Goodness and value theory: Encyclopedia II - Goodness and value theory - Theories of the good

Goodness and value theory - Theories of the good

A correct definition of goodness would be valuable because it might allow one to construct a good life or society by reliable processes of deduction, elaboration or prioritisation. One could answer the ancient question, "How then should we live?", among many other important questions.

Goodness and value theory - Goodness as an objective property

One attempt to define goodness describes it as a property of the world. According to this perspective, to talk about a good is to talk about something within the object itself. Plato was one advocate of this view.

Many people support the idea that God(s) created the universe. Such persons may, therefore, claim that the universe has a purpose and value according to the will of such a creator, and which lies beyond human understanding.

One spiritual, transcendental viewpoint is that of Taoism, the ancient Chinese philosophy which advocated quietism and conformity to the Way, or Tao: "The Tao is the natural order of things. It is a force that flows through every living or sentient object, as well as through the entire universe".

When questions of the nature of value are answered with "God", this is called "summum bonum".

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 happiness; 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.

The traits or properties that would justify calling a thing good are different for different categories of judgment. For example, the criteria by which we judge art to be good are different from those by which we judge people to be good. But it is difficult to see what the common property of all these things are in terms of what actually exists in the world.

Many judgments of goodness translate to prices, and prices tend to have some stability across people. But this appears to be a summary or effect of judgment, not a cause.

Moreover, if it is a property, it is not one that all people necessarily grasp. For instance, a piece of art found in an attic may be sold for the price of a meal. A collector may then recognise it as a lost work of a famous artist and sell it for more than the price of a house. The price changed because the collector had better judgment than the owner who kept it in an attic.

And still, if goodness were a common trait or property, we should be able to abstract it, but no one has succeeded.

Of course, one needn't conclude that something is impossible just because it hasn't been accomplished. Perhaps philosophers just haven't stumbled across the right definition.

Or perhaps some have. Robert S. Hartman, for example, claims he has. He maintains that "good" is a second-order property, a quantifier of qualities. For Hartman, to call a thing good is to contend that it posesses all of the qualities that are required in order for it to fit a certain meaning. See Science of Value.

Goodness and value theory - Goodness as subjective/evaluative

It is difficult to figure out where an immaterial trait such as "goodness" could reside in the world. A counterproposal is to locate values inside people. Some philosophers go so far as to say that if some state of affairs does not tend to arouse a desirable subjective state in self-aware beings, then it cannot be good.

Evaluative theorists may say that to answer the question "What things are intrinsically good?" we need only answer "What do I or we think is good?"

There are, however, problems with this approach.

Firstly, people can be wrong about what is good for them. For instance, a deranged man may be convinced that stabbing a fork in their eye is a good idea, but discovers otherwise after the fact. Or, more seriously, a child may not see the danger in crossing the road without looking first, but even in her state of ignorance may believe that crossing the road is a good idea.

Secondly, it can be objected that evaluative theories open the door to a total relativity of values, or ethical relativism. This would make it impossible for any moral laws or norms to exist in an absolute sense except through arbitrary and unstable mutual agreements.

Thirdly, on the surface of it, evaluative theories seem to lean toward subjectivism, or the idea that the individual is the judge and arbiter of values. Yet subjectivism does not account for the fact that often people in cultures agree about their values. This has spawned the view of conventionalism, which poses a challenge to subjectivism.

These two theories are at loggerheads, yet any theorist that seeks to explain values and goodness in terms of evaluations must deal with the issues of individualism and collectivism.

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.

One way to resolve the issue is to focus on empathy—the ability of a being to feel another's pain—which leads to helping behavior. People tend to value the lives of gorillas more than those of mosquitos because the gorilla lives and feels, making it easier to empathize with them. This idea is carried forward in the ethical relationship view and has given rise to the animal rights movement and parts of the peace movement.

This is compatible with Enlightenment views, including David Hume's stances that the idea of a self with unique identity is illusory, and that morality ultimately comes down to sympathy and fellow feeling for others, or the exercise of approval underlying moral judgements.

Some have defined goodness and that which is intrinsically valuable as the experience of pleasure, and the bad as the experience of pain. This view is called Hedonism, a monistic theory of value. It has two main varieties: simple, and Epicurean.

Simple hedonism is the view that physical pleasure is the ultimate good. However, the ancient philosopher Epicurus used the word 'pleasure' in a more general sense which encompassed a range of states from bliss to contentment to relief. Contrary to popular caricature, he valued pleasures of the mind to bodily pleasures, and advocated moderation as the surest path to happiness.

