Right. That's the salient point when it comes to invoking evolutionary biology as a rationale for ethical normativity. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure this correctly represents my view, or if that is what it seems, I did not intend that.

"Rationale" suggests justification, or excuses bad behavior, and I did not mean to suggest that we give in to our basest instincts. But we need to be aware of them to override them.

I did not mean to comment of "ethical normativity" - whatever that is - but rather to comment on what we have to work with.

The connection between goodness and rightness is as follows: if X is good, then one ought to behave in such a manner so that X is the case.

The problem, I think, in your OP is that you fail to recognize three things about ethical contemplation: (1) goodness is not necessarily about behavior, (2) goodness is largely contextual, and (3) rightness can be pragmatic.

Viz.,:

1) Goodness is just about what ought to be—not what one ought to do. E.g., it is good not to get cancer, independently of what is the right thing for a person to be doing. Your OP presupposes that goodness is just connected to rightness.

2) Goodness is contextual, even if one believes in some sort of absolutism (e.g., platonism, divine law, etc.): what is good, i.e., in X ceteris paribus may not be good given more factors.

3) What is right, which is about good behavior (and not what is good simpliciter), has an ideal and pragmatic element to it. Viz., just because I should do X in a perfect world does not entail that I should do it in the real world right now. E.g., in a perfect world, I shouldn’t eat other animals, but that doesn’t mean that it is impermissible to eat them given the circumstances that I need to them to survive and the fact that they are not persons.

For example, most people would agree that selling all your worldly possessions and donating the money to charity is something that would be good

I don’t believe that most ethicists would agree with this; because it entails that is good to be purely selfless, which disrespectful to oneself. Why would it be good to give someone all your food, and then starve to death?

They certainly would agree that one should donate their excess of goods to charity, all else being equal, or that duty may require a person to be purely selfless (like a soldier sacrificing their life for another); but not that it is good to just donate everything, all else being equal, to charity.

However, if it were good to donate everything to charity, then it plainly follows that one should be doing it; but this is all else being equal: it may be the case that it is good ceteris paribus but not good given <…>….e.g., if you need to feed your family, then it is not good to donate your food to charity, but if we are analyzing the mere donation to charity all else being then it is a good act. Your OP has conflated all the possible contexts into one.

However, that doesn't mean that one is obligated to do so

Rightness and wrongness are the primitive properties of moral (i.e., behavioral) discourse; and are not to be conflated with obligatoriness. Permissibility (and its negation), ommissibility (and its negation), and obligatoriness (and its negation) are complex properties built off of the former properties.

Just because it is good to do X, which does entail that one should be doing X ceteris paribus, it does not follow that one is obligated to do X. That is, just because, e.g., I should do X it does not follow that I am required to do X.

You also slide from what is good per se to what is good for an organism.

Yet the two aren't unrelated, even if they aren't identical. Just as beliefs and statements are the sort of things that can be true or false, and these are only made or possessed by entities with minds, so too it doesn't make sense to speak of "goodness" in the absence of any experiencing thing. Nothing is good or bad for a rock or a comet, except perhaps in some very loosely analogous sense (e.g. warm air is "good" for hurricanes to the extent that it sustains them).

This is the difficulty of defining a notion of goodness (or beauty and truth) in per se terms in a metaphysics that has eliminated the transcendent. You have a multiplicity of goods, what is going to unify them?

Sure, and I understand (roughly) how Ethics is taught.

In a lot of ethical thought, it is "good for you" to be good. I would imagine most ethics courses start with these because they tend to dominate the earlier epochs. The pursuit of the good is also the pursuit of freedom and happiness. Hence, acting unethically is simply hurting yourself.

To be sure, you might be able to attain some goods by acting unethically. An unethical businessman might cheat and manipulate his way into having wealth and status, the ability to procure all sorts of goods for himself.

Here is the analogy Boethius draws in the later parts of the Consolation for this situation. Flourishing is like trying to climb a mountain. At the top is the highest good, which is good per se, but alsogood for us. You'll be happiest if you make it to the top, but you'll also be happier if you make it higher up the mountain.

