Yet More Thoughts on "The Good"

If there's one thing that really gets philosophers going, it is the idea of "the Good". We probably owe this problem to Plato, since although people had probably been arguing about what was good and what wasn't since the dawn of time, it was Plato who decided that there had to be a thing (or Form, or Idea) which could act as a kind of super benchmark to determine whether any one thing, action or state is "good". Almost certainly the English on their own would never have come up with such an idea, since English is not particularly amenable to making philosophical concepts out of adjectives (unlike German; as Ellis points out in Language, Thought and Logic, this is one reason why English and German philosophers have such a hard time understanding each other).

Is it possible that "the Good" is simply one of those tricks that language plays on us, convincing us that if we can make a word, then something must exist for that word to refer to? Personally I reject the very idea that words "refer to" things (that is, to the view of meaning put forward by Ayer, Russell and the early Wittgenstein). If you adopt this idea, then most language becomes meaningless, and since we obviously do mean something by the word "good", we would be better off trying to clarify what it is that we mean, rather than what it is that we "refer to".

It is commonly held that the word "good" has several different meanings, as evidenced by the following sentences:

It's a good screwdriver.
It was a good film.
She had a good life.
She led a good life.

The first appears to be a practical judgement, the second aesthetic, the third (maybe) hedonistic and the last one moral. Does this mean, then, that we have four different "goods", which just happen to have the same word attached (homonyms, in other words)? On the other hand, should we follow (the later) Wittgenstein's dictum that "the meaning of a word is its use" and say that they all mean the same thing (expressing approval), but in different "language games"?

Perhaps a better way of looking at the problem would be to take "good" in these sentences as a function with a lot of missing arguments. For those readers not familiar with predicate logic, a word of explanation is in order here. Basically a function is like (but not the same as) a verb, in that it "does something" to its arguments, which are like (but again not the same as) nouns. Thus we could express "Daniela loves Chomsky" as

L(d,c)

We could then express "(be) good" as:

G(w,x,y,z)

where:

G = is beneficial for or advantageous to;
w = the event, state, object or person which is held to be good
x = the event, state, object or person which w is advantageous for;
y = the criterion by which w is judged;
z = the situations where the statement applies.

You could, of course, argue that z should be part of any proposition, but that's another story.

If we accept this structure for "good", then a sentence like "Loosening up (w) after training (z) is good (G) for body-builders (x) to prevent stiff muscles (y)" fills all the argument places. However, few statements with "good" are this complete. "It's a good screwdriver", for example, omits arguments x, y and z. This is not a problem here, since these arguments are either obvious or immaterial. It is part of the meaning of "screwdriver" that it is to be judged by its efficiency in screwing and unscrewing, in a situation where someone (it doesn't usually matter who) is screwing or unscrewing something. If you were considering using it to disembowel someone, you would be more likely to say "This is (not) a good weapon". It is from this occasional mismatch of criteria that we get the irony of sentences like "as a surgeon, he would make a good butcher."

When we look at the sentence "It's a good film", the missing places become a bit more important. It is by no means clear whether the speaker is talking about all viewers or a specific group (e.g. horror film fans) or by what criteria the film is to be judged (e.g. ability to scare people silly). Unless this information is provided by the context (e.g. a discussion on special effects at a horror film convention), the sentence is semantically sloppy, and it is precisely this which bedevils so many arguments about aesthetics.

Things usually get worse when we enter the moral arena. Consider the two sentences "She had a good life" and "She led a good life". Assuming we know the person referred to in the first sentence, we can make a pretty good guess at what criteria she used in determining how good her life was (e.g. amount of sex, drugs and rock and roll), and we assume that we are talking about her criteria, not someone else's. A statement like "She thought she had a good life, but in fact she didn't" sounds vaguely absurd, a bit like "He thought he was in pain, but in fact he wasn't." However, in the sentence where she led a good life, it is not clear what is to fill arguments x and y. Was her life good for herself, other people, God, or small furry animals? Was it good in terms of happiness, excitement or adherence to the code of chivalry? A person is not like a screwdriver, which has a limited number of functions; the more complex the subject, the more careful you need to be about filling in the arguments. This is one reason why Julian of Norwich's famous statement "all manner of thing shall be well", while it may be great mysticism, is semantically impenetrable.

