Good, theories of the

3. The goodness of people

When we call a person ‘good’ are we using ‘good’ in the ordinary sense? Sometimes it seems clear that we are. A person may be good at things – talented at sports or crafts, or master of an intellectual discipline. A person may also be good in certain roles – a good mother or teacher, for instance. Aristotle’s functional account of goodness, or something like it, seems to apply to these cases: a good teacher is good at carrying out the functions of a teacher, or has the qualities that it is rational to want in a teacher. But what about when we say that a person is good, just as a person?

In fact there are two different ways in which people are said, just as people, to have value. Ordinarily, when we say of a particular person that they are ‘a good person’, we mean that they are morally good or virtuous. Aristotle applied his functional account of goodness to moral virtue in a straightforward way. He identified reason as the human function, meaning that what is distinctive of human beings is the use of reason to govern our activities. Virtues are qualities that foster the good performance of this function. Both Plato and Aristotle compared moral virtue to health: it is a way of being in good psychological condition. The functional account has also been used in a more broadly social way to explain moral goodness. On this view you are morally good if you are good at the performance of all of your various social roles, or if you have the qualities it is rational for your friends and fellow citizens to want in a friend and fellow citizen; or, as in certain sentimentalist theories, if you are an object of moral approval because you have these qualities (see Virtues and vices §§2–3).

Those accounts identify moral goodness with the possession of certain dispositions – character traits – that influence a person’s conduct. Philosophers who favour such accounts usually suppose that your actions issue directly from your character. But other philosophers claim that human beings have a power distinct from and more directly related to actions than character traits are, namely the will (see Will, the). The will enables you to act freely, even to the point of doing what is ‘out of character’; and it makes you responsible for your actions, even when they seem to be determined inevitably by your character. Kant, accordingly, recognized a form of moral goodness distinct from virtue or the goodness of character traits, namely goodness of the will or moral worth, which pertains to the well-functioning of the will itself, either as it is exercised in particular actions, or as a standing disposition. Kant famously claimed that you may achieve moral worth even if you have temperamental qualities which make it hard for you to do what duty demands (see Self-control). This claim raises important questions about how the will and character are related.

The second way in which people are considered to be valuable just as people, enshrined in many religious and philosophical systems, involves the thought that every human being as such has a fundamental value which it is wrong to deny or overlook. The religious view that we are all God’s children, the political view that all human beings are created equal, and the Kantian moral view that every human being is an end-in-itself are all expressions of this idea. There are various views about what makes people valuable in this way – freedom of the will, rationality, consciousness, the possession of identifiable interests, the capacity for pleasure and pain, or simply life itself – and so what treatment is called for. Some of these options raise the question whether other living things should also be accorded such value (see Moral standing §§1–3). This kind of value is different from that which we attribute to particular people when we say they are morally good, for one need not be an especially good person to lay claim to the political rights or the moral respect due to every human being. But the two ideas are sometimes related by the thought that it is the capacity for moral goodness, or the capacity that makes us capable of moral goodness, that gives us this fundamental value (see Respect for persons).