The virtuous person is like someone who learns how to properly climb. They walk up the mountain, or scale the difficult parts. The wicked person can make it up the mountain, but they are like a person who has learned to walk on their hands. Their means are inefficient, and ultimately they will never make it to the summit that way. When a storm comes, bad fortune, the virtuous person can hang on, or if they fall, they can quickly climb back up. The vice addled person unstably walking on their hands topples over and plummets down the mountain (e.g. our wicked business cheat might lose his wealth and status through bad luck, and then where will he be? Meanwhile, Socrates gets sentenced to death and quips that "nothing bad can happen to a good man;" he is unperturbed).

I did not mean to comment of "ethical normativity" - whatever that is - but rather to comment on what we have to work with. — Questioner

That's OK, I'm not accusing you of anything! But 'ethical normativity' is precisely the nub of the question posed by the OP - why ought we do good.

My comment and the quote I provided was about the general assumption that evolution provides the basis or ground for judgements about such matters. That is what I'm questioning. I hasten to add I'm not promoting any kind of 'Intelligent Design' agenda. I'm overall pretty familiar with the evolution of h.sapiens, and evolution generally, which I've studied since I was a child (I grew up on the excellent Time-Life series of books.) But I think our culture leans too heavily on evolutionary theory for a sense of identity. It is a biological theory about the origin of species. Due to the historical circumstances of its discovery it has assumed a role for which I don't think it's suitable. See Is Evolution a Secular Religion? Michael Ruse.

Yet the two aren't unrelated — Count Timothy von Icarus

You wanted to draw a symmetry between "true" and "good". If there were such a symmetry, then there would be a schema for "good" that is equivalent to Tarski's schema for "true". There isn't. Hence the supposed symmetry isn't there.

Being true is about sentences while being good is about attitude. They are quite distinct.

Being true is about sentences — Banno

:chin:

If there were such a symmetry, then there would be a schema for "good" that is equivalent to Tarski's schema for "true". There isn't. Hence the supposed symmetry isn't there.

Well no, I explained the symmetry that I think exists. You have invented your own positions to argue with that no one has presented.



An eyebrow raiser to be sure.

:chin: — Wayfarer

It's sentences that are true or false.

I feel obliged to say something about the conscilience between being good and being true in pre-modern philosophy. Sound judgement relies on clear vision, the ability to assess what is the case and respond accordingly. And this, across a wide range of situations and scenarios. It isn't a matter of technical know how or specific subject-matter expertise, but - what's that old-fashioned word? - wisdom, a.k.a. sapience (part of our species name, as it happens.) Of course, for us moderns, that is challenging, because the universe is supposed to be indifferent to us, and besides not animated by anything other than physical laws. But I felt it was worth calling out.

To be sure, you might be able to attain some goods by acting unethically. An unethical businessman might cheat and manipulate his way into having wealth and status, the ability to procure all sorts of goods for himself. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So what ought we to say to the unethical businessman? Should we say, "You're being inefficient and improvident. You're not getting as many goods as you'd get if you behaved ethically, and furthermore when the hard winds blow, you won't do as well as the ethical person"?

That doesn't strike me as ethical discourse at all, and I'm fairly sure you wouldn't endorse it. The problem here is that you're still allowing "It's good for you to be good" to represent a coherent statement within ethics. But either each instance of "good" means the same thing, in which case the statement provides no information, or else "good" is equivocal, with each "good" meaning something different, in which case you could get a variety of interpretations, such as "You'll receive things you desire (= good1) if you are virtuous (= good2)" or "You'll flourish (= good1) if you are virtuous (= good2)" or "Being virtuous (= good2) will be pleasurable for you (= good 1)." But what you can't derive is a statement that says either "It is not virtuous (= good 2) to achieve good1" or "Good 2 does not refer to the things named as good1". Both of those require ethical argument of a particular sort -- an argument that shows why the goods of personal life (pleasure, success, honor, love, etc.) are distinct from right action. An appeal to any of those goods as a reason for right action takes us once more out of ethics and into . . . well, psychology, or power dynamics, or something.

Yeah, OK, I'm impressed by Kant's ethics, so sue me! :wink:

I explained the symmetry that I think exists. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Did you? Perhaps your erudite post made the explanation recondite.

So what was it, again?

To be sure, you might be able to attain some goods by acting unethically. An unethical businessman might cheat and manipulate his way into having wealth and status, the ability to procure all sorts of goods for himself. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But it's more than that.