One of the benefits of tracing good to pleasure and pain is that both things seem to be easily understandable, both in oneself and to an extent in others.

There are potential problems with identifying goodness as pleasure.

Some deontological theorists allege that it is strange to say that carrying out one's duty (which they hold is obviously good) has anything to do with pleasure. In reply, Epicureans defend the doctrine of psychological hedonism, responding that all action proceeds from some sense of gratification.

Also, the sense of achievement following completion of one's work is rarely considered pleasure in the physical sense of the word. The Epicurean view of pleasure, however, considers it to be pleasurable.

Necessarily accompanying hedonism is the consideration of consequences. For example, visiting a dentist may cause some pain in the present while avoiding even more in the future. However, for the intuitions of many deontologists, consequentialism is strained when considering duty: following the order of a good rule, for example, involves no reflection on consequences at all, but rather involves immediate action. Epicureans reply that carrying out an action is different from recognizing its goodness, and that the latter necessarily involves thinking about pleasure and pain.

Much like the definitions of the good discussed above, situations producing happiness or pleasure are different in different categories of action. What is good in one situation is bad in another. These differences need to be explained.

Furthermore, the conditions and consequences of pleasure, or pain, can seem to be either good or bad, and thus seemingly undermine intuitions about that pleasure or pain. A sadist, for example, may enjoy torturing children, and gain pleasure from it, but surely this action is bad. The hedonist responds by pointing out that the principle holds even in this counterexample: the suffering of the child makes the act bad.

Neither happiness nor pleasure has been conceptually divided in a way that permits deductive choices of real-world alternatives. However, the Epicurean replies, this is an issue for most (if not all) theories of the good.

So imagine that the only intrinsically good things in the world are good pleasures. But this would be a circular account of "good". For, if one were to say that good things are good pleasures, then they would be using the word "good" to define itself.

Alternatively, one might try to find out which pleasures will result in the most other pleasures. Call them "optimal pleasures". Then, one could call optimal pleasures "intrinsically good" and then say: "the only instrinsically good things in the world are good pleasures." That would avoid the circularity problem.

But this, perhaps, is flawed. Imagine a nation of sadists. The public torture of one person in such a nation may produce more pleasure than any other event, since everyone's horrible urges would be satisfied. But many people would say that such an action would be bad. The hedonist might agree that the action is bad because of the avoidable pain of the person suffering, and in spite of the happiness generated by the people. This is seemingly paradoxical. However, the hedonist can continue to hold their position via one of at least two routes: they may weight the avoidance of pain above the pursuit of pleasure, and they may point out that the lives of those who have to live in a sadistic society are a hidden social consequence.

John Dewey (1859-1952) in his book Theory of Valuation saw goodness as the outcome of "valuation", a continuous balancing of "ends in view". An end in view was said to be an objective potentially adopted, which refined or rejected based on its consistency with other objectives or as a means to objectives already held.

His empirical approach did not accept intrinsic value as an inherent or enduring property of things. He saw it as an illusory product of our continuous valuing activity as purposive beings. When held across only some contexts, Dewey held that goods are only intrinsic to a situation. When across all contexts, goodness is best understood as instrumental, with no contrasting intrinsic goodness.

Dewey's formulation asserts, among others things, that:

• What is good cannot be defined in abstraction from situations and our experience of them.

• There seems to be no enduring thing which can be said to be absolutely good in itself.

• An inductive, empirical based investigation of goodness as the outcome of situations of valuation activity would be a more productive approach.

Some philosophers have criticized theories of the pragmatic sort by distinguishing between "what is" and "what should be". They claim that there is an unsurmountable gap between facts and values, the "fact-value distinction". The clearest proponent of this viewpoint was David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature, who famously questioned the move from statements about facts to statements about what ought to be.

Goodness and value theory - Choice optimization theory

One more recent philosophical idea being passed around is defining Good as "That which increases the quality and quantity of choices available overall."

This maxim might be countered by the phenomenon of opportunity costs observed by social scientists. Opportunity cost is when people who are confronted with a greater number of choices also experience greater dismay at their choices after the fact, because of the missed opportunities.

Goodness and value theory - Conceptual metaphor theorists

Conceptual metaphor theories argue against both subjective and objective conceptions of value and meaning, and focus on the relationships between body and other essential elements of human life. In effect, conceptual metaphor theories treat ethics as an ontology problem and the issue of how to work-out values as a negotiation of these metaphors, not the application of some abstraction or a strict standoff between parties who have no way to understand each other's views.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Theories of the good", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki