Is there a good?
Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2007 8:39 pm
Branching off from the discussion in "Animal Morality and Human Need", I thought I'd ask everyone's opinion on a question germaine to the whole question of morality: Is there any such thing as the good?
Before you answer, let me put the question in context. What Socrates and Plato brought to moral philosophy is partly the idea that morality is behavior in the practice of a particular goal, the good. Rather than saying that we behave morally in order to profit personally, or to construct a pleasant society, or for fear of reprisal, they argued that the best reason to be moral was that there was a "thing" called the good, and that it was, in itself, worth achieving.
Now the good need not be some supernatural state, as you might interpret Plato's ideal of The Good. It need not be anything empirical. It can be just an idea in the plain old sense of something that we think up. For the purpose of this discussion, let's suppose that the criteria for calling something the good (rather than any particular, garden variety good) is that it is its own end, not a means to some other end.
If you're not sure whether some supposed version of the good meets that criteria, try to fill in the blank in this sentence: "We persue [the good you've named] in order to achieve ________." If you can provide a reasonable answer for that blank, then your good probably fails the criteria. If the sentence might as easily be false as true, then the good you've named still stands a fighting chance. If you can't think of any word that would fit into that blank, then it's a strong possibility you've lit upon the good.
For the purposes of this thread, however, I'm not asking what, if anything, you thing is the good. I'm just asking whether or not you think there is a good. From there, we can talk about what it might be, or how we might go about finding that out.
Before you answer, let me put the question in context. What Socrates and Plato brought to moral philosophy is partly the idea that morality is behavior in the practice of a particular goal, the good. Rather than saying that we behave morally in order to profit personally, or to construct a pleasant society, or for fear of reprisal, they argued that the best reason to be moral was that there was a "thing" called the good, and that it was, in itself, worth achieving.
Now the good need not be some supernatural state, as you might interpret Plato's ideal of The Good. It need not be anything empirical. It can be just an idea in the plain old sense of something that we think up. For the purpose of this discussion, let's suppose that the criteria for calling something the good (rather than any particular, garden variety good) is that it is its own end, not a means to some other end.
If you're not sure whether some supposed version of the good meets that criteria, try to fill in the blank in this sentence: "We persue [the good you've named] in order to achieve ________." If you can provide a reasonable answer for that blank, then your good probably fails the criteria. If the sentence might as easily be false as true, then the good you've named still stands a fighting chance. If you can't think of any word that would fit into that blank, then it's a strong possibility you've lit upon the good.
For the purposes of this thread, however, I'm not asking what, if anything, you thing is the good. I'm just asking whether or not you think there is a good. From there, we can talk about what it might be, or how we might go about finding that out.