But I think that's Moore's contention: good can't be defined by or analyzed in terms of any other properties, good is a simple, sort of an atomic unit or fundamental building block of moral language and reasoning. — busycuttingcrap

Yes. I think it's true.

Whether Moore is right about this is, of course, a different story. — busycuttingcrap

What do you think about whether it's right or wrong and why?

Well, then, how do you know "Sally is good"? By what criterion are you making that judgment?

So, what's the consensus of the good in ethics? — Shawn

Well, for starters, whatever it is, "good" is categorically preferred in ethics to "bad".

Anyway, IME, philosophy isn't about "consensus" but about perplexity and problematizing our givens.

Moore proposed a form of consequentialism in terms of the good. Do you agree with him?

I "agree" much more with his younger contemporary Karl Popper's (sketchy) negative utilitarianism but even more so with the moral philosophers I referenced above in my first post on this thread. A succinct expression of my ethical outlook on "good" is expressed in this wiki article
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffering-focused_ethics to wit: the pragmatic priority (good) of reducing disvalues (suffering) over aspiring to values (happiness).

What do you think about whether it's right or wrong and why? — Shawn

Heh, way to put me on the spot. :wink:

Its been a while since I read any Principia Ethica, I'd have to think about it a bit (and probably do some reading) to say what I object to about Moore's view, specifically. But generally speaking, I tend to be sort of suspicious of realist meta-ethical views (and I think Moore's account certainly qualifies as such), and land more in the subjectivist, emotivist, non-cognitivist camp.

(That said, I think there's something nifty and fun about Moore's argument here- and same for his "proof" of external objects, i.e. the "here is a hand" argument- regardless of whether its sound or not; he was a rather clever chap)

But I think that's Moore's contention: good can't be defined by or analyzed in terms of any other properties, good is a simple, sort of an atomic unit or fundamental building block of moral language and reasoning. Whether Moore is right about this is, of course, a different story. — busycuttingcrap

If a unit is an atomic one, as you called it, it still does leave room for delineation from other things. For instance, an atom (in the sense you used it) "is an indivisible unit, something that has no components and inner structure".

This is to show that just because something is "atomic", it does not escape the possibility of getting defined.

This what I am saying is different from arguing whether "good" is atomic or not. I am arguing that just because something is atomic, it still can be defined, explained, described, and shown to be what it is.

That's A.

B. is that just because something is atomic, it still has properties. It behaves in one way or another in the world, and that behaviour can be traced back to the properties of this "atom".

Sure, that's a valid point; there are different kinds of definitions after all, and being unanalyzable in the sense Moore is talking about isn't necessarily the same as being indefinable in some other sense (for instance, as you say, delineating it from other things, giving examples, and so forth).

Well, then, how do you know "Sally is good"? By what criterion are you making that judgment? — 180 Proof

Any number of factors, depending on context. Maybe she is moral and kind. Maybe she is a competent guitarist. Whatever it is, it is something innate about her that is laudable.

When determining whether or not an action is good, we can ask ourselves what the world would be like if everyone did that. That's a pretty good rule of thumb.

Good can't be defined? That's a really nice place to start a discussion on ethics, oui?

Good is good? :chin:

May I suggest ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/768786 :chin:

Interesting. But I wanna know why Moore thinks good is (just) good? What are the implications of this claim for ethics? Carrying an empty sack?

Go ask Moore..In the meanwhile ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/768887

"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.

I invite examples that debunk this definition.

Please don't juxtapose something that is good now but will be not good later, or something that is good for Mr. X but not good for Ms. Y. Those violate the rule in the definition, "at the same time and in the same respect." — god must be atheist

Why do all of you ignore this? What's with the crap? Only because it renders all of our discussion meaningless?? you are all invalidating your arguments until you debunk the definition. This whole thread is meaningless crap, sophistry to the max, empty phrases that only sound good but have no weight in a thinking person's mind UNTIL you or I debunk the definition I gave here.

Don't be lazy, don't be stupid. Do it. Without first doing it, it is false and misleading and a LIE to speak "good is undefinable" when a completely good definition is staring you right in the face.

All you, or anyone of you, or I, have to do is come up with an example, a valid example, in which the definition fails. It is not an insurmountable task: just one example, and that's all we need to continue the hifolutin' discussion.

Do it, for chrissakes.

Please don't get me wrong. This is not an ego issue. I would be the happiest if someone came up with an example that invalidates the definition I provided.

It doesn't even matter that I provided the definition. What matters is that a definition exists, that nobody invalidated, and then you ALL keep talking about how "good" can't be defined.

It is right there, for crying out loud. The definition. Why do you keep harping on it does not exist and it can't exist? Don't you see the irony of this?

How long do you think you want to keep on being ridiculous? The king has a green overcoat, and you are all wondering why it's not green and furthermore that it's impossible for it to be green... when it's green, right in front of your eyes.

I would like to ask you why a perfectly serviceable definition based on joy/suffering is circular (re Moore)?

Does Moore mean that good is bringing joy to people, you included, is circular? I'm using yer definition and looking at Moore's book's title Principia Ethica, he means business i.e. he's not making shit up.

C'mon guys & gals. Principia Ethica was written/published in 1903 (120 years ago). Have we learned nothing in 1.2 centuries?

"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.

I invite examples that debunk this definition. — god must be atheist

I like it. So X is good iff it is three of advantageous, pleasant, helpful and accommodating.

These are interesting. Advantageous, helpful and accommodating are adjectives describing a means to an end. The end pursued is the good thing, and things that help you get there are instrumentally good, right?

Pleasure, as Hume observed, seems to be an end in itself.

So we have two theories here, do we? Would you like to unify these and say that the good is pleasure and anything that helps us get there is instrumentally good?

That is, one can consistently conceive of someone willing what is not good. — Banno

I can't conceive of a good that is good from nobody's point of view, that isn't willed by someone.

There can be contradictory goods in a world with multiple wills. From a rapist's point of view, raping someone is fab, if a bit sweaty.

So we have two theories here, do we? Would you like to unify these and say that the good is pleasure and anything that helps us get there is instrumentally good? — bert1

Thank you, thank you, thank you!! finally someone who doesn't ignore my input.

You separated "good" into two kinds: pleasure, and instruments that lead to pleasure.

At this point I agree with you.

As someone already mentioned it, "good" can only be a judgment by sentient beings. Plants, in my opinion, can't tell if something is good or bad, they just survive or not, thrive or whither. Animals are equipped with decision making survival capabilities, and that definitely needs to involve concepts of good and concepts of bad. Bad is suffocation, being eaten alive, having your mother torn to pieces in front of you. Good is being liked, sex, food, laughter, music, dancing.

A chair is good because it helps me sit comfortably. A magnet is good because it shows me which way to go. A wolf is bad when he jumps me, but good when it keeps the deer population at bay.

Good and bad are hopelessly tied to being alive and having senses.

An advanced version of this is morals: morals have to do not with pleasure or survival, but with the survival of the nearest available derivative of one's dna.
--------------------------

Thanks, Bert1, for picking up the baton.

One must constantly live under the caution that nothing in human nature is universal. There are 8 billion of us, and each of us are different. Due to differences in qualities that make us up. The differences are borne from mutations. Some mutations and / or gene couplings are extreme. Therefore there are people with no conscience, no guilt, no remorse, who can commit any sin or crime and feel fine about it. Most of us can't.

Such is the case with "good" as well. There are masochists, whose idea of a good time is not pleasure but suffering.

Because of these extreme anomalies one must not reject a theory or natural law.

Pleasure, as Hume observed, seems to be an end in itself. — bert1

He's my favourite philosopher of them all. He had more fresh, individual and original insight than anyone else.

I think this by Hume is the proper answer to the claim that good can't be defined because any attempts lead to circularity.

Well, yes. If something can't be topped, if something is the end of the line, then that's what it is, instead of it being a logical conundrum. Good is a biopsychologically derived product of judgment, and since we are all in the category who behave to the rules governing that product, obviously we can't think of any valid "good" which could point us to something better than "good".

However, to define "good" is not that hard.

I have a feeling, that what adjustment Bert1 had done to my definition, and my ensuing insights, already have had an extensive literature, and they are well-known theories in philosophy.

Where I come in is that I intuited the same truth, if you want to call it truth, without any prior reading; and that I tried to adjust the discussion to become sensible.

This is not the first time this happens to me. I invented an inertia navigation device, in principle; then I went to the library to research how to build its components, and there was a roomful of books denoted to the invention.

There had been quite a few revelations in my life like that. Coming to a realization that I thought was original, only because of my lack of previously engaging myself in reading about it in the applicable literature.

One day, I am sure, I'll come up with something that is truly original.

The only question is, is this going to happen before or after I die.

The first thought I had was justice.

Justice is generally considered good.

And yet justice is not...

...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

because sometimes justice must deal with rule-breaking. So while it is disadvantageous and unpleasant and unhelpful nor accommodating to punish people for breaking the rules, it's a part of what makes justice just: That the rules are fairly applied, even if inconvenient.