There's nothing to prevent that wealthy businessman from not having a rewarding and happy life. Access to significantly better food, superior health care, services and accommodation. To be able to provide these for friends, cronies and family as needed. To have sick children obtain preferential treatment. To access the best art, travel, education and advice. To live longer, healthier and safer and to have everyone they care about provided with the best things available in the culture. These are non-trivial matters and while the saying 'money can't buy you happiness' is often provided rather wanly when talking about such folk, sometimes it's the case that precisely the opposite is true.

being good is about attitude — Banno

This seems right to me.

[

So what ought we to say to the unethical businessman? Should we say, "You're being inefficient and improvident. You're not getting as many goods as you'd get if you behaved ethically, and furthermore when the hard winds blow, you won't do as well as the ethical person"?

It's not all we could say, but it's part of what we could say.

That doesn't strike me as ethical discourse at all

Well see, perhaps MacIntyre does have a point, because in ancient and medieval ethics the idea that it is "good (for you) to be good" and never "bad to be good" is a very strong thread. Socrates' lines after being sentenced to die: "Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death," and: "When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing—then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, both I and my sons will have received justice at your hands," are not throw-away lines.

The problem here is that you're still allowing "It's good for you to be good" to represent a coherent statement within ethics. But either each instance of "good" means the same thing, in which case the statement provides no information, or else "good" is equivocal, with each "good" meaning something different, in which case you could get a variety of interpretations, such as "You'll receive things you desire (= good1) if you are virtuous (= good2)" or "You'll flourish (= good1) if you are virtuous (= good2)" or "Being virtuous (= good2) will be pleasurable for you (= good 1)." But what you can't derive is a statement that says either "It is not virtuous (= good 2) to achieve good1" or "Good 2 does not refer to the things named as good1". Both of those require ethical argument of a particular sort -- an argument that shows why the goods of personal life (pleasure, success, honor, love, etc.) are distinct from right action. An appeal to any of those goods as a reason for right action takes us once more out of ethics and into . . . well, psychology, or power dynamics, or something.

Only supposing that our only options are total equivocity, "good" means something entirely different when it is "good for you," and total univocity. I don't think these are our only options. The relation here is analogous; pros hen predication is open to us.

The history leading up to Kant is probably relevant here in that it is the denial of analogy, the drive towards the univocity of being, and the voluntarism of Reformation theology that serves as the backdrop for the emergence of the Enlightenment. The relationship between metaphysics and ethics is subtle here, but I think there is a real relevance because you can see something very similar at work in Islamic thought, with the univocity of Fakhr al-Dīn, versus the preference for analogy in other commentators on Avicenna. Univocity leads towards voluntarist theology because God cannot be absolutely sovereign if God's freedom is subject to some sort of outside Good. This elevates the Good above God, such that the Good is really what dictates what God does. This is exactly what Plotinus is trying to avoid in the tractate on divine freedom.

Thinkers make this same sort of argument in atheistic contexts today. "We cannot be free if we are bound to some Good, we can only be free if we decide what the Good is." That's one problem with univocity.

If we're stuck with a univocal good, we can still talk about tradeoffs between different goods or the distinction between apparent goods and real goods (reality versus appearances). Yet, I think we'll still find things quite difficult because we will be trying to explain goodness in a framework where appearances seem to be arbitrarily related to reality. For instance, sex and drinking can be goods in the good life (partaking in the univocal good), but then what does what is sought by the sex addict and the alcoholic lack this good? Or perhaps there is some precise level of each that should be sought? It seems to me though that the Good must be sought as a principle that is manifest in a vast multiplicity of things, which is going to make it extremely challenging to explain univocally. When the lion catches its prey, it seems "good for the lion" and "bad for the prey" by nature for instance.

One solution here is to simply split of "moral good" from any other notion of goodness, and I think this simply leaves the good impotent. People ask "why be good?" and we have no answer for them. People ask "why is x good?" and we find ourselves explaining that "goodness is a non-natural property..."

Edit: BTW, we need not look to MacIntyre's Aristotelian tradition here to find this thread. It's in the work of the Stoic philosopher-slave Epictetus or Laozi and other Eastern philosophers.

So forget about what is good or not good, and instead focus on what to do.

After all, wasn't the reason for trying to work out what was good, precisely to enable us to decide what we ought do?

