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An exploration on what is good
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An exploration on what is good

MarchHare
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Posted 06/23/09 - 03:14 PM:	#11
Makarismos wrote: Subjective words would be removed from the dictionary? How about better, worse, right, wrong? Beneficial, harmful? The statement you make here reduces you to a global Skeptic: hardly a practical position. I would go so far as to call your statement Glib and unsupportable. I agree; in fact, I think there are a huge number of wordds that have a certain subjective element to their meaning: tall, red, heavy, cold, hot, near, far, book etc. etc. I'm imagining some very short dictionaries. As for the original question of the topic: the key role "good" seems to play when used to describe something in the moral sense is (a) imperative (we want people to do Good Things) and (b) optative (we want Good Things To Happen). Where philosophy comes into it, as I see it, is to determine criterions which things-that-people-want are rational to want and pursue. Some are obvious (one shouldn't pursue wine if one wants to stay sober or act disreputably if one wants to be well-regarded) while others are very complicated (eg. any universalisability criterion). R. M. Hare's works on this are those that I esteem most highly, since he clearly and shamelessly went away from moral realism and moral facts being "out there" in some metaphysical sense, while still retaining cognitivism and objectivism. I didn't choose the username "MarchHare" for nothing!
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

mway
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Posted 06/23/09 - 04:38 PM:	#12
I did not say to remove all subjective words from the dictionary. Just 'Good' and 'Bad' because they serve no useful function.
Lame is to Wav, as the Brain is to Reality.

MarchHare
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Posted 06/23/09 - 06:03 PM:	#13
mway wrote: I did not say to remove all subjective words from the dictionary. Just 'Good' and 'Bad' because they serve no useful function. What do you mean by "useful function"?
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

mway
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Posted 06/23/09 - 08:31 PM:	#14
I cannot find a sentence with which their use would be necessary.
Lame is to Wav, as the Brain is to Reality.

Makarismos
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Posted 06/23/09 - 11:41 PM:	#15
Is your idea good or bad?

MarchHare
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Posted 06/24/09 - 07:32 AM:	#16
mway wrote: I cannot find a sentence with which their use would be necessary. Again, that's very vague. To express the sentence "This is a good piece of chicken" requires that "good" is used; if one is to say that "good" could be replaced by "tasty", then that is changing the meaning of the sentence. Furthermore, why is "necessity" of use a criterion in "usefulness"? A screwdriver might be useful, but it isn't necessary that that particular screwdriver is used.
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

mway
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Posted 06/24/09 - 07:17 PM:	#17
You guys are right (apologies for vagueness), so I will try and rephrase. I find the words 'Good' and 'Bad' too subjective, and as such, their usefulness [to me] dissolves. If someone says to me, "This is a good piece of chicken," they have basically told me nothing. Tasty on the other hand (although also being subjective) tells me a lot more.
Lame is to Wav, as the Brain is to Reality.

zio
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Posted 06/25/09 - 06:49 AM:	#18
Crackers: I been thinking about what you said, and is not a propagation of life I inferred too, but a prolongation of it. I think that by neglecting "that which defines all living beings" we loose sight of the interconnectedness of everything, the ripple effect. And fostering that interconnectedness is to our benefit I think. I will agree that there are distinctions in human's reasoning capacity to other living things. I like what you said about man's faculty of creation, although am tempted to relate that to an ability to imagine and am not sure how imagination and the envisioning of a future event diverge. Thank you for your insights, and I extend that to all others who commented.

MarchHare
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Posted 06/25/09 - 07:44 AM:	#19
mway wrote: You guys are right (apologies for vagueness), so I will try and rephrase. I find the words 'Good' and 'Bad' too subjective, and as such, their usefulness [to me] dissolves. If someone says to me, "This is a good piece of chicken," they have basically told me nothing. Tasty on the other hand (although also being subjective) tells me a lot more. There seem to be two unsaid premises here- 1. The sole useful function that a word can play is descriptive. 2. "Good" and "bad" are subjective terms that serve to report facts about the agent. Premise 1 is an error that is often made but never successfully defended: while it is true that great deal of sentences are declarative (ie. describing the world) there are also a vast array of meaningful and useful sentences that are not declarative. Imperatives, optatives, emotives, interrogatives and miratives don't primarily convey information, but one certainly wouldn't want to cut them out of language altogether. Premise 2 is also common but hard to defend: if "It is good to help others" is reducible to "I approve of helping others", then why would we have disagreements about whether or not it is good to help others? "I approve of helping others" and "You approve of helping others" are not inconsistant. If "good" and "bad" were subjective reports, there would be no moral disagreement.
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

Makarismos
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Posted 06/25/09 - 02:00 PM:	#20
MarchHare, I partly agree with you, but I also disagree. I am between your position and that of mway. The word "good" might mean what I and you think it to mean, but it might also mean anything that we colectivly decide it to mean. In this sense it is subjective. The term "good" might mean different things depending on our criteria. We might have as a premise: 1) good cars must be fast If this is our assumed premise, then it seems that a necessary condition for a car to be good, must be that it is fast. We can see that in this case a good car must be fast, but it may also require other characteristics (i.e. be able to stop, stay in one piece for a journey etc). We might disagree on this idea, I might instead say: 1) good cars are fuel efficient. The term good is subjective in this way also. In terms of morality, it is both the case that morality might be different, and that it is not a matter of simple taste. We broardly agree on accptable social behaviour, because of a few things: 1) We are all human, and need similar things to survive (air, water, food, shelter, company etc). 2) We have all be raised within society, and therefore we have had to have dealings with others. 3) We have all learnt English, and have been exposed to similar ideas because of this. 4) We are all the result of a long lasting, complex culture, the ideals of which cannot be altered by any one man, or even many working together - or at least not with any kind of speed. Morality could be different than it is, no problem: we might think that slavery is ok, or that women are the property of men (for example), and so long as we agreed then we would consider ourselves to be right. Their is no way of objectively measuring anything about humans to say that slavery is wrong, or that ownership of anything is justified - and so we must simply go on what we feel. The moral discourse can become rather long winded, but it must boil down to a foundation of moral feeling: this feeling, though not objective, is rather difficult to change and not a simple matter of taste. Therefore things are good depending on our criteria, and our criteria depend largely upon how we feel about the thing in question. I also happen to think that ideas of good and bad are essential to the running of our society - or indeed any society. Without society we would have no necessary words either, and therefore I suggest that we need the concepts of good and bad very much. Cheers M

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