Your argument's fault will become clear to you once you establish to yourself and get comfortable that "good" is not an absolute term; it is a term that is highly subjective. Therefore one person's good could be another person's not good.

There are absolutes in this world, and there are relatives. "Good" is a relative. Only ethicists on the Kantian (?) vein of thought (or maybe in other veins as well) think that there is some ideal, everlasting, and perfect "good" out there.

Well, sorry to break your bubble, but there is NO Santa Claus and there is no universal "good" out there. Not one that we have discovered yet, anyway.

Once you realize that "good" is subjective, then you must make sure you understand as well that since it's subjective, something can be good and not good at the same time, but NOT IN THE SAME RESPECT. This is of utter importance, that you apply this consideration.

As Thrasymachus pointed out, what is just is what the powerful say. To even have an opinion on the matter, one must first be powerful. — Moliere

Anyone can have any opinion on any matter. No powerful social standing is required to have an opinion. I am not powerful in any sense, and yet, as you can see, I have opinions. If you are powerful, which I can't tell from here, but it's possible, then I can see how you can agree with Th...us.

I'm sympatico with
I don't see that your definition [of good] is of much help in working out what we ought do, which is, after all, the point of ethics.
— Banno — 180 Proof

I am sorry, 180 Proof, that you expect the impossible.

Think about it.

Banno put down his opinion in a post. You replied with a flaming approval of an icon.

I am supposed to decipher from that, that you only meant a particular point in Banno's reply, not the entire reply, and I am supposed furthermore to be able to pinpoint precisely which part you are agreeing with?

How can you seriously expect that people will properly guess that when you give a blanket statement of approval by indicating ONLY whom it goes to, and a flaming icon?

It is now obvious that you did not mean the entire post to be approved, and I am glad for it. It is only obvious, however, because you explained in long hand and naming each term in unambiguous ways. I suggest you do that in the first place, and not as an apology after a misunderstanding has happened and been reported.

I am glad that I misread your intention of what you meant to say, but I won't take the blame for this misreading. You must really be more clear in your communication if you want people to understand properly what you actually mean.

You took my :fire: out of context, then blamed me for being terse as if I'd replied to your post rather than Banno's. Ok. My bad, gmba. :sweat:

Suppose someone comes up with an example that they claim debunks your definition. How can we tell whether their claim is true? — Herg

Good question.

By examining the logic and finding that the definition fails.


------------------------

Caveat: the definition I gave has been amended properly by Bert1, which states that pleasure is good, and a final means by itself (as per Hume), and the other thing that is good is a process, tool, action, opinion, that promotes the eventuality of a pleasure to happen.

------------------------

The definition fails if you find something that is good, yet does not fit the criteria of the definition.

For instance: A triangle has three points and three sides.

I have a two-dimensional object that has four sides and four points.

Therefore the two-dimensional object I have is not a triangle, because it fails to satisfy the criteria given in the definition of the triangle.

I took it out of context because there was no indication of other context.

Banno made his opinion.

You approved it with a flame.

I did not like that you agreed with THAT opinion.

You did not indicate that only PART of that opinion of Banno's you agreed with.

I took it out of context *by what you meant to indicate, not by what you ACTUALLY indicated* because you did not separate the context out of the whole post pinpointing what you meant by the flame.

↪180 Proof I was asking for your views on Moore's argument ...
— Agent Smith
I think it's irrelevant to ethics (re: "goodness"). — 180 Proof

:up:

180 never takes responsibility for the clarity of his own posts.

Heh. I'm not being clear. I do not agree with Thrasymachus. I was attempting a reductio of your position -- if what is good is just what is good for someone, then for a prince that wants to be a king killing the king is good for them. So, by your definition, at least some of the time, killing for the purpose of obtaining a better social position is good.

The allusion to Thrasymachus was just to draw an analogy that what you're saying is similar to what he said in The Republic -- not exactly so, but given the above scenario, can you see the parallels?

There are absolutes in this world, and there are relatives. "Good" is a relative. Only ethicists on the Kantian (?) vein of thought (or maybe in other veins as well) think that there is some ideal, everlasting, and perfect "good" out there — god must be atheist

I think all absolutes are also, at the same time, relatives. For instance, the qualitative content of a moment of awareness is contingent and relative, but its condition of possibility is time consciousness, the appearance of now as a tripartite structure of past(memory , present and future( expectation). This is true of ‘good’, of course, but in addition, what is experienced as good involves a validation of expectation, whereas
what is not good involves a mismatch between expectation and appearance.