There's nothing to prevent that wealthy businessman from not having a rewarding and happy life. Access to significantly better food, superior health care, services and accommodation. To be able to provide these for friends, cronies and family as needed. To have sick children obtain preferential treatment. To access the best art, travel, education and advice. To live longer, healthier and safer and to have everyone they care about provided with the best things available in the culture. These are non-trivial matters and while the saying 'money can't buy you happiness' is often provided rather wanly when talking about such folk, sometimes it's the case that precisely the opposite is true.

This depends on how you want to define "happiness" I suppose. In Boethius' sense, this is eudaimonia, "flourishing." No one in this tradition argues that money cannot be useful vis-a-vis the attainment of eudaimonia, just that money does not accomplish this of itself.

You could certainly call what you describe a "pleasurable" life. But let's take this example to the extreme in order to see if pleasure and flourishing are equivalent:

Suppose we have given a power AGI instructions to maximize human pleasure. They go about raising children, tending to their every need, and keeping them awash in pleasurable sensations. The children grow into adults, but never develop much beyond the cognitive equivalent of infants. However, they are experiencing a great deal of pleasure. Is this a "good life? " Is it "human flourishing?"

Or, less extreme, we could consider the Gammas of "A Brave New World," conditioned to enjoy their jobs and fear novelty, enjoying a steady stream of mass media to consume and soma to binge on (a sort of side effect free version of MDMA).

One thing to note is that in all three examples the state of general pleasure felt is not particularly self-determining. If the AI malfunctions the humans are doomed. Likewise, the Gammas turn to enraged rioting when their soma is kept from them. The business cheat is unlikely to remain happy if he is exposed and loses his status and wealth, and is sent to prison. Socrates, St. Paul, St. Ignatius, Boethius, etc. all seem pretty sublime in prison, awaiting execution.

So there is the question of stability, but also of freedom. Is being more free part of flourishing? I would say yes. But someone who would be miserable without all sorts of apparent goods is in a sense less free. Consider the business cheat. Suppose he wants to stop cheating but knows he will be miserable without his wealth and all it buys. Well, without great strength of will he will be unfree to stop cheating, and even if he is continent and he does stop cheating, he will be (at least temporarily) unfree to live a life he finds pleasant.

Suppose we have given a power AGI instructions to maximize human pleasure. They go about raising children, tending to their every need, and keeping them awash in pleasurable sensations — Count Timothy von Icarus

Pleasure is not a reflex mechanism, or the release of chemicals. It is an enormously complex phenomenon inseparably linked to overarching goals and interpretive values. Being “awash in pleasurable sensations” amounts to
achievements in sense-making of a norm-driven organism.

After all, wasn't the reason for trying to work out what was good, precisely to enable us to decide what we ought do?

Yes, as Socrates says in the Republic, we would prefer to always have what is truly best, not what merely seems best at the moment, or what others say is best. The difficulty is that experience teaches us that what we desire most is not always what is truly best. We do things we regret. So, "what we ought to do" is obviously not always "what we want to do" (i.e. what appears to be good to us). Presumably, this is truly what we ought to want, since reason tells us that it makes no sense to prefer that we should possess or achieve what is truly worse, and not what is truly better.

For instance, if someone were to show 's "unscrupulous businessman who lives a very pleasant life" that another life would truly be better, presumably he would want that better life and not his current one, even if he lacked the will or means to achieve it. No one says: "I want to be fundamentally deluded about how to live the best life possible, and live a worse life instead."

Yet, if we want to possess or achieve what is truly best, I am not sure how this is accomplished without knowing what is truly best. Thus, we are back to knowing what is truly better or truly worse.

But I don't think making progress on this knowledge is impossible. Plato gives us a decent start with some things that will be key regardless of what the Good turns out to be, As he points out, certain epistemic virtues are a prerequisite for conducting successful inquiry, while one also needs the reflexive freed/will power to act on what one knows if knowledge of the Good is to be useful. So, clearly, the prerequisites for discovering what is "truly best" must themselves be good.



Sure. Is this an objection to the example? Do you think it's impossible? What about the A Brave New World example? I only mention these as limit examples. The more general point is that it seems quite possible to have many pleasurable experiences and a "pleasant life," while avoiding the development of faculties and aptitudes that we tend to think are important for human flourishing.

