Good, theories of the

1. History and metaphysics of the good

Almost anything may be assessed as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This ubiquity of ‘good’ and its cognates in other languages has suggested nearly opposite conclusions about the metaphysics of goodness to different philosophers. At one extreme we find Plato’s view that the good is the fundamental principle of reality. Through works such as the Republic, Plato expounded his view that the reality of an object consists in its ‘participation’ in a ‘Form’. A Form is both an archetype or pattern, and an ideal, a perfect version, of the things of which it is the Form. Each Form, because it is perfect, in turn participates in the Form of the Good. A thing is real, then, to the extent that it participates in the Form of the Good.

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle criticizes Plato’s account for not telling us anything about particular kinds of goodness (see Aristotle §§21–6). Yet Aristotle’s own metaphysics retains a version of the equation of goodness and reality. The essential nature of each thing, according to Aristotle, consists in its characteristic activity or function, and it is both most perfect and most real when it performs that function well (see Perfectionism).

These metaphysical views may seem remote from our everyday employment of the idea of goodness. Yet most philosophers agree that the basic insight behind Aristotle’s account throws important light on many uses of ‘good’. To say that a thing is good is to say that it is a well-functioning thing of its kind, and its well-functioning is related to its reality: a good heart is one that pumps blood well, and a heart that ceases to pump blood altogether ceases to be a heart. This functional account of goodness applies most clearly to things that have purposes – instruments and tools, biological organs, parts of machines, crafts and professions – and it has the advantage of making it clear why we care about having things that are good. But when we say that happiness, or beauty, or freedom, is good, we do not seem to be talking about the performance of a function. Efforts have therefore been made to extend the basic idea of the functional account to things which are not clearly purposive, like people and lives. In A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls proposes that ‘a good x’ means ‘an x that has the properties it is rational to want in an x’. A good life, for example, has the properties it is rational to want in a life. The goodness of pleasure, freedom, or beauty may then be interpreted in terms of the role these things play in good lives.

The relinquishment of the view that the good coincides with the real marks the transition from the ancient and medieval to the modern world. Modern thinkers confront a value-neutral world, the world of matter and motion described by physics. Modern ‘realists’, although they reject the general equation of the real and the good, still believe that goodness is an objective property of certain objects (see Moral realism). Other modern philosophers believe that goodness is not a property that exists independently of the human mind, but rather some sort of projection or construction out of the needs, desires, and interests of human or sensate beings.

Philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries distinguished between the ‘naturally good’ and the ‘morally good’. The naturally good is what is pleasant or desirable or makes us happy. Some early modern philosophers believed that the morally good is constructed out of the naturally good. For example, natural law theorists like Hobbes and Pufendorf thought that naturally good actions become morally obligatory when we are commanded to perform them by God or a sovereign (see Natural law), while sentimentalists, such as Hutcheson and Hume, held that naturally good dispositions – pleasant or useful character traits – are rendered moral virtues by the fact that we approve of them (see Moral sense theories). Rationalists such as Clarke and Price, on the other hand, believed that certain actions have a special kind of moral value which is independent of natural goodness, namely rightness.

By the late eighteenth century the distinction between natural and moral goodness began to blur, but from two opposed directions. Kant (1788) argued that moral goodness is the necessary condition of natural goodness. Happiness purchased by immoral action, for example, is not good at all (see Kantian ethics; Kant, I§§9–11). The utilitarians, by contrast, made natural goodness the source of all value, arguing that morally right actions are simply those that produce the maximum amount of the natural good, happiness or pleasure (see Utilitarianism).

The claim that happiness or pleasure just is the good puzzled Moore, who, in the early years of the twentieth century, pointed out that ‘good’ certainly does not mean ‘pleasant’ (see Moore, G.E. §1). Moore argued (1903) that any attempt to identify ‘good’ with a natural property is an instance of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, and that we must therefore suppose that ‘good’ is a ‘non-natural’ property (see Naturalism in ethics §3). This attempt to establish value-realism on linguistic grounds set off a discussion of what the word ‘good’ means, or how it is used. Does it describe some property of objects, or is it used just to prescribe or recommend? The most extreme view is that of the emotivists, who stand in diametric opposition to Plato. Emotivists believe not only that goodness is not the fundamental principle of reality, but that strictly speaking the word ‘good’ does not refer to anything real at all. Its ubiquity, they think, can be explained only by the supposition that ‘good’ is used merely to express the speaker’s subjective approval, like a squeal of delight (see Emotivism).