Précis

Against Absolute Goodness examines a property that played a fundamental role in twentieth century Anglo-American moral philosophy. Indeed, that may understate the importance of absolute goodness. It is arguable that it is the property that Plato was talking about when he posited the form of the good, and that since then it has been at the center of moral theorizing in the western tradition. But in any case, G.E. Moore provides an excellent example of a philosopher who posited the existence of this property. And because of the influence of his Principia Ethica (1903) on twentieth century moral philosophy, absolute goodness has remained at the center of attention among analytic philosophers. By “absolute goodness” he meant the property that we ascribe to things when we speak of them as being, quite simply, good. We can say, for example, that pleasure is good (period). Or that knowledge, virtue, friendship, beauty, are good (period). In speaking this way, according to Moore, we are not saying that these things are good for so-and-so. Nor are we using the word “good” in the way we do when we say, for example, that this is a good poem, or that is a good hammer. Friendship and the appreciation of beauty, according to Moore, are to be valued because they are good—whether or not they are good things of a kind or good for anyone. We might say that they are good things, but here the word “things” does no work; it certainly does not mean that they are good as things. Moore's claim that there is such a property as absolute goodness seems to be confirmed by common ways of speaking, for we often say about this or that event or state of affairs: “it's a good thing!” What sets me “against” absolute goodness is this: I doubt that it ought to play a role in our practical reasoning. “Pleasure is good” is a meaningful sentence, but it does not give us a good reason to value pleasure. Speaking more generally, absolute goodness gives us no reason to value or do anything. I try to justify this skeptical stance by examining a large number of domains of practical reasoning in which absolute goodness might be thought to guide our thinking: pleasure, knowledge, beauty, love, cruelty, suicide, future generations, bio-diversity, killing in self-defense, and the extinction of the species. In none of these cases, I argue, does good reasoning need to be expressed in terms of absolute goodness. Even persons, I suggest, should not be thought of as being good in this way. The meaningfulness of sentences like “pleasure is good (period)” does not show that there is such a property. Is there any other reason to suppose that there is? The only good reason would be this: sound practical thought presupposes that some things are good (period). But since I argue that we never need to invoke absolute goodness in order to reason well, I am led to the conclusion that we have no good reason to suppose that there is such a property. My negative thesis about absolute goodness leads to a positive result: a better appreciation of the importance of a different kind of goodness: what is good for someone

Absolute (philosophy · Analytic philosophy · Beauty · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · Form of the Good · Friendship · Pleasure · Property (philosophy · Social science · Sociology · Virtue · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Psychology