Sure. Is this an objection to the example? Do you think it's impossible? What about the A Brave New World example? I only mention these as limit examples. The more general point is that it seems quite possible to have many pleasurable experiences and a "pleasant life," while avoiding the development of faculties and aptitudes that we tend to think are important for human flourishing — Count Timothy von Icarus

I dont think so. Pleasure and what you are thinking of in ethical terms as ‘human flourishing’ are not independent entities. And given that all goals and purposes, including minor pleasures, are integrated holistically at a superordinate level, the depth of satisfaction of a pleasant life will be directly correlated with human flourishing. Of course, the other’s criterion of flourishing may not meet your standards, in which case you’re likely to split off their life of pleasures against what you consider robust flourishing, rather than adjusting your construal of their way of life such as to gain a more effective understanding of how they actually see things. That’s more difficult than carrying around a priori concepts of flourishing in your wallet.

After all, wasn't the reason for trying to work out what was good, precisely to enable us to decide what we ought do?

Exactly. "Good", as a subjective descriptor is a functional label (when applied to actions and outcomes) for what an individual finds to be moral, which is what that individual ought to do. Of course a different individual will have a somewhat different set of what they find to subjectively be "good", and thus will have a somewhat different set of what is moral and thus what they ought to do.

On the matter of pleasure/flourishing, I think I agree with Joshs -

Pleasure and what you are thinking of in ethical terms as ‘human flourishing’ are not independent entities. And given that all goals and purposes, including minor pleasures, are integrated holistically at a superordinate level, the depth of satisfaction of a pleasant life will be directly correlated with human flourishing. Of course, the other’s criterion of flourishing may not meet your standards, in which case you’re likely to split off their life of pleasures against what you consider robust flourishing, rather than adjusting your construal of their way of life such as to gain a more effective understanding of how they actually see things. That’s more difficult than carrying around a priori concepts of flourishing in your wallet. — Joshs

Nicely expressed.

The more general point is that it seems quite possible to have many pleasurable experiences and a "pleasant life," while avoiding the development of faculties and aptitudes that we tend to think are important for human flourishing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd say someone we might regard as evil is probably as capable of leading a full and rewarding life as anyone else. The point I made about the aforementioned wealthy swindler is that their easy access to life-enhancing, qualitative aspects—like healthcare, services, education, and culture—allows them to enrich their flourishing further. It’s not merely about Fabergé eggs and flashy red cars.

I guess the crux of this matter is the question - are some forms of flourishing more virtuous than others? I think this comes down to the values of the person making that judgement. If you are influenced by Aristotle or Christianity you will say yes.

Why should one do that which is good? — Hyper

Because it's good, an end in itself. However, to exploit goodness as a means for other ends is not so good. Lots of people want to be good, or appear good, as a means to hide or compensate for whatever bad that they have done.

No, I don't think that good is synonymous with, "something one ought to do". For example, most people would agree that selling all your worldly possessions and donating the money to charity is something that would be good. However, that doesn't mean that one is obligated to do so. Please input into this conversation with your own takes. — Hyper

If it's in your power to prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, then you're morally obliged to do so (e.g. Peter Singer).

Are the examples impossible or do you just not want to call this "pleasure?"


Something like the Gammas in "A Brave New World," doesn't seem impossible to me. Are they flourishing though?

I dont think so. Pleasure and what you are thinking of in ethical terms as ‘human flourishing’ are not independent entities

Well, this is another false dichotomy. They don't need to be "independent" to not be the "the same thing." I would agree that anhedonia is not conducive to human flourishing, but that doesn't make "pleasure" and "flourishing" synonyms, or terms that cannot be usefully differentiated such that one can be present in the relative absence of another.

Human pleasure is very complex because humans are very complex. But causing pleasure can be fairly simple. Sticking an electrode into the appropriate part of the human brain and applying electrical current will result in sensations described as "intensely pleasurable." Monkeys will likewise show signs of pleasure upon similar stimulation and will self-stimulate in this way if given the option, even if it means undergoing demanding tasks or ignoring other goods.

To make the two inseparable is simply to ignore what most people mean by the word "pleasure." Short experiences like watching a movie, sex, eating, etc. can be "pleasant" and "pleasurable," on normal understandings of these terms. Animals are said to respond to "pleasurable stimuli " in research, etc.

But on no conventional usage of "flourishing" or "living a/the good life," does eating a good meal, watching a fun movie, or having an electrode in one's head stimulated, etc. constitute the achievement of those latter terms.

