Having been brought up on G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica not to mention the work of Russell and Whitehead I'd have to say what I said as a first-pass comment.

However I agree with you, things are never quite as simple as they seem when one grinds them fine, also time and ideas move on. In discussions such as this I like to use the analogy of Newton's Laws of Motion which after hundreds of years still work well for 'everyday' use but they're all but useless in other endeavors such as our phones' GPS - to get there we had to progress through Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics to Relativity over several hundred years. The same applies to philosophy and philosophical argument and it's why I find it so interesting.

As you're aware, like other disciplines, philosophy is built on earlier work - from the Ancient Greeks through Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and so on, so it's not unreasonable to expect philosophy to have moved on from G.E. Moore's time. Nevertheless, I had to start somewhere and Moore's points are reasonably relevant.

In the light of modern-day thinking it's not unreasonable to examine Bentham's and Mills' ideas and philosophers should continue to do this no matter the era they're working in. That said, it's not a matter of discarding old ideas but that of refinement.

we cannot deprecate utilitarianism ideas without taking into account what they have contributed to both philosophy and to the world in a practical sense - as clearly all modern cities incorporate utilitarian principles to varying degrees. If we are to deprecate them then we must give explicit arguments for doing so. As you correctly point out we should question Bentham's felicific calculus and similarly I'd add to that the then notion of measuring 'happiness' in units of utiles and 'unhappiness' in even less familiar disutiles.

It made sense to use these calculi in Bentham's time. Then the conceptual framework encapsulating the notion of utility would have been better understood and appeared more useful if there were ways to measure the effectiveness of its outcomes. Nowadays we've moved on for reasons too complex to discuss here and I won't mention them as they will be familiar to you.

Anyone who would insist in trying to do quantitative measurements in this now-simplistic and anachronistic framework would seen a little daft. So quo vadis? Let's look at a parallel: physics has moved on from the Newton's comparatively simple notion of force to the more sophisticated useful concepts of energy and momentum, similarly so too has philosophy but unlike physics, it has yet to come to any widely accepted conclusions in this particular matter.

I believe Bentham and Mills were on the right track however, they were bedeviled in their efforts (as we still are) to 'quantify' abstract notions - those that we're taking about here. Putting a 'measure' on abstract notions is needed if we're to put them to practical use in the real world. (Perhaps we should wheel in A.J. Ayer or his modern cohorts here for we've a language/nomenclature problem: people need to have a comprehensive understanding of any new language - i.e.: the meaning of any new definitions.)

Thus, for this purpose, it seems logical to me to separate the 'theoretical' approach of Moore, Russell, Whitehead et al from this new thought, and it needs to be a radical break. Berkeley's questioning the existence of the quad's tree or Russell's questioning the reality of the table at which he's sitting through doubts about the viability of his sense datum have no place here.

(Physicists didn't make progress in QFT (part of Quantum Mechanics) until they learned to solve seemingly intractable math issues such as 'infinites' (akin to dividing by zero). This was a damned hard effort and took many years but it only came about after they recognized the need for a solution was essential if they were to make further progress. It's clear to me philosophy has problems of this nature and magnitude and the subject we're discussing here is one of the most significant of them.)

Why is this important you may well ask. Because the world's in a mess and that's because society's also in a horrible mess - the Nature article which we're responding to here illustrates the point. Our ethics are all over the place, values and value systems are no longer consistent as they were once were when the Church ruled our lives, and so on. And we desperately need a coherent, realistic and practical responses from philosophy/philosophers. Simply, the profession isn't leading the way as it ought to be, it should have been much more proactive decades ago and taken the leadership after the churches vacated their traditional role.

What worries me about the second part of your response isn't that philosophers are questioning the empiricist reasoning of the likes of Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, etc. or Moore's Principia Ethica for that's what philosophers do, rather it's the milieu in which they're now operating which is seemingly putting strictures on what they do. Like fashion, a set of cultural boundary conditions is determining what they actually do in practice. (BTW, I accept with Academia in the horrible state it's currently in at present that challenge is more than unusually difficult.)

There's more than a hint of postmodernism in your response. That's not a criticism of you the messenger but rather it's echoing my concern that we no longer have time to luxuriate in many of postmodernism's excesses. Simply, time is desperately short, philosophers must be proactive now.

You only have to read the posts to this story on HN to realize the diversity of opinion and the lack of agreement and cohestion in respect of core values amongst this group. Outside this community views will be even more diverse.