The traditional accounts of John Maynard Keynes downplay connection between Keynes's philosophy and his economics. This is reversed in The Cambridge Companion to Keynes, which links economic theory to economic policy and philosophy. Keynes held that capitalism was the system most likely to sustain the ‘actual life’ of basic economic existence as well as the one most apt to create an adequate surplus for sustaining the ethical life based on Moore's ends of art and friendship.

In this review by Tarja Knuuttila we find an interesting account of early analytic ethics that makes sense of its underlying conservatism. Knuuttila says in one of the essays by Tiziano Raffaelli entitled "Keynes and philosophers" Raffaelli links Keynes back to G. E. Moore, who tried to move beyond the simple calculus of utilitarianism.

Moore had argued in Principia Ethica (1903) that virtually all previous ethical theories have been erroneously based upon the fallacy that there is some thing in the world (e.g. utility) that always entails the good. In place of this view, Moore argues that good is an indefinable entity that cannot always be attached to some thing in the world. Utility may be good, or it may be bad. Only good is always good.

Knuuttila says that Raffaelli:

remarks how Moorian supreme values of love and beauty influenced Keynes's conception of economics as only instrumental to the good life. Keynes was, however, also critical towards Moore, whose conservative conclusion that right action would consist in obeying the customary norms led Keynes to write A Treatise on Probability (1921), which is the other major book of his along with The General Theory. Moore argued, to Keynes's dissatisfaction, that knowledge is never complete enough to guarantee the good results of actions, and that resorting to probability does not change the situation, thus making customary rules of conduct the best option. Yet the probability-relation proposed by Keynes falls back on Moore's (and the early twentieth-century Cambridge's) "naïve epistemology" since Keynes claims that probabilistic knowledge rests on "direct acquaintance" with probability-relations. Consequently, the probability-relation was for Keynes the same kind of unanalyzable notion as good was for Moore.