So, while I agree that one is "situated in the other," this does not make "pleasure" a synonym for, or inseparable from "flourishing." This is to use the words in a very different way from how it is employed in psychology/neuroscience and regular usage.

Of course, the other’s criterion of flourishing may not meet your standards, in which case you’re likely to split off their life of pleasures against what you consider robust flourishing, rather than adjusting your construal of their way of life such as to gain a more effective understanding of how they actually see things. That’s more difficult than carrying around a priori concepts of flourishing in your wallet.

This seems like using an uncoventional definition of "pleasure" to equivocate on as a means of supporting relativism without actually making a clear argument for it, i.e the latter part here where "separating pleasure from flourishing is simply choosing the 'easier' and simplistic analysis."

But of course, it isn't obvious why thinking that "people can be wrong about what is good for them," necessitates an inability to be more or less able to "see things as other people see them." Indeed, people often differentiate between pleasure and flourishing in terms of how they see their own flourishing. Watch any documentary on serious drug addicts and your likely to see claims like: "these drugs ruined my whole fucking life," presented with a direct contrast to how pleasurable they are. To refuse to differentiate between pleasure and flourishing here is itself to refuse to "gain a more effective understanding of how they actually see things."

I won't even touch the "a priori" part, except to say this is akin to leaping to "the self as hermetically sealed solipsism," i.e. another extreme false dichotomy/strawman.

I guess the crux of this matter is the question - are some forms of flourishing more virtuous than others? I think this comes down to the values of the person making that judgement. If you are influenced by Aristotle or Christianity you will say yes.

Well, the difficulty here is that "virtuous" has come to mean something very different in modern ethics. The term can mean simply, "being more in line with a sui generis 'moral good' that is unrelated to other goods."

For Aristotle, the virtues (excellences) are exactly those traits that allow one to achieve happiness. Eudaimonia is a virtuous life. There aren't multiple forms of flourishing, even if there are very many different ways to flourish, which might vary by culture, epoch, and individual.

In particular, for Aristotle in Book X of the Ethics, as for many other thinkers, the life of contemplation is highest. The highest human achievement is to "become like God." As St. Athanasius puts: "God became man that man might become God." But you can also think of the God of the philosophers as simply a transcendental limit case. God is threatened by no one and so hates and fears nothing. God is completely self-determining, impassible, and so God's happiness and beneficence is never threatened.

It seems impossible for the unscrupulous cheat to ever attain to this mode of life, thus the lack of the appropriate virtues harms them.

We could ask, "who led the better life?" and "who would you prefer to be?"

Martin Luther King (imprisoned and assassinated, arguably for doing the right thing);
Mahatma Gandhi (imprisoned and assassinated, arguably for doing the right thing);
Boethius (imprisoned and executed, arguably for doing the right thing), or;
Saint Francis (homeless and subject to extreme privation—although reading his poetry we can note that this in no ways dulled his sensitivity to the sensual, indeed it seems to have heightened it into ecstacy)

...as opposed to say, some example of an unscrupulous, very lucky person who seems happy with their lot (perhaps President Trump is a good example here, although some people see him as mighty virtuous, so perhaps we could imagine Jeffery Epstein if he never got exposed and punished.)? Of course, Jeffery Epstein became suicidal when exposed and punished, and so this makes the point about the stability and freedom associated with true flourishing. No doubt, bad people can have "good luck," but no one can ensure that they have perpetual "good luck" (and is such luck really "good" if it precludes developing the virtues?)

I'd say it's better for us to live a life akin to the former group. If we say that the two are equally worthwhile, then we seem likely to be committed to some sort of relativism. But I think the evidence and arguments for the idea that things can be actually good or bad for people is quite strong.

A lot more can be said here. The lucky Jeffrey Epstein who isn't caught seems incapable of achieving many important goods, and is in a certain sense is less free. Laozi, the Buddha, and St. Francis can flourish out in the wilderness.

"Good" discussion! To start a reply, let's take seriously the possibility you raise, that this is an example, a la MacIntyre, of an ethical discourse that seems incoherent to a modern (me) but was sensible and important in an earlier tradition. So my first question would be, Can you take the statement "It is good for me to be good" and either paraphrase it or state it in other terms, such that it would resist my objection that it's either empty or equivocal? I don't think MacIntyre uses "incoherent" to mean some sort of Kuhnian incommensurability, whereby ancients and moderns will never be able to talk to each other no matter how hard they try. So you ought to be able to fulfill my request, or I hope so. (This would be for starters. We need to be very clear, I think, about the job "good" is doing in the target sentence, before we can move on to the other substantive points.)