The Kantian hope of an absolute specific qualitative content of meaning associated with the good ( categorical imperative) turned out to be only relative, but there are formal structural conditions of possibility for the experience of goodness that post-Kantian philosophers argue are absolute.

180 never takes responsibility for the clarity of his own posts. — bert1

I can't read and comprehend my posts for you, bert. :yawn:

The difficulty with “good”, I think, is that it describes someone desiring certain qualities or properties in another thing, but is not itself a quality or property, and so is unavailable for any analysis that excludes good objects and the people who say they are good.

I don’t understand his open question argument, though, because it looks like he assumes the subject and predicate are conceptually identical, rather than the predicate serving to modify the subject, which the grammar entails. The sentence “Bananas are yellow” does not entail bananas are identical to yellow, for instance, yellow is bananas. Can anyone clear this up for me?

What a mess. So far every contribution to this thread has used circular terms to ‘define’ the good.
— Joshs

No, no, no. Read the previous page. Read my definition of "good". It is not circular. — god must be atheist

I must have missed how your definition avoids being circular. Did you somewhere indicate how good is more or other than just what benefits an individual relative to their needs?

180 never takes responsibility for the clarity of his own posts. — bert1

It's been a long-standing fracture between 180 and me. I like the guy, actually, I respect him, and I bow for his knowledge and mind. But he doggonedly avoids being clear and most times even being committal. It's not a fault, only an irritation. The fault is when he expects people to know what he means when his description is less than scanty.

Did you somewhere indicate how good is more or other than just what benefits an individual relative to their needs? — Joshs

You're right. Every definition is circular. But it has been created, and it is not impossible therefore to create a definition for "good". The initial opening post asked this question, and I answered it.

The allusion to Thrasymachus was just to draw an analogy that what you're saying is similar to what he said in The Republic -- not exactly so, but given the above scenario, can you see the parallels? — Moliere

Maybe I would, but I read The Republic a long, long time ago, and stopped halfway, although I enjoyed it tremendously. But I can't see the parallel, because I can't remember the passage that deals with Thrasymachus.

My fault. I admit.

The difficulty with “good”, I think, is that it describes someone desiring certain qualities or properties in another thing, but is not itself a quality or property, and so is unavailable for any analysis that excludes good objects and the people who say they are good. — NOS4A2

True, but this problem can be circumvented by giving parametric conditions or assigning parametric properties to the quality of "good".

Eh, no worries, it's not necessary to the point anyways. I was just being shmancy ;)

:up: :smile:

"Good" is an adjective denoting that a thing that is good is a thing that is advantageous and pleasant and helpful and accommodating OR at least three at the same time and in the same respect of the aforementioned qualifiers. — god must be atheist

Caveat: the definition I gave has been amended properly by Bert1, which states that pleasure is good, and a final means by itself (as per Hume), and the other thing that is good is a process, tool, action, opinion, that promotes the eventuality of a pleasure to happen. — god must be atheist

OP is asking if good can be defined, and is therefore, by implication, asking for a definition of 'good'. I think that what you have provided is a list of reasons why we might want to call something 'good' — that it's advantageous, or pleasant, or helpful, or accommodating — which is not the same thing as a definition.

However, I think your list gives us a clue. Here are two lists, the one you gave for 'good', and a corresponding one for 'bad':
Good: advantageous, pleasant, helpful, accommodating
Bad: disadvantageous, unpleasant, unhelpful, obstructive

The four words in the first list are all positives; the four in the second list are all negatives. I think this is a clue as to what 'good' and 'bad' are doing: they're somehow separating objects into two groups, those about which we want to say something positive, and those about which we want to say something negative.

