Goodness and evil

''For other uses of good, see Good (disambiguation)

In religion, ethics, and philosophy, goodness and evil, or simply good and evil, refers to the concept of all human desires and behaviors as conforming to a dualistic spectrum —wherein in one direction are those aspects which are wisely reverent of life and continuity ("good"), and wherein the other direction are those aspects which are vainly reverent of death and destruction ("evil").

Religious and philosophical views tend to agree that, while "good and evil" is a concept and therefore an abstraction, goodness is intrinsic to human nature and is ultimately based on the natural love, bonding, affection that people grow to feel for other people. Likewise, most religious and philosophical interpretations agree that evil is ultimately based in an ignorance of truth (ie. human value, sanctity, divinity), and evil behavior itself is an abberation —one that defies any understanding save that the path to evil is one of confusion and excessive desire (greed). In physics and statistical thermodynamics, the property of goodness or order is often referred to as a state of low entropy.

As a philosophical abstraction, goodness represents a hope that natural love be continuous, expansive, and all-inclusive. In religious context, it is by this hope that an important concept of God is derived —as an infinite projection of love, manifest as goodness in the lives of people. The belief in such hope is often translated as "faith", and wisdom itself is largely defined within religious doctrine as a knowledge and understanding of innate goodness. The concepts of innocence, spiritual purity, and salvation are likewise related to a concept of being in, or returning to, a state of goodness —one which, according to various teachings of "enlightenment", approaches a state of holiness (or Godliness'').

Theory

Theories of value investigate how people positively and negatively value things and concepts, the reasons they use in making their evaluations, and the scope of applications of legitimate evaluations across the social world. As a related issue, theories of goodness inquire into what sorts of things are good, and what the word "good" really means in the abstract. The purpose of this article is to explain the two concepts in greater detail, and how philosophers and social scientists have understood the ways in which they are related.

Significance

Value theory has a number of applications. All religions and most philosophical movements have been concerned with establishing their own theory of value. Ideas about value can define "good" and "bad" for a community or society, thus changing the nature of the society and its aims. It affects everyone's life, and maybe all life on Earth, in the way people organize themselves in societies, and even how they think. Indeed, values play an important part in everyday life. Everyone has their own set of beliefs about what is and isn't good or valuable, because people have the ability to make their own preferences.

Theories of the good affect political economy, which sets relative valuations on factors of production. When governments decide what is good and bad, it affects all manner of policies, such as tax cuts and raises, increased and decreased regulations, the provision and elimination of subsidies, etc.

Descriptive, meta-ethical, and normative fields

This article's goal is to present a treatment of all essential theories of value by the use of a philosophical and academic approach. In properly analyzing theories of value, everyday beliefs are not only carefully catalogued and described, but also rigorously analyzed and judged.

There are at least two basic ways of presenting a theory of value, based on two different kinds of questions which people ask:

What do people value? (What do people consider to be good?)
What really is valuable? (What really is good?)

The two questions are subtly different. One may answer the first question by researching the world by use of social science, and examining the preferences that people assert. However, one may answer the second question by use of reasoning, introspection, prescription, and generalization. The former kind of method of analysis is called "descriptive", because it attempts to describe what people actually value; while the latter is called "normative", because it tries to actively establish value norms. These descriptive and normative approaches can be complementary. For example, tracking the decline of the popularity of slavery across cultures is the work of descriptive ethics, while advising that slavery be avoided is normative.

Meta-ethics is the study of the fundamental questions concerning the nature and origins of the good and the just, including inquiry into the nature of the good, as well as the meaning of evaluative language. In this project, it is distinct from investigations into how others see the good, or of asserting what is good.

Fundamental distinctions

What are the different kinds of goodness? A number of useful distinctions have been made by philosophers in the treatment of this question.

Moral and non-moral goods

For more information on theories of the morally good, click here.

There is a difference between moral and natural goods. Moral goods are those that have to do with the conduct of persons, usually leading to praise or blame. Natural goods, on the other hand, have to do with objects, not persons. For example, to say that "Mary is a morally good person" might involve a different sense of "good" than that in the sentence "A banana split is good".

Ethics tends to be more interested in moral goods than natural goods, while economics tends to be more interested in the reverse. However, both moral and natural goods are equally interesting to goodness and value theory, which is more general in scope.