I think most rule-bound notions of justice would go against your definition, insofar that the rules were justified because of their fairness. (of course, rule-bound utilitarianism would go with what you said, it's just stating utility in terms of rules though -- that's not what I mean)

What is fair is not always pleasant. And, truth be told, we waste a lot of money on pursuing justice while failing to attain it, so its advantage is at least questionable. Sometimes it's advantageous to just let things go, fairness be damned. And sometimes it's good to be unhelpful and unaccommodating, such as when a group of people let their grievances be known publicly.


But even more directly, to get at what began the thread -- we can always sensibly ask, no matter what definition you provide, if the definition you provide is a good definition.

So if the good is defined by happiness, we can ask "But is happiness really good?" -- does that question make sense to you?

If we double down and say, yes, happiness really is the good, then the question falls flat.

But if you agree that the question makes sense, rather than it being a tautology, then there must be a distinction between happiness and goodness such that we can ask the question and make sense of it.

So if the good is defined by happiness, we can ask "But is happiness really good?" -- does that question make sense to you?

If we double down and say, yes, happiness really is the good, then the question falls flat.

But if you agree that the question makes sense, rather than it being a tautology, then there must be a distinction between happiness and goodness such that we can ask the question and make sense of it — Moliere

What a mess. So far every contribution to this thread has used circular terms to ‘define’ the good. Even fairness implies a moral notion of equivalence or balance. Fair refers to a ‘good’ sort of balance. Justice may not be pleasant but it is ‘good’. Hmm, so there is no ‘pleasantness’ associated with aim of justice? What’s needed is a definition of good , pleasant , happy , absence of suffering, that breaks out of the circle and shatters Moore’s contention. We have a number of options to choose from here. We could look at biologically-based thinking that grounds affective valuation in the organizational principles of living systems.

Of course , in the most basic sense, all life forms are shaped by pressures for survival. But it is not simple survival that is at stake, but the ability to preserve stable ongoing self-consistency of interaction with an environment under changing conditions. Thus living systems have an overall normative directionality, and it is this which it is necessary to maintain when we talk about ‘survival’. So what is ‘good’ for an organism is good from the perspective of its own aims and purposes, which are anticipatory. Living systems are anticipatory sense-makers. In a cognizing creature, what is good is associated with what is coherent , intelligible, predictable in a relative sense, and what is ‘better is aligned with what enables one to attain greater intimacy, consistency and intelligibility of events. What is bad is associated with chaos , confusion, the interruption of coherent sense-making.

It s not as if the subjective feelings of good and bad are mechanisms arbitrarily tacked onto these organizational
dynamics, such that at some point the correlation between goodness and intelligibility could be severed and good could become attached to incoherence.
Goodness is simply another way to talk about what enhances normative functioning of a cognizing system.
Goodness must be detached from the reliance most moral theories place on specific qualitative content of meaning, and instead conceived in terms of the anticipatory integrity of sense-making.

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

That is consistent, at least, with Moore's notion as I understand it.

Even fairness implies a moral notion of equivalence or balance. Fair refers to a ‘good’ sort of balance. Justice may not be pleasant but it is ‘good’. Hmm, so there is no ‘pleasantness’ associated with aim of justice? What’s needed is a definition of good , pleasant , happy , absence of suffering, that breaks out of the circle and shatters Moore’s contention. We have a number of options to choose from here. We could look at biologically-based thinking that grounds affective valuation in the organizational principles of living systems.

So if you say justice implies a moral notion of equivelence or balance -- where fairness is the good sort of balance -- I understand what you mean by the good sort of justice vs. the bad sort of justice. Hence, justice is not goodness, because I can understand justice in both the good and the bad way.

I used justice because I think it's the sort of moral value that tends go against values that put happiness and comfort as the sum of all that is good, which I took @god must be atheist to be proposing.

But there is no sum of all that is good. There is no reducing goodness to some other thing. It's all those things, but then we find that some goods conflict with one another.

"Proper functioning" was the original position that I thought made sense of ethics in a naturalistic way, which is what counts against Moore. However, I think the open-question argument works against proper functioning just as well as any other definition proposed of goodness -- and not because it's a priori, but because "proper functioning" leads to contradictory goods that we must choose between. Even if there are natural, ethical facts -- people choose against proper functioning and call it good.