Here's another clue:

When a speaker declares x is good, they are marking their approval of x. Moreover, they are asserting that this approval springs from something intrinsic to x itself. If I say "Sally is good", I don't merely like Sally, according to me Sally is so constituted as to be intrinsically liked. — hypericin

I think this is pretty nearly right. The only thing I would want to do (apart from removing the words 'intrinsic' and intrinsically', because we can say that something is good because it is instrumentally good, not just because it is intrinsically good) is to replace 'approval' with something more general, in keeping with the fact that god-must-be-an-atheist's list has four items in it that aspire to cover a range of different responses. As I see it, if I say 'Sally is good', while it may indeed be the case that I approve of Sally and think that she is likeable, what I'm actually saying (because 'good' serves only to connect an object with positivity, and not with anything as specific as approval or liking) is that Sally deserves or merits or warrants some kind of positive attitude or response — which might indeed be approval or liking — but without pointing directly at any one of these responses, merely waving a hand vaguely at the entire class of positive responses, from mild approval through degrees of liking to active seeking out, without telling you which of them is my actual response or attitude. (I think of this as the 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' theory of the meaning of 'good': John Cleese on the castle wall saying, with a comic French accent, 'I fart in your general direction.')

Where this ends up, I think, is at some kind of fitting attitude theory (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fitting-attitude-theories/). There's a quote from A.C.Ewing in this article which I think just about sums it up:
“if we analyse good as ‘fitting object of a pro attitude’, it will be easy enough to analyse bad as ‘fitting object of an anti attitude’, this term covering dislike, disapproval, avoidance, etc.”
My personal preference is to define 'good' as 'merits a pro-response', and 'bad' as 'merits an anti-response', but I think that's detail. The article makes the point that "FA theories come in both cognitivist and noncognitivist versions, and can be given either a realist or a quasi-realist gloss." My view is that it should be given a cognitivist and realist gloss, but I won't go into that here.

I hope some of this has been helpful, and that I've not trodden on too many toes.

Definitions are circular within a finite frame. The circular series of terms for ‘good’ used in this thread that I referred to are mutually defined according to a common or interwoven sense, in which the ‘meaning of the ‘good ‘ is contingent, either relative to the individual or culture, but arbitrary in its basis. My circular frame of definitions for the ‘good’ are interwoven via a different sense. In my circle, the arbitrariness of the good is only an apparent arbitrariness. That it is only apparent makes it neither true nor false, but a certain useful way of understanding the good. My definition is useful in a different way , which leaves the previous definition intact ( if one only sees the good as arbitrary then that is valid, as far as it goes). I invite others to see my definition as enriching the arbitrary definition, by saying what others are unable to say about the good besides the fact that it is arbitrary. This would be like inviting others to see that the relation between an electric current and a magnetic field is not arbitrary but interlocked. I don’t need to say that what I show them is true, only that it allows me to do things that connect the two concepts in more ways than what they were able to do. — Joshs

What?

Is this a disagreement with
the idea that goodness is synonymous with "preserving stable ongoing self-consistency of interaction with an environment under changing conditions"? — Joshs

Well, yes, since homeostasis leads to reproduction.

Good of you to raise "point of view". Bertt did the same sort of thing:

The same thing can be both good an not good depending on the point of view. — bert1

But then he was puzzled by the idea that ethics is about what we ought to do...

Yes, Bert, ethics is about what we ought do. And I guess it's clear, so far as it goes, that we ought do what is right, and we ought do what is good.

The fun begins when someone asks what is right, what is good and what ought we do.

If so, it has always seemed to me to be a misguided pursuit. Suppose I work out, by a consideration of ethics, what I ought to do. What happens then? Why would I do it? My will has to somehow be engaged, no? — bert1

Of course. One presumably ought to will what is good.

But if what is "good" is just what one wills, one has a conceptual problem, since it remains that we can ask if one ought do what one wills.

That would pretty much amount to "do whatever you will", saying nothing about what we ought to will, and so not answering the question.

And even if rape is good for rapists, and invading other countries is good for oligarchs, we are still left with the question as to whether such folk ought to be let do as they please.

You see, the thing about ethics is that it takes a step past doing what you want - the question you both have addressed - and asks instead about what one ought do. It's the difference between a question for children and a question for grownups. Sure, one might as well do what one wants. But as one grows up one notices one is embedded in a social structure that places limits on what one does.

Of course, one might respond by modifying "Do what you want" to "Do what you can get away with".

But most folk are able to take on a more nuanced approach. And that's were ethics comes in. We can have a reasoned discussion about what sorts of things one ought to do. In the process we might find ways to better articulate what is disagreeable about rape and invasion.

