User:Lucidish/Goodness (moral)

blah blah blah intro since the dawn of time philosophers have argued blah blah

Meta-ethical foundations of the moral good

Issues of meaning

Moral cognitivists assert that statements of value stand for beliefs that can be categorized as true or false. Consider the statement, "Athens, Greece is an older city than Athens, Georgia." Although one might quibble about continuity, the identity of a city over time, most people would probably say that this statement is meaningful and true. It is not, though, a statement of value, because there is no necessary connection between age and goodness, beauty, etc.

Now consider the statement, "Committing a murder is worse than telling a lie." One could quarrel, again, with the terms, asserting that either of the two terms being compared is ambiguous. Still, most people outside of a philosophy class would probably agree that, all things being equal, this statement is meaningful and true. They would agree, in essence, with moral cognitivism.

Notice also that moral cognitivism doesn't imply (although it would be consistent with) moral absolutism, which is the view that there is always and only one valid framework for moral judgment.

Non-cognitivism is a meta-ethic that asserts that values and the good are merely attitudes, and not beliefs which can be logically analyzed in terms of truth and falsity. Some philosophers considered goodness as a special property that is not empirically verifiable, like "redness". For example, G.E. Moore blamed the sense that morality was a verifiable thing on what he called the "naturalistic fallacy". He believed that people had a nonphysical intuition that could sense goodness, which was then falsely projected onto things and fallaciously treated as a natural property.

One variety of non-cognitivism is called Emotivism. According to this theory, the expressions of "good" and "bad" are simply expressions of attitudes, akin to booing and cheering. It was thought by emotivists that to call something "wrong", or "good", was either to express disapproval or approval.

Quasi-absolutism is a view by Gilbert Harman, writing in the tradition of use theory of language, which gives an account of the meaning of moral statements that is neither absolutist nor non-cognitive. He offers the notion that moral statements about right, wrong, good, and bad have to do with the hypothetical projection of personal evaluations on the world, yet pretend to be absolute for rhetorical purposes. In this manner, these statements can be treated as true or false in the abstract, but are not actual properties of the world. On such grounds, moral deliberation and argument can be pursued fruitfully.

It may, finally, be argued that not only are there no moral absolutes, but that there is no point in discussing morality at all. This perspective is called moral nihilism.

Issues of method

A common and useful tactic in analyzing "goodness" is trying to divide the concept into smaller, more understandable concepts. It has been thought that if some conception of goodness were divided, or causally regressed far enough, the process would eventually come to a logical stopping place, an "ultimate good".

Many philosophers tried to end the regressions by applying an auxiliary evaluation that puts an end to further decomposition. For example, Aristotle considered "The supreme element of happiness" to be theoretical study, because it "ruled all others." (Nicomachean Ethics, 1177a15) In this case, supremity was the auxiliary evaluation that could be doubted. He also supported the ancient Greek view which said that it was not happiness alone which was intrinsically good; it was, instead, a certain kind of happiness called eudaimonia, which roughly translated means "flourishing" or "well-being". Eudaimonia is more than simply pleasure; it is a happy life that is well-lived.

Also, for Aristotle, happiness is a subjective state, while eudaimonia is an objective state, literally meaning something like "having a good spirit."

Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) approached the problem by asserting that everything sensed was an effect, with an earlier cause. Each immediate (proximal) cause was less diluted in goodness, and therefore, the first cause would have to be perfectly good. In this case, the concept of dilution might be doubted as an inaccurate metaphor, or that the dilution necessarily scales back to perfection (maybe the first cause was very good, instead of perfect).

However, since this argument has not been demonstrated, one might doubt whether or not the causal regression ends, let alone whether it still avoids circularity.

Indeed, all known forms of such regressions are open to charges of circularity by skeptics. Attempts to translate, divide or causally analyze the concept of goodness are accused of failing in a particular way. Every attempt seems to end up with one or more subconcepts prefixed with the word "good", or uses related words like "pleasure", "dutiful", "praiseworthy", or "virtuous". To skeptics, such definitions appear circular, and therefore are believed invalid.

Nature of good

Realism vs. irrealism

• Railton
• Hume

Realism: naturalism vs. non-naturalism

Collectivism vs. individualism

We may want to go beyond eudamonia by saying that an individual person's flourishing is valuable only as a means to the flourishing of society as a whole. In other words, a single person's life is, ultimately, not important or worthwhile in itself, but is good only as a means to the success of society as a whole. The questions now at issue are: Is an individual's life intrinsically good, or is it merely instrumentally good? Is an individual's life, well-lived, something that is desirable for its own sake, or is it desirable, ultimately, only as a means to having a happy society?

Some cultures may want to go beyond selfishness by saying that an individual person's flourishing is valuable only as a means to the flourishing of society as a whole. In other words, a single person's life is, ultimately, not important or worthwhile in itself, but is good only as a means to the success of society as a whole. Some elements of Confucianism and Marxism are an example of this, encouraging the view that people ought to conform as individuals to the demands of a peaceful and ordered society.

The terms "values individualism" and "values collectivism" will be used to mark the dispute. Here are some definitions:

• Values individualism is the view that only individual lives are intrinsically valuable, and thus are valuable not merely as a means to the flourishing of society. This view is most allied with species of egoistic ethical philosophies.
• Values collectivism is the view that individual lives are only instrumentally valuable; that is, they are good only as a means of bringing about the flourishing of society, which is the only intrinsically good thing. This view is most allied with altruistic ethical philosophies.

The values-ethicist is then faced with the problem of how to choose, and on what basis, between values collectivism and values individualism.

