky makes the point well:

Keynes’s argument, then, can be interpreted as an attempt to free the individual to pursue the good … by means of egotistic actions, since he is not required to have certain knowledge of the probable consequences of his actions in order to act rationally. It is part, in other words, of his continuing campaign against Christian morality. This would have been appreciated by his audience, although the connection is not obvious to the modern reader. More generally, Keynes links rationality to expediency. The circumstances of an action become the most important consideration in judgments of probable rightness. … By limiting the possibility of certain knowledge Keynes increased the scope for intuitive judgment. (Skidelsky 1983, 153–54)

We cannot get into the intricacies of probability theory here. Suffice it to say that Keynes’s a priori theory was demolished by Richard von Mises (1951) in his 1920s work, Probability, Statistics, and Truth. Mises demonstrated that the probability fraction can be meaningfully used only when it embodies an empirically derived law of entities which are homogeneous, random, and indefinitely repeatable.

This means, of course, that probability theory can only be applied to events which, in human life, are confined to those like the lottery or the roulette wheel. (For a comparison of Keynes and Richard von Mises, see D.A. Gillies [1973, pp. 1–34].) Incidentally, Richard von Mises’s probability theory was adopted by his brother Ludwig, although they agreed on little else (L. von Mises [1949] 1966, pp. 106–15).