What is Good?

About a year ago, we did a series on morality, and concluded with Utilitarianism as a meta-ethical framework by which to decide which personal moral system is most appropriate for each circumstance. But when talking about Utilitarianism, I made the same mistake that most Utilitarian advocates make, and that is to define good by a word that means something else. Whether this word is happiness, pleasure, fulfillment, wellbeing, eudaimonia, or, in my case, satisfaction, it feels too limiting, like we’re shifting the definition of good to mean something else. So today, I am going to explain what I mean by “good,” and in the future, I will simply call it “good,” rather than any of those other less satisfactory labels.

We start by observing that we feel that some things are worthy of happening more than others. These things can take the form of circumstances, actions, attitudes, and plenty of other types of things. When presented with two of these things, we will judge one to be better than the other. Unless we are contemplating philosophy, this judgment is made by observing how we feel about it, and this feeling is stimulated by the comparison, just like our vision is stimulated by the light entering our eyes, and our hearing is stimulated by the sound entering our ears. In other words, we have a sense of right and wrong.

You might think, like a lot of philosophers throughout history, that having a sense of good means we must be perceiving some objective good that is out in the world and is independent from our perception. But there is no reason to believe our perceptions always show us objective things. For instance, the objects we see have no color, they just reflect different wavelengths of light. The colors come into being when our brains interpret the signals from the wavelengths of light enter our eyes. Similarly, good is not an inherent property of the circumstances, actions, etc. that exist in the world, but comes into being as the interpretations our brains make of those things. So then what is good? Good is when the sense of good is stimulated.

But there’s a problem that immediately jumps out at us. Different people perceive different things as good and bad. We see this all the time. People argue and fight because they disagree about whether something is good or bad.

There are three approaches to resolving this. The first is to look for universal moral goods, things that cause everyone’s sense of good to signal the same thing. The idea is that these are truly good, and everything else is conditional. The second approach is Relativism, the idea that there is no real good or bad, and it just depends on your point of view. The third approach is Deontology, which says everyone’s sense of good is equally valid, and no one’s good should be given more weight than anyone else’s. Building upon Deontology, we get Utilitarianism, which says when you add up everyone’s individual good, we get an objective total good.

One person’s sense of good is most strongly stimulated by learning about the universe. Another’s is most strongly simulated by training their body and working together with a team to rise through competitive ranks. Another’s is by doing work with their hands that has practical value to those around them. Deontology and Utilitarianism say that none of these are good intrinsically, but they are all good when paired with the people they are good for.

Moral Theory VI: So How Should We Live?

Moral Theory:
I. Intuitionism
II. Authoritarianism
III. Divine Command and Attributes
IV. Ethical Egoism
V. Utilitarianism
VI. Virtue and the Golden Rule

Negative Morality:
Divine Hierarchy

Last time in the Moral Theory series we started from basic observational facts about human beings, and building on them with logic, came to the conclusion that the objective truth of morality is Utilitarianism, where utility (the good to be maximized) is defined as the sense that things are as they should be, both outwardly and internally, which I summarized with the word “satisfaction.” Yet even though this is built on a bedrock of logic and facts, it still has a lot of problems. The most glaring is the information problem. To do what is best, one must know two impossible things: the subjective experience of other people, and all dimensions of all possible consequences of all possible actions. Almost all of the people in the world know what is good for them better than anyone else does, with the exceptions of young children and sometimes people who are very close to one another, and most of us are bad judges even of what is best for ourselves. The effects of moral actions are part of a vast, chaotic system, where one thing causes eight more, which each cause many more, and so on. We know so little about the broader consequences of our actions that we might as well be clueless.

But we don’t have to rely on Utilitarianism alone for moral guidance. That would be like using only quantum physics to try to figure out how to use a new coffee machine. Sure, quantum physics is the bedrock truth of how matter works, but there are easier ways of thinking about coffee makers to get them to do what you want. The same is true with morality. Utilitarianism may be the bedrock truth, but there are other, simpler systems that can guide us to do what is good. Throughout the series, we have talked about some of these systems, but now with Utilitarianism we have the tool we need to evaluate each system and compare them to each other, to determine which is best for which situation.

The simplest, most elegant system for good moral behavior is the Golden Rule. It has several different phrasings. The Book of Matthew in the Bible says, “do to others as you would have them do to you.” Confucius said, “Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself.” But my favorite, and what I think strikes best at the heart of the rule’s meaning, is the way Immanuel Kant stated it, which he called the Categorical Imperative, “act so as to treat people always as ends in themselves, never as mere means.” This means that nothing is more important than people, and everything we do should be for the benefit of people. This might seem familiar. After all, it is basically the same good as identified with Utilitarianism, except explained in way that is easier to apply to our everyday encounters with others.

The Categorical Imperative has an added bonus, in that it resonates strongly with our moral intuitions. It just feels right. When searching for a way to live morally, the Categorical Imperative is a great place to start, and even if one lives their entire lives without moving to something more complex and nuanced, it has a very high chance of leading to a life full of goodness.

However, no one is perfect, and people fail to live up to the moral expectations of others and of themselves. People break rules, they lie, they steal, they shout at each other and refuse to understand. Despite this dismal truth, though, there is no need to despair. Instead, we can look to Virtue Ethics, the principle of accepting ourselves and others as we are, and always looking for the next step to become better.

It is not reasonable to expect anyone, least of all yourself, to become perfect overnight. People can change, but only through small, gradual changes over time. Virtue Ethics is a way to focus on that change in ourselves, not to compare ourselves to others, but to measure ourselves against what we were yesterday, or last week, or last year. When we succeed at this, we feel an amazing sense that the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which is revered by philosophers as a state of mind more desirable than happiness. It is the sense that, though things may not be perfect, we are moving in the right direction internally, and because of that we can accept life as it is given to us.

Virtue is a clean, nourishing word. It brings to mind traits like patience, courage, and self-control. However, virtues are not a set of rules for how to live, rather they emerge as side-effects of a person's never-ending journey toward being a better person. Virtue Ethics is all about the journey, not the destination.

Utilitarianism may be the bedrock factual truth about morality, explaining what is good, but it does a lousy job at telling us how good we should be and what to do to get there. So instead of being a guide to morality itself, it works better as an objective standard by which to compare other moral systems that are subjective, but easy to digest. Most of what we have talked about in this series does not score very well. However, the Categorical Imperative, considering its simplicity and all the good it leads to, gets an A, and the contagious positivity of Virtue Ethics gives it an A+. Combining Utilitarianism's objective scale, the reference point of the Categorical Imperative, and Virtue Ethics’s push to always move forward, we have found a robust system of morality, which can be as complex or simple, as nuanced or general, as global or personal as we need it to be.