Moral statements with missing arguments are fine when the participants in the dialogue all share assumptions about the default conditions for those arguments (a bit like the fans at the horror film convention). Thus Aristotle was (usually) clear about what he meant by "the good life", and so would a Wahabi Muslim be. On the other hand, an Aristotelean talking to a Wahabi would experience an almost total communication breakdown. It is not so much that they have different ideas of "good", but that they are tacitly filling in the arguments differently.

Is it possible, then, to talk about a "good (or bad) person"? I would advise against it for the following reasons. Firstly, as I have said, a person is not a screwdriver. People do not have one or two clearly defined functions, but do lots of different things, so there is no one standard by which we can judge all human activities. As Epictetus says, "if someone speaks more eloquently than you, do not say 'He is better than me', but simply say 'He speaks better than me'." The chances of a person performing every human activity in accordance with whatever criteria of excellence you may have drawn up are infinitessimal. Secondly, the final argument - the situations where the statement of goodness apply - is not filled in in the sentence "She is a good person, " and furthermore it would often sound silly if it were to be filled. It is hard to imagine saying "She is a good person at the moment", "She is a good person on Tuesdays" or "She is a good person in the office", though you could say "She is a good person to have at your back in a fight." This last sentence, however, removes the global implication of "person"; it is like saying "She is a good comrade in arms." On its own, "She is a good person" implies that she is good in all places and at all times, which, as General Semantics and Rational Emotive Therapy both point out, is a misleading and even dangerous global judgement. Similarly, statements like "People are fundamentally good/evil" beg a number of questions.

Getting back to "the Good", can we imagine an ultimate standard of goodness, while rejecting Plato's idea of a pre-existing "Good" of which the various goods we propose are merely shadows? Bentham and Mill attempt to democritise "the Good" by applying the criterion of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" (some versions have it as "the greatest good of the greatest number", but this is obviously circular). This has some appeal as a rough and ready measure of political appropriateness, but aside from the questions it raises about the relative value of happiness (or misery), it only deals with one kind of good, that is moral/political good. If you start applying it to films or screwdrivers, for example, it breaks down. A good film does not necessarily make people happy, and while a good screwdriver may ultimately contribute to the sum of human happiness, a good machine gun probably would not.

A more promising approach may come from teleology. Elsewhere (in Pattern, Awareness, Process) I refer to "patterns" having "intrinsic tendencies". A pattern is just about anything you can think of, and its intrinsic tendency is the way it will act or develop if unconstrained by other patterns - a fairly similar idea to Aristotle's telos. One might venture that what is good for a pattern, by its own criteria, is whatever furthers this intrinsic tendency. This may not be the same as what is good for surrounding patterns. What is good for a cancer is whatever stimulates it to grow (i.e. realise its telos) which is the very opposite to what is good for the person with the cancer. If the universe as a whole (what I call "the Pattern" with a capital P) can be said to have an intrinsic tendency, then presumably "the Good" is whatever furthers that tendency. There is, however, a problem here, since in defining "intrinsic tendency" I used the phrase "if unconstrained by other patterns", and obviously if we talking about the whole caboodle, there can be no other patterns. We might avoid this problem by looking at sub-patterns which act against the overall intrinsic tendency as a kind of anaphora - a bit like eddies in a current, part of it but against it. This is how, for example, Lao Tsu can talk about the Tao as being present or absent, or about the Tao of Man as opposed to the Tao of Heaven. In more classical theological terms, Satan is both part of and against God's will. This goes some way, perhaps, towards making sense of Julian's "all manner of thing shall be well": obviously in one sense, that which goes against God's will (to use Christian terminology) cannot be good, but since God's will in another sense has to include everything that goes against God's will, then indeed "all manner of thing shall be well" - there is simply no alternative.

It is at this point, perhaps, that "explanations come to an end," as Wittgenstein put it. When faced with such awesome concepts as "the intrinsic tendency of the Universe", it is virtually impossible not to either give up in frustration or plunge wholeheartedly into mysticism. I would argue that both alternatives are acceptable in their own way. If we are trying to have a meaningful verbal exchange, then probably the best thing is to accept that above a certain level of generalisation, words like "good" cease to have practical meaning. On the other hand, if we want to go beyond the limitations of language on thought and get a feeling of "the Good", then Julian's way may be more useful.