Well, we could start with Plato and my post above:

...as Socrates says in the Republic, we would prefer to always have what is truly best, not what merely seems best at the moment, or what others say is best. The difficulty is that experience teaches us that what we desire most is not always what is truly best. We do things we regret. So, "what we ought to do" is obviously not always "what we want to do" (i.e. what appears to be good to us). Presumably, this is truly what we ought to want, since reason tells us that it makes no sense to prefer that we should possess or achieve what is truly worse, and not what is truly better.

For instance, if someone were to show Tom Storm's "unscrupulous businessman who lives a very pleasant life" that another life would truly be better, presumably he would want that better life and not his current one, even if he lacked the will or means to achieve it. No one says: "I want to be fundamentally deluded about how to live the best life possible, and live a worse life instead."

Yet, if we want to possess or achieve what is truly best, I am not sure how this is accomplished without knowing what is truly best. Thus, we are back to knowing what is truly better or truly worse.

Now, it seems we agree that it's better for people to live in a society that provisions for the common good and where people want to contribute to the common good, rather than living under constant coercion. It is better to live in a society with low levels of violence, where everyone gets a good education, where people do not go hungry, etc. The "Star Trek" post scarcity society.

Your concern seems to touch on the "free rider" problem. Why should I, the individual, not cheat? It seems I can benefit from the common good without bearing the sacrifices of contributing towards it.

For Aristotle this makes no sense, because the ability to actually participate in the common good, such that you prefer what is best for a society that will outlive you is part of living a good life. It is a good "for you" to participate in friendships and institutions where you actually preference the other, rather than only grudgingly entering into these in order to attain some other good. (Aristotle's "levels" of friendship is instructive here.)

I think an example from marriage helps. Most people don't want their spouses to sleep with other people. We can ignore the edge cases here.

Obviously, we can imagine someone who "cheats" in this scenario. However, we might ask, "is the person who is willing to deceive their spouse, or to coerce them into consenting to their affairs, really likely to be enjoying the same good from their marriage as someone who truly wants what is best for their spouse and who, on account of this, doesn't even want to cheat?" Recall, pace Kant, that for Aristotle being virtuous (as opposed to merely continent) involves enjoying doing what is good.

The case where one actually benefits from cheating likewise makes no sense in Plato's description of love in the Symposium, nor in Hegel's conceptualization of how we benefit from identifying with institutions (e.g. the family, the state, etc.).

So, this gets to the Boethius analogy I mentioned above, about climbing a mountain. A person might gain some goods by cheating, by being a free rider, etc., but ultimately being willing to do these means one has missed out on even greater goods. Part of living a good life is the ability to truly enter into a common good. Cheating is like trying to climb a mountain while walking on one's hands. You might make some temporary progress, especially with some help from fortune, but it's
not a stable way to reach the summit.

Jeffery Epstein attains some goods. He has bad fortune, gets exposed and punished and is suicidal. He was dependant on good luck. Boethius in prison, or Laozi out in the wilderness have nothing, and they still flourish.

There is a much deeper metaphysical connection here in the tradition as well, the way in which goodness ties into the unity and intelligibility by which anything is any thing at all, and by which we can even say true things about things—the Doctrine of Transcendentals, and that does make the whole approach more convincing, but it is pretty far afield. Evil, badness, on this view is a privation, a view articulated by Aristotle but which is more fully developed in St. Augustine.

These are all interesting and worthy points, and I want to go on to discuss them. But can you return to the question of "It's good for me to be good"? What I'm trying to understand is whether, when I'm being urged to "be good", we're using the same concept of "good" as the assurance that "It (will be) good for me". My contention is that they must not be the same concept, in order to avoid conceptual emptiness. When Socrates says, "No evil can happen to a good man," do you think he means, "Nothing evil [not-good] can happen to a good man because good men only experience good things"?

But I think our culture leans too heavily on evolutionary theory for a sense of identity. It is a biological theory about the origin of species. Due to the historical circumstances of its discovery it has assumed a role for which I don't think it's suitable. — Wayfarer

At the same time, the theory of evolution allows for a wide degree of variation with the species. It recognizes spectrums of traits and characteristics (even gender), and in that way may assist us in accepting those who don't fit our particular paradigm.

