Does saying "a morally good singer is a morally good person" undermine Geach's attempt to undermine Moore?

Question

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Peter Geach used the infelicity of statements like, "A good singer is thusly a good person," to try to show that G. E. Moore's sense of the word "good" was misguided. However, can't Moore's standpoint be restored, to some extent, just by going to, "A morally good singer is thusly a morally good person," or, "An intrinsically good singer is an intrinsically good person,"^S etc.?

Now, I doubt all such qualifications would go through, although I'm having trouble coming up with a qualifier that sounds off when plugged into the indicated template ("A _______ good _______ is a _______ good person"). (I tried out "agent-relatively" in the first slot, for example, and it still sounds correct, to me at least, and if only for now!) (Putting things like "evildoer" or "murderer" in the second slot just comes off as insane, or in the case of "murderer" dependent on unknown conditions, if any there be, in which aggressive/non-defensive killing is somehow good.)

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^SOne might take the intrinsic goodness of a singer for an intrinsic talent that lends itself to singing, or an automatic and eager disposition to sing well, or something along that line. It is unclear to me, from reading through the SEP article that pertains the most to the concept of intrinsic value, that the word "intrinsic" there is meant to do double-duty with the same word as used in the phrase "intrinsic property," however.

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Alternative formulation of the question: while reviewing the relevant section of the relevant SEP article again, I noticed this:

[Geach's objection] is a charge that has been rebutted by Michael Zimmerman, who argues that Geach’s tests are less straightforward than they may seem and fail after all to reveal a significant distinction between the ways in which “good” and “yellow” operate (Zimmerman 2001, ch. 2). He argues further that Thomson mischaracterizes Moore’s conception of intrinsic value. According to Moore, he claims, what is intrinsically good is not “just plain good”; rather, it is good in a particular way, in keeping with Thomson’s thesis that all goodness is goodness in a way. He maintains that, for Moore and other proponents of intrinsic value, such value is a particular kind of moral value.

Is Zimmerman's line of thought equivalent to the one I've brought up, here?

Answer 1

No, it does not. Consider 'an occasional singer'. You cannot say 'an occasional singer is a person, therefore an occasional singer is an occasional person'. That is because the target of the adjective 'occasional' is the person's singing, not the person. Likewise there is an important difference between a good singer and a morally good singer. The normal interpretation of the first expression is a singer who sings well, while that of the second is a good person who sings, well or badly. The target of the adjective 'good' in the first expression is the singing, while the target of good in the second is the person, and that is the cause of the problem. By introducing 'morally' you are changing the target of 'good' from the singing to the person, and hence 'a morally good singer is a morally good person' makes sense, while 'a very occasional singer is a very occasional person' does not.

Perhaps examples with two or more activities illustrate the point more clearly, such as:

She was an excellent singer but an appalling actress.

He was a good tactician but a bad leader.

In such examples, you cannot take both adjectives to be referring to the person alone, as they are contradictory.

Answer 2

It seems quite grammatical to say "a morally good singer", though a bit odd to the ear because of the semantic distance between morality and singing, though I suppose it is quite acceptable to say that "Any good gospel singer is necessarily a morally good singer". The question remains then if is metaphysically necessary to conclude that all who sing well about good morals are necessarily morally good people, to which I would agree with Marco Ocram that it simply isn't a necessity.

I think this a natural language consideration where the absence of material logic allowing you to move from "morally good singer" to "moral person" is stymied by the way adjectives are peculiar to the nouns they modify. What I mean by that is that facts about singers, knowing for instance they are types of people, allow us to make some inferences from adjectives modifying singers to adjectives modifying people, we cannot always.

A case where it works:

A living singer is a living person.

Clearly that stands to reason.

A good singer is a good person.

Clearly that does not. It seems to me, that morally good seems to occupy an ambiguous middle ground, perhaps through lack of established convention, whether the goodness refers to the singing-ness or the singer-ness.

Your question is intriguing because it begs the question, based on what calculus can we or cannot we infer such a transference of attribute between a hyponym-hypernym pair. And I'm going to pause and think...

And what has leapt to my mind is the idea there is a difference between essential and accidental properties (SEP). Your phrase seems to have no basis to determine if the claim about the property is essential or accidental.

A "morally good singer" seems to suggest that while properties qualify entities, that in our minds, entities sometimes qualify properties through experience. These irregularities in definitions were observed by Wittgenstein in his family resemblance. In modern semantic theory, Rosch's prototype theory is a good candidate for explanatory language. And Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things probably would be good start on how the postivist notions of atomic categories is betrayed by a layer of calculations that go on with neurons under the hood in determining our categories and how they give noun phrases meaning in a way that doesn't conform with classical logic and set theory.