Sometimes, moral and natural goods can conflict. The value of natural "goods" is challenged by such issues as addiction. The issue of addiction also brings up the distinction between economic and moral goods, where an economic good is whatever stimulates economic growth. For instance, some claim that cigarettes are a "good" in the economic sense, as their production can employ tobacco growers and doctors who treat lung cancer. Many people would agree that cigarette smoking is not morally "good", nor naturally "good", but still recognize that it is economically good, which means, it has exchange value, even though it have a negative public good or even be bad for a person's body (not the same as "bad for the person" necessarily - consider the issue of suicide).

Those who are interested in describing the values people have may often take up an economist's standpoint. Economic analysis emphasizes that what is sought in the marketplace are goods, and tends to use the consumer's choices as evidence that various products are of value. In this view, religious or political struggle over what "goods" are available in the marketplace is inevitable, and consensus on some core questions about body and society and ecosystems affected by the transaction, are outside the market's goods so long as they are unowned.

However, some natural goods seem to also be moral goods. For example, those things that are owned by a person may be said to be natural goods, but over which particular individual(s) may have moral claims. So it is necessary to make another distinction: between moral and non-moral goods. A non-moral good is something that is desirable for someone or other; despite the name to the contrary, it may include moral goods. A moral good is anything which an actor is considered to be morally obligated to strive toward.

When discussing non-moral goods, one may make a useful distinction between inherently serviced and material goods in the marketplace (or its exchange value), versus perceived intrinsic and experiential goods to the buyer. A strict service economy model takes pains to distinguish between the goods and service guarantees to the market, and that of the service and experience to the consumer.

Intrinsic and instrumental goods

Many people find it useful to distinguish instrumental and intrinsic goods, first discussed by Plato in the "Republic". An instrumental good is worth having as a means towards getting something else that is good (e.g., a radio is instrumentally good in order to hear music). And an intrinsically good thing is worth having for itself, even if it doesn't help one get anything else that's good (e.g., the sound of beautiful music).

But these are not mutually exclusive categories. Some things are both good in themselves, and also good for getting other things that are good. "Understanding science" may be such a good, being both worthwhile in and of itself, and as a means of achieving other goods, such as producing technology.

Since instrumental goods are always tied to other goods, it may be said (for instance, in deontological ethics) that the values by which one lives must ultimately be intrinsic. For example, most people pursue the goal of making money so that they can afford what they call "the finer things in life", and since people dedicate their lives to achieving these things, it might be said they hold some kind of intrinsic value. However, some, including hedonists, claim that there is only one thing that is an "intrinsic good": pleasure. And others, like skeptics and ethical nihilists, doubt whether there are any intrinsic goods at all.

Pragmatism and contributory goodness

For more on this subject, see Pragmatism.

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 may be 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 relative to a situation. When across all contexts, goodness is best understood as instrumental, with no contrasting intrinsic goodness. In other words, Dewey claimed that anything can only be of intrinsic value if it is a contributory good.

Another improvement is to distinguish contributory goods. These have the same qualities as the good thing, but need some emergent property of a whole state-of-affairs in order to be good. For example, salt is food on its own, and good as such, but is far better as part of a prepared meal. Providing a good outside this context is not delivery of what is expected. In other words, such goods are only good when certain conditions are met. This is in contrast to other goods, which may be considered "good" in a wider variety of situations.

Those philosophers that think goods have to create desirable mental states also say that goods are experiences of self-aware beings. These philosophers often distinguish the desirable experience, which they call an "intrinsic" good, from the things in the world that seem to cause the experience, which they call "inherent" goods.

Kant: hypothetical and categorical goods

For more information, see the main article, Immanuel Kant.

The thinking of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) greatly influenced moral philosophy. He thought of moral value as a unique and universally identifiable property. He showed that many practical goods are good only in states-of-affairs described by a sentence containing an "if" clause. For example, in the sentence, "Sunshine is only good if you do not live in the desert". Further, the "if" clause often described the category in which the judgment was made (art, science, etc.). Kant described these as "hypothetical goods", and tried to find a "categorical" good that would operate across all categories of judgment without depending on an "if-then" clause.

An influential result of Kant's search was the idea of a good will as being the only good in itself. Moreover, Kant saw a good will as acting in accordance with a moral command, the "Categorical Imperative": "Act according to those maxims that you could will to be universal law." From this, and a few other axioms, Kant developed a moral system that would apply to any "praiseworthy person." (See Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, third section, ^*-^*.)

Kantian philosophers believe that any general definition of goodness must define goods that are categorical in the sense that Kant intended.

Theories of the intrinsically good

A satisfying formulation of goodness would be valuable because it might allow one to construct a good life or society by reliable processes of deduction, elaboration or prioritization. One could answer the ancient question, "How then should we live?", among many other important related questions. But it has long been thought that this question can best be answered by examining what it is that necessarily makes a thing valuable, or what the source of value consists in.

Transcendental realism

One attempt to define goodness describes it as a property of the world. According to this claim, to talk about the good is to talk about something real within the object itself which exists independently of the perception of it. Plato was one advocate of this view, in his expression that there is such a thing as an eternal realm of forms or ideas, and that the greatest of the ideas and the essence of being was Goodness, or The Good. The Good was defined by many ancient Greeks and other ancient philosophers as a perfect and eternal idea, or blueprint. The Good is the right relation between all that exists, and this exists in the mind of the Divine, or some heavenly realm. The Good is the harmony of a Just political community, Love, Friendship, the ordered human soul of virtues, and the right relation to the Divine and Nature. Plato's dialogues often have characters that will mention the many virtues of a philosopher, or a lover of wisdom.

Many people are theists, who 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 partially beyond human understanding. For instance, Thomas Aquinas was a proponent of this view, and believed to have proven arguments for the existence of God, and the right relations that humans ought to have to the Divine First Cause.

Another 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".

Perfectionism

Human perfectionism

It was the belief of Aristotle that virtues consisted in the realization of potentials which were unique to humanity, such as the use of reason. This type of view has been recently defended in a more modern form by Thomas Hurka.

Transhuman perfectionism

Some techno-optimists, especially transhumanists, avow a form of perfectionism in which the capacity to determine good and trade off fundamental values, is expressed not by humans but by software, genetic engineering of humans, artificial intelligence. Skeptics assert that rather than perfect goodness, it would be only the appearance of perfect goodness, reinforced by persuasion technology and probably brute force of violent technological escalation, which would cause people to accept such rulers or rules authored by them.

Welfarist theories

Welfarist theories of value are those which say that that which is good, and hence valuable, are due to their effects on the wellbeing of persons.

Subjective theories of wellbeing

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.

Most philosophers that think goods have to create desirable mental states also say that goods are experiences of self-aware beings. These philosophers often distinguish the experience, which thay call an intrinsic good, from the things that seem to cause the experience, which they call "inherent" goods. Failing to distinguish the two leads to a subject-object problem in which it is not clear who is evaluating what object.

=Hedonism

= In some theories there is no higher collective value than that of maximizing pleasure for the individual. Some have even 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.

Jeremy Bentham's book The Principles of Morals and Legislation prioritized goods by considering pleasure, pain and consequences. This theory had a wide effect on public affairs, up to and including the present day. A similar system was later named Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill. More broadly, utilitarian theories are examples of Consequentialism. All utilitarian theories are based upon the maxim of utility, which states that that which is good is that which provides the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It follows from this principle that that which brings happiness to the greatest number of people, is a good.

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. For the hedonist, the explanation for helping behavior may come in the form of empathy—the ability of a being to "feel" another's pain—. People tend to value the lives of gorillas more than those of mosquitoes 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. The impact of sympathy on human behavior 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.

=Preferentialism

= A view adopted by James Griffin (philosopher) attempts to find a subjective alternative to hedonism as an intrinsic value. He argues that it is the satisfaction of one's informed desires which constitutes wellbeing, and not necessarily whether or not said desires actually cause the agent to experience happiness. Moreover, these preferences must be life-relevant, that is, contributing to the success of a person's life overall.

Desire satisfaction may occur without the agent's awareness of the satisfaction of the desire. For example, if a man wishes for his legal will to be enacted after his death, and it is, then his desire has been satisfied despite the fact that he will never experience or know of it.

Objective theories of wellbeing

The idea that the ultimate good exists and is not orderable but is globally measurable is reflected in various ways in classical economics, green economics, welfare economics and the Gross National Happiness and measuring well-being theories, all of which focus on various ways of assessing progress towards that goal, a so-called Genuine Progress Indicator. Modern economics thus reflects very ancient philosophy, but a calculation or quantitative or other process based on cardinality and statistics replaces the simple ordering of values.

For example, in both economics and in folk wisdom, the value of a thing seems to rise so long as it is relatively scarce. However, if it becomes too scarce, it leads often to a conflict, and can reduce collective value. See the separate analysis of wealth.

The value of labor. In the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and in its critique by Karl Marx, human labor is seen as the ultimate source of all new economic value. This is an objective theory of value (see value theory which attributes value to real production-costs, and ultimately expenditures of human labor-time (see also law of value. It contrasts with marginal utility theory, which argues that the value of labor depends on subjective preferences by consumers, which may however also be objectively studied.

The economic value of labor may be assessed technically in terms of its use-value or utility or commercially in terms of its exchange-value, price or production cost (see also labor power. But its value may also be socially assessed in terms of its contribution to the wealth and well-being of a society.

In non-market societies, labor may be valued primarily in terms of skill, time, and output, as well as moral or social criteria and legal obligations. In market societies, labor is valued economically primarily through the labor market. The price of labor may then be set by supply and demand, by strike action or legislation, or by legal or professional entry-requirements into occupations.

Mid-range theories

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.

Agent-centered theories

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.

In his Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen asserted free time as the most fundamental good and systems of organizing which enabled it as the most fundamental value in civilization. He refuted the common claim that Asian value theorists had devalued freedom and was clear that a marketplace (creating unity via pricing) valuing free time could be created. Marilyn Waring took a similar view from a feminist perspective, arguing womens' time was undervalued and especially the free time they used to raise and teach children. Waring also strongly denied that military hardware or activities were of any value, and attempted to reconcile peace or welfare views of good with the ecological values.

Virtue theories

The value of fairness. John Rawls' book A Theory of Justice prioritized social arrangements and goods based on their contribution to justice. Rawls defined justice as fairness, especially in distributing social goods, defined fairness in terms of procedures, and attempted to prove that just institutions and lives are good, if rational individuals' goods are considered fairly. Rawls' crucial invention was the original position, a procedure in which one tries to make objective moral decisions by refusing to let personal facts about oneself enter one's moral calculations.

One problem with the approaches of Kant and Rawls is that they are overly procedural. Procedurally fair processes of the type used by Kant and Rawls may not leave enough room for judgment, and therefore, reduce the totality of goodness. For example, if two people are found to own an orange, the standard fair procedure is to cut it in two and give half to each. However, if one wants to eat it while the other wants the rind to flavor a cake, cutting it in two is clearly less good than giving the peel to the baker and feeding the core to the eater.

Applying procedural fairness to an entire society therefore seems certain to create recognizable inefficiencies, and therefore be unfair, and (by the equivalence of justice with fairness) unjust.

This strikes at the very foundation of Kantian ethics, because it shows that hypothetical goods can be better than categorical goods, and therefore be more desirable, and even more just.

Agent-external theories

Society, life and ecology

Many Asian views value unity as a good: to go beyond eudaimonia 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 are an example of this, encouraging the view that people ought to conform as individuals to demands of a peaceful and ordered society.

According to the naturalistic view, the flourishing of society is not, or not the only, intrinsically good thing. Defenses of this notion are often formulated by reference to biology, and observations that living things compete more with their own kind than with other kinds. Rather, what is of intrinsic good is the flourishing of all sentient life; extending to those animals which have some level of similar sentience, such as Great Ape personhood. Others go farther, by declaring that life itself is of intrinsic value.

By another approach, one achieves peace and agreement by focusing, not on one's peers (who may be rivals or competitors), but on the common environment. The reasoning goes that as living beings it is clearly and objectively good we are surrounded by an ecosystem that supports life. Indeed, if we weren't, we couldn't even recognize that or discuss it. The anthropic principle in cosmology recognizes this view.

Under materialism or even embodiment values, or in any system that recognizes the validity of ecology as a scientific study of limits and potentials, an ecosystem is a fundamental good. To all who investigative, it seems that goodness, or value, exists within an ecosystem, Earth. Creatures within that ecosystem and wholly dependent on it, evaluate good relative to what else could be achieved there. In other words, good is situated in a particular place and one does not dismiss everything that is not available there (such as very low gravity or absolutely abundant sugar candy) as "not good enough", one works within its constraints. Transcending them and learning to be satisfied with them, is thus another sort of value, perhaps called satisfaction, or in Buddhism enlightenment.

Values and the people that hold them seem necessarily subordinate to the ecosystem. If this is so, then what kind of being could validly apply the word "good" to an ecosystem as a whole? Who would have the power to assess and judge an ecosystem as good or bad? By what criteria? And by what criteria would ecosystems be modified, especially larger ones such as the atmosphere (climate change) or oceans (extinction) or forests (deforestation)? For discussion see debates on monoculture and permaculture.