But I don't think making progress on this knowledge is impossible. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You were earlier defending logical monism, weren't you? Do I recall correctly?

So is there a pattern here of seeking the Grand Narrative? One Explanation To Rule Them All?

Hubris, No?

What would it be like, to have an ethical calculus that will tell us What To Do in every case?

In particular, how would we tell that we had the calculus right? To know we had it right would require that we had a way to evaluate it's results that was independent of the calculus.

But if we had such an independent way to evaluate the calculus, why not use that instead of the calculus?

But I think the evidence and arguments for the idea that things can be actually good or bad for people is quite strong. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I think that's my main observation on this subject which is hardly original or revelatory. But I do think the quality of such people's lives can be much better than their nefarious activities might suggest. We don't want to think that such folk can get away with it and be happy.

For Aristotle, the virtues (excellences) are exactly those traits that allow one to achieve happiness. Eudaimonia is a virtuous life — Count Timothy von Icarus

An influencial framework. Do you personally accept it?

My contention is that they must not be the same concept, in order to avoid conceptual emptiness.

I guess I don't understand why you think this is a problem. Health is also predicated analogously. What is healthy for a person or a society is not what is healthy for a tree or an ant. But all can be more or less healthy. And what is healthy for one person is not always healthy for another. We might say that "peanuts" and "running" are both healthy vis-á-vis men, but peanuts are not healthy for the person with a peanut allergy, nor is running healthy for the person with a broken ankle. In the latter case, what is healthy changes over a relatively short period of time; running will be healthy for the individual when the ankle is healed.

When we speak of what health is for organisms generally and what health is"for you," why it is "healthy (for you) to be healthy," we are not speaking of two totally equivocal concepts, nor do I see how this analagous relationship would render "health" conceptually vacuous. Health is a general principle realized unequally in a multiplicity of particulars.

The Good is the same way, except that it is more general (indeed for Plato and most of the classical tradition, the most general unifying principle).

When Socrates says, "No evil can happen to a good man," do you think he means, "Nothing evil [not-good] can happen to a good man because good men only experience good things"?

No, he says this in part because misfortune cannot rob the man who has attained what is truly best of what he has gained. St. Augustine makes this point more clearly in On The Free Choice of the Will, when he claims that what we should value most is what cannot be taken from us. St. Polycarp lives it out when, upon being threatened with various brutal execution methods if he does not abandon God, he pronounces that it would not make sense to "transform into something worse once we have become something better."

I think to understand entirely how this works requires understanding why Socrates makes the Good analagous to the Sun vis-á-vis the forms. When I first read Plato I thought this was simply because the Good is "best" and so has to be "highest." I also fell into the trap of thinking he picked the Good because he is a moralist simply trying to spin a story to make people act well. Or perhaps it's the old "cope" whereby people make God good because it feels good to have a beneficent all power entity watching out for you.

But Plato has very good reasons for thinking it is the Good by which the forms are knowable and intelligible. And this relates to Plato's psychology, since it's the attempt to attain to what is "truly good," not just what appears to be good, or is said to be good by others, that allows the rational part of the soul to transcend the given of what we already are—current desire and opinion—for what is truly most desirable and what is really true.

This is what allows the rule of reason to make a person more unified, a whole, rather than a collection of competing drives and desires. Pace Nietzsche, this isn't the tyranny of reason, with the appetites and passions being beaten down, but rather what allows for both the appetites and passions to be most fulfilled (rather than competing in a chaotic "civil war within the soul."_

But there is a parallel between the way the Good is what allows people to become self-determining and more fully unified (and so more fully themselves) and the way in which it is the Good that allows anything to be any thing at all. I really like Robert M Wallace's "Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present" for bringing this out, and his book on Hegel brings out the way in which the Logic expands on this (and the way in which Kant still manages to capture a much deflated version of the classical notion). Aristotle picks up from Plato and develops this relationship more, and it develops through the Patristics and Islamic thinkers before making it into the nature "Doctrine of Transcendentals," in St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas, Meister Eckhart, etc. I haven't found good secondary sources for these unfortunately.

Conceptually empty? There are criticisms of this tradition, but I don't think this is going to be one of them.