Even if there are natural, ethical facts -- people choose against proper functioning and call it good. — Moliere

You lost me. How exactly are you understanding ‘proper functioning’ and what does it have to do with the normatively oriented organizational dynamics of living systems?
And give me an example of how one ‘chooses against proper functioning’? I have a feeling you are conflating ‘proper’ with a specific qualitative content of meaning, which places you squarely back within the circular defining of ‘good’( my qualitative meaning of good differs from your qualitative meaning of it).

RE: Is "good" indefinable?
et al,

This is a judgmental perception.


(COMMENT)

Good is unique to the observer's perspective. IF there is more than one observer, THEN there is the possibility that they may not agree on whether or not an event is either "GOOD" • or • "BAD."

Most Respectfully,
R

You lost me. How exactly are you understanding ‘proper functioning’ and what does it have to do with the normatively oriented organizational dynamics of living systems? — Joshs

It's how William Casebeer likes to translate Aristotle's eudaimonia in Natural Ethical Facts.

Normatively oriented organization dynamics of living systems sounds a lot to me like what Casebeer was proposing in making a science of ethics loosely based on Aristotle's ethics, which is similarly natural and biological. So it's just where my mind went.

I have a feeling you are conflating ‘proper’ with a specific qualitative content of meaning, which places you squarely back within the circular defining of ‘good’( my qualitative meaning of good differs from your qualitative meaning of it). — Joshs

Even if that's not the mistake I'm making, I'm probably making a mistake somewhere. If we're lost we're probably beginning from different places entirely.

I'm a meta-ethical nihilist of the error-theory variety. I don't think there's really a way to define good in some natural or factual way. I think the argument from difference is what persuades me of this, in the end -- people simply do disagree over what is most important and make choices between goods, and in those cases people have good reasons in spite of contradicting one another in a matter of choice, so to say one is good or the other is good is to make a similar choice. I think we make choices between competing goods, and "goods" is itself something which we define for ourselves. So, contra Aristotle, who believes there are proper functions of an organism, I'd say there are no such functions or teleologies or natural facts.

I don't claim anywhere that "GE Moore's definition of good is circular." Ask Shawn or Banno or ... My objection to positive definitions of good ("value") in ethics is that they are besides the point, or idle. (NB: I'm certainly not a moral nihilist / error theorist either ...)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/768887

I'm a meta-ethical nihilist of the error-theory variety. I don't think there's really a way to define good in some natural or factual way. I think the argument from difference is what persuades me of this, in the end -- people simply do disagree over what is most important and make choices between goods, and in those cases people have good reasons in spite of contradicting one another in a matter of choice, so to say one is good or the other is good is to make a similar choice. I think we make choices between competing goods, and "goods" is itself something which we define for ourselves — Moliere

The organizational dynamics I laid out don’t have to be understood in naturalized fashion. In fact I think it’s best understood as a metaphysical presupposition, and it underlies, in different ways, the ethical thinking of philosophers as diverse as Husserl, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze , Rorty , Gergen and Derrida.

Yes, people do disagree over what is most important if we look at their preferences strictly in terms of qualitative content. But we can’t stop there , because then we are only reifying the domain of good as an arbitrary value rather than getting at its origin. There is no such thing as a good in itself , even if we are restricting this good in itself to a contingent subject. What arises for any of us as something good is what works for us within the framework of a system of values to enrich and move forward that system. But value systems are always in the process of changing into new systems, so that the particular qualitative content that represents a good within one system is no longer works within the new system. So this is the contingent and relative aspect of good. But the other aspect of the good is universal and a priori.

This is the aspect of the good which survives changes in values systems, it’s formal rather than specific structure. This aspect of the good we all can agree on. Since eventually any good within a particular value system will stop working for us as we move beyond that system, the philosophers I mentioned above agree that it is universally ‘better’ to keep oneself mobile , to celebrate the movement from one value system to one that replaces it rather than getting stuck in any one system for too long. So you see that for these thinkers the universal , formal aspect of goodness as efficacy of relational change ( usefulness) is more significant that the contingent and relative aspect that you highlight. It is this understanding of the universal aspect of the good that allows us to honor an endless plurality of value systems, and along with them an endless variety of qualitative senses of the good, rather than looking for the correct one. We understand that each sense of the good works within its system, and is valid for that reason and within that context.

Assuming bert1 is a Kantian, does it follow that which is willed, is the good? — Shawn

Kantian or not, it's clear that @bert1's account leads quickly to incoherence...

From a rapist's point of view, raping someone is fab, if a bit sweaty. — bert1

He can't say for sure if even rape is not a good.

While Bert may have trouble seeing it, I'm sure most here would agree that what someone wills is not the very same concept as what is good.