The view that all life has intrinsic value is reminiscent of the philosophy of Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel rejected individualism as expressed for example in both the American and the French revolutions. Individualism, he felt, runs directly contrary to the nature of humanity and reality, since the individual has value and reality only as a part of a greater and unified whole. Humans, for instance, live only as part of a living planet Earth.

Most ethical decision models focus on sorting our collective vs. individual value in a given transaction, to identify externalities, intangibles and so on. Some of the major theories of justice rely on drawing clear lines in this regard, e.g. the restorative justice model requires explicitly stating the collective values lost and on regaining them, e.g. social unity and forgiveness - even "social capital". In all such models the collective must have a value system, or it would not intervene at all and certainly would not enforce decisions by violence (such as a court or legal system).

Values pluralism vs. monism

There is an unlimited succession of things which are potential candidates for intrinsic goods: from particular events of pleasure, to an individual's happiness, to an individual's eudaimonia, to the flourishing of a society, to the flourishing of an entire ecosystem. So it can be seen that there is a rather difficult problem about the scope of the theory of value.

Assuming that at least one of these is of intrinsic value, one may ask whether or not more than one thing of intrinsic value exists. There are broadly two kinds of answers to this inquiry. The "values monist" may claim that there is only a single thing of intrinsic value, while the "values pluralist" may claim that many things are of intrinsic value.

As a values pluralist, you might say: every item in this succession of items is intrinsically good. The goodness of a particular experience, of an individual's whole life, of society, and of an ecosystem, are all worth having for their own sake, and not merely as a means to something else. So as a values pluralist one might say: "I don't have to decide which of these things is intrinsically good, because they are all intrinsically good."

That position does not seem to be amenable to the choices that people face in life. Sometimes we have a choice, for example, to sacrifice our own pleasure, or happiness, or even our own lives, for the sake of many other people. In these cases two things are weighed: your own individual happiness, and the more general happiness of a lot of other people. And if one concludes that one should sacrifice their own happiness, does that mean that the individual's happiness is of less value, or has no intrinsic value?

An example of a philosophy that faces this problem of scope is existentialism. For an existentialist, being precedes essence, and personal choices are paramount in setting values. It makes little sense to evaluate one action over another: if they are real choices then they are expressions of our being, and of our ultimate freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre faced the famous difficulty of being unable to decide whether it was better to stay at home to care for his elderly mother or to go to war in the defence of his country.

In addition to the problem of scope, there is also the problem of rank-ordering one's values, and whether or not it can be done.

W.D. Ross was an ethical philosopher who coined the notion of prima facie duties, or duties that have some weight on the surface of them (like "non-maleficence" and "beneficence"). Each duty that he listed can be understood as a value, except in the form of a command with relative weight, and which may be balanced against other considerations.

Some philosophers have suggested that values can be graded on a scale from the most important to least important. This has been called the "Constancy Assumption". By contrast, some (like Dewey) have suggested that values are relative to the context, or situation, that the actor is in.

We are left with unresolved issues: the issue of the relative importance of intrinsic values. If these things are to be ranked in order of importance, how would the ranking go? On what basis should actors choose in cases of conflict? Why is one value better than another?

Monistic theories of value assert that there is exactly one intrinsic good, from which all other goods are instrumental.

The intrinsic goods that have been discussed up to now are pleasure, happiness, eudaimonia and the flourishing of a society or an ecosystem. There is a strong similarity among those four goods: for example, a flourishing individual or organism is almost always much happier than a non-flourishing one.

But any survey of candidates for the intrinsic good would be incomplete without considering goods that are essentially unrelated to pleasure, happiness, etc. The most familiar examples are religious. For example, there is a tradition in Judaism that one should obey God's laws as an end in itself, without fear of punishment or expectation of reward (now or in the afterlife). To obey God's laws might require one to value one's neighbor's flourishing, for example, but in that case the neighbor's flourishing is merely an instrumental good.

There are non-religious examples, too, such as the evolutionary ethic of John David Garcia. Garcia believed that humanity will destroy itself if happiness remains the people's ultimate goal and that the only choice of intrinsic good that can be pursued indefinitely without leading to self-destruction is creativity. This warning is not an offhand remark, but rather the central point of Garcia's thirty-year career as writer and public speaker. (It is made, for example, in the first paragraph of the preface and again in the first paragraph of the introduction of his first book.)

Note that Garcia does not hold that happiness is bad or wrong, just that when forced by circumstances to choose between happiness and creativity, one should choose creativity. Moreover, Garcia recognizes that a certain minimal level of happiness is a prerequisite to being creative; i.e., someone who never takes pleasure in anything has a big problem which will tend to outweigh all other considerations. In this situation, there is no conflict between the goals of increasing happiness and increasing creativity, as both goals are increased by solving the big problem — by pursuing treatment for depression.

Skeptical worries

The entire project of investigating the good is, to some skeptics, worrisome.

For many skeptics, the investigation into the good is not a fruitful quest. The prospect of the investigation being successful, with goodness finally analysed, satisfactorily defined, and universally agreed, is unsettling for some people. They assert that perhaps the definition could be used in a totalitarian way, or perhaps the world would lose some of its ambiguity, or there may be a loss of diversity in society and in ways of life. So the fact that some existing choices may be threatened produces the paradoxical situation that ultimate, incontrovertible knowledge of what is good may, to some people, not seem good or desirable.

Skeptics question the rise of literature that characterizes ecology as good or bad. Some green ethicists ask what the role of the ecosystem is in terms of values and the good. It seems that goodness, or value, exists within an ecosystem. In that case, values and the people that hold them seem subordinate to the ecosystem. If this is so, what kind of being could validly apply the word to an ecosystem as a whole? Who would have the power to assess and judge an ecosystem as good or bad, and by what criteria?

Similar questions can be (and have been) made concerning evaluations of deities by theists.