As I see the general problem in the reception of the definition is that people fail to distinguish between what THEY, the readers think is good, and what the actual point of view of of the actor in an action deems is good. — god must be atheist

Perhaps instead most folk are able to distinguish between what they want and what is good, and choose not to rape or invade even if it would be pleasurable or convenient.

True, but this problem can be circumvented by giving parametric conditions or assigning parametric properties to the quality of "good".

“Goodness” is itself a property, according to Moore. Excuse my stupidity, but how is it possible to give a property properties without first considering goodness to be an an object in itself?

Excuse my stupidity, but how is it possible to give a property properties without first considering goodness to be an an object in itself? — NOS4A2

That's verging on the naturalistic fallacy.

Your argument's fault will become clear to you once you establish to yourself and get comfortable that "good" is not an absolute term — god must be atheist

I think those you mention understand that.

They will also understand that there is an area of discourse around what is good and what is not, around what we ought to do and what we ought not. A conversation that is about ethics.

That good is not absolute (however one is to understand that) does not tell us much about what to do.

Nor does telling us that folk want what they want - even if that is phrased as "the good is what one wills" or "the good is a thing that is advantageous and pleasant and helpful and accommodating".

Ethics is not about what you want.

So sure, some folk want one thing, some folk want another. We realise that. Now there can be a whole conversation about how we work out who gets what.

And "Once you realize that" you will be doing ethics.

(Edit TL;DR at openAPI gave this post as "Your argument that "good is not an absolute term" does not tell us much about what to do. We need to engage in a conversation about ethics in order to decide what is good and what is not.")

There's an expression one will sometimes happen across in the discussions of texts of spiritual philosophy, 'the good that has no opposite'. That is as near as you can get to an 'absolute good', as it connotes an unalloyed good. It is differentiated from what is good in ordinary discourse, where good is defined in terms of its opposite - good as distinct from bad (expressed in the taoist aphorism 'long and short define each other'.) Whereas the 'good that has no opposite' is an appeal to a good that lies beyond the opposites.

An example comes to mind from Mahāyāna Buddhism and the 'eight worldly concerns' (annotated by me):

hope for pleasure (good) and fear of pain (bad),
hope for gain (good) and fear of loss (bad),
hope for praise (good) and fear of blame (bad),
hope for good reputation and fear of bad reputation.

a commentary on that:

The World Knower (i.e. Buddha) has said:
Gain and loss, pleasure and pain,
Pleasant words and unpleasant words, praise and blame—
These are the eight worldly concerns.
Do not allow these concerns occupy your mind;
Regard them with equanimity.

Letter to a Friend by Nāgārjuna

Insofar as the 'definition' of the good is concerned, this doesn't offer a definition as such, which after all is only a matter of words, so much as a prescription whereby such an unalloyed good is to be sought.

Whereas the 'good that has no opposite' is an appeal to a good that lies beyond the opposites. — Wayfarer

Interesting, but hard to imagine what that might be and possibly hard to access such knowledge.

Of course. Carry on.

(But then, I did read somewhere that 'The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value.' Can't remember where, it's a scrapbook entry.)

Sounds like Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus... :smile:

Ah yes, that must've been it. I copied a lot of quotes from this forum over the years.

Principia Ethica.

I am not defending Moore's view, however. Far from it. As I say, Moore thought that 'good' is indefinable. But he thought that on the basis of an argument that commits the very same fallacy that he was accusing others of. That is, he took the inability of answers to the normative version of the question "what is good?" to answer the metaethical version of the question "what is good?" to be evidence that the latter is unanswerable (or rather, that the answer is that 'it is what it is'). That's as fallacious as thinking that an answer to the normative question is, by dint of being an answer to it, also an answer to the metaethical question. He correctly identified a common fallacy, and then proceeded to commit it!

So, Moore was correct in his criticism of moral theorizing up to that point, he was incorrect in his positive moral theory. He thought the good is what it is. But it isn't. It can be defined.

'The good' is that which features as the object of a valuing relation that has the source of all moral value and norms as its valuer. And as only persons - minds - can be valuers, the source of all moral value and norms is a person. Which person? The person who it is. That last claim is Moorean in spirit, but the view is far from Moorean. It's a form of divine command theory, rather than a form of non-naturalism (the latter being Moore's view).

Moore's view was, frankly, insane.