"Remaining on Earth" as the most basic value. While green ethicists have been most forthright about it, and have developed theories of Gaia philosophy, biophilia, bioregionalism that reflect it, the questions are now universally recognized as central in determining value, e.g. the economic "value of Earth" to humans as a whole, or the "value of life" that is neither whole-Earth nor human. Many have come to the conclusion that without assuming ecosystem continuation as a universal good, with attendant virtues like biodiversity and ecological wisdom it is impossible to justify such operational requirements as sustainability of human activity on Earth.

One response is that humans are not necessarily confined to Earth, and could use it and move on. A counter-argument is that only a tiny fraction of humans could ever do this, and those would be self-selected by ability to do technological escalation on others (for instance, the ability to create large missiles on which to flee the planet and simultaneously threaten others who sought to prevent them). Another counter-argument is that extraterrestrial life would encounter the fleeing humans and be forced to destroy them as a locust species. A third is that if there are no other worlds fit to support life (and thus no extraterrestrials competing with humans to occupy them) it is both futile to flee, and foolish to imagine that it would take less energy and skill to protect the Earth as a habitat, than it would take to construct some new habitat.

Accordingly remaining on Earth, as a living being surrounded by a working ecosystem, is a fair statement of the most basic values and goodness to any being we are able to communicate with. A moral system without this axiom seems simply not actionable.

However, all religious systems acknowledge an afterlife and improving this is seen as an even more basic good. In many other moral systems, also, remaining on Earth in a state that lacks honor or power over self is less desirable - consider seppuku in bushido, kamikazes or the role of suicide attacks in Jihadi rhetoric. In all these systems, remaining on Earth is perhaps no higher than a third-place value.

Radical values environmentalism can be seen as either a very old or a very new view: that the only intrinsically good thing is a flourishing ecosystem; individuals and societies are merely instrumentally valuable, good only as means to having a flourishing ecosystem. The Gaia philosophy is the most detailed expression of this overall thought but it strongly influenced Deep Ecology and the modern Green Parties.

It is often claimed that aboriginal peoples never lost this sort of view - anthropological linguistics studies links between their languages and the ecosystems in which they lived and which gave rise to their knowledge distinctions. Very often, environmental cognition and moral cognition were not distinguished in these languages - offenses to nature were like those to other people, and Animism reinforced this by giving nature "personality" via myth. Anthropological theories of value explore these questions.

Most people in the world reject older situated ethics and localized religious views. However small-community-based and ecology-centric views have gained some popularity in recent years. In part, this has been attributed to the desire for ethical certainties. Such a deeply-rooted 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. Ones that relied only on local referents one could verify for oneself, creating more certainty and therefore less investment in protection, hedging and insuring against consequences of loss of the value.

History and novelty

The value of the old and the new. An event is often seen as being of value simply because of its novelty in fashion and art. By contrast, cultural history and other antiques are sometimes seen as of value in and of themselves. Philosopher-historians Will and Ariel Durant spoke as much with the quote, "As the sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories, so the sanity of the group lies in the continuity of its traditions; in either case a break in the chain invites a neurotic reaction" (The Lessons of History, 72).

Assessment of the value of old or historical artifacts takes into consideration, especially but not exclusively: the value placed on having a detailed knowledge of the past, the desire to have tangible ties to ancestral history, and/or the increased market value scarce items traditionally hold.

Creativity and innovation and invention are sometimes upheld as fundamentally good especially in Western industrial society - all imply newness, and even opportunity to profit from novelty. Bertrand Russell was notably pessimistic about creativity and thought that knowledge expanding faster than wisdom necessarily was fatal.

References

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. 1998. USA: Oxford University Press. (1177a15)
Bentham, Jeremy. The Principles of Morals and Legislation. 1988. Prometheus Books.
Dewey, John. Theory of Valuation. 1948. University of Chicago Press.
Durant, Ariel and W. Durant. The Lessons of History. 1997. MJF Books. (p72)
Garcia, John David. The Moral Society - A Rational Alternative to Death. 2005. Whitmore Publishing.
Griffin, James. Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance. 1986. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hume, David. A Treastise of Human Nature. 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hurka, Thomas. Perfectionism. 1993. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. 1996. Cambridge University Press. Third section, ^*-^*.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. 1999. Belknap Press.

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