1. We attribute all sorts of goodness to all sorts of objects. This variety and heterogeneity, almost if not uniquely proprietary to good, was recognized by Aristotle with no other sceptical outcome than the rejection of Plato's unitary Form of the Good (see Nicomachean Ethics I.6 and Eudemian Ethics I.8). Aristotle though was a very sober thinker. In modern times we are more precipitate. Once we know the temptation to think of “good” as a word that can be used to predicate almost anything of almost any kind of thing, it seems we reach immediately for the idea that all there is to a thing's goodness is its arousing approval (A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson), or its lying within the range of a sincere universal prescription (R. M. Hare), or its answering to some relevant interest to be specified from the context (Paul Ziff),Footnote 1 or its having properties that provide reasons to respond in certain ways to it (Thomas Scanlon).Footnote 2 As we shall see, there is a grain of truth in each of these proposals, but in each case the truth in question lacks the metaethical significance commonly attributed to it.Footnote 3 First though let us ask whether at the level of the object language the great variousness and plurality of goodness is really the hotchpotch that it has appeared.
2. In the first chapter of The Varieties of Goodness,Footnote 4 Georg Henrik von Wright sets out the distinct varieties into which he proposes to partition all good or goodness. There is the instrumental variety, the goodness of things seen as instruments for purposes, their suitability or effectiveness for those purposes. (Consider von Wright's sundry examples “good knife”, “good horse”, “good house”, “good harbour”, “good way of making a bed”, “good way of unlocking a door”.) There is the technical variety (consider “good orator”, “good carpenter”, “good navigator”). There is the medical variety. (Consider “good heart”, “good eyes”, “good hearing”, “good eyesight”, “good memory”.) There is the beneficial. (Consider the fact that exercise “is good for” the healthy, that lubrication is “good for” an engine, that institutions of a certain kind are “good for” a country. See p. 10.) Then there is the larger category of which von Wright says that the beneficial is a sub-category, the larger category that he calls (without specifically Benthamite intent) utilitarian goodness. By way of illustration of the need for the more inclusive category, consider in parallel with the beneficial the collateral varieties of goodness within which one finds a plan or an opportunity or a piece of luck which is good by being advantageous and/or favourable for some given or contextually particular purpose, or a virtue which it is good for its possessors to have (p. 42) because it prepares them to face danger (say) or protects them (as von Wright asserts) from the temptations to idleness or excess. Then there is the hedonic good. (Consider a “good apple”, a “good wine”, a “good dinner” or a “good holiday”, and the goodness of things which are in some way “pleasant”.)
3. There is much more to say about the adjective “good”. But what about the substantival use of the word? Von Wright says that sometimes it denotes “anything which is an end of action or object of desire or want or need” (p. 10). But sometimes “the good” stands for what von Wright calls “the good of a being”. This last von Wright compares with “das Wohl” and identifies as that being's welfare. Welfare is one of the three eminently important concepts (he says) which regard “man as a whole”. The other two are health and happiness. “[Welfare] can be called, somewhat solemnly, the good of man”, von Wright said in his summation of his whole position.Footnote 5 Then he said “The things which promote [welfare] are called beneficial, those which detract from it harmful. All things inclusive of their consequences which a man treasures for their own sake are parts of the whole which is his good or welfare. Health, one could say, is the basis of welfare and happiness its crown or flower”.
4. There have been philosophers who might have objected that von Wright's search for system was crowding out the pulsating multifariousness of the phenomena. But he was ready and waiting to add yet more varieties. He adds for instance that
There are the uses of “good” which refer to matters of conduct and character. A man can be good and do good. Good is usually done to somebody. When a man does good to some being, his acts or deeds are frequently, though not always, called good as well. An act can be done from a good motive or with a good intention. There is a feature of benevolence and a preparedness to act called a good will… (p. 11).
Indeed there is at least one other variety which I should have urged von Wright to mark somewhere, namely goodness in a calling. A further candidate might be aesthetic goodness, the goodness that consists in the beauty of a thing. Varieties is wide open to such suggestions. We shall come in due course to “good man” and “good act”. But we shall begin with those that von Wright first anatomized.
5. From the opposite side, there is another sort of objection von Wright might have encountered. In the 60s, when few analytical philosophers had got beyond the thought that J. L. Austin had put about by remarking that, even where it stands alone, the adjective “good” is usually substantive-hungry (or “attributive” as P. T. Geach preferred to sayFootnote 6), philosophers who looked for system might have questioned whether von Wright really needed to recognize so many varieties. They might have claimed that instrumental goodness, technical goodness and all the rest could be unified in a simple category of goodness of a kind: “Where the word “good” holds open a place for a substantive, all the semantic differences that result from the collocation of the adjective and a particular substantive can be traced to the substantive. On a proper theoretical understanding, there is no reason to suppose that the contribution of the adjective “good” itself needs to vary. Let us not postulate more varieties of goodness than we need”.Footnote 7
In response to all this, let us refer to chapter two of Varieties. In that chapter, von Wright is ready to allow that “by calling something “good” in the instrumental or in the technical sense we often… say that this thing is good of its kind”. So far, this is in line with the claim made by his imaginary critic, the univocist. Take “good knife”. Simply to understand what a knife is is to grasp the idea of a standard for knives. So much seems right, but how general is the good-of-its-kind proposal? One doubts how well it can work with “good fortune”, or “good outcome” or “good act”. Are there standards of excellence for outcomes or acts such as we have for knives or watches or cars? (Cp. Varieties, p. 44.) It may be that goodness of a kind will need to play a larger part in the philosophy of goodness than von Wright expected (lexicographers certainly invoke this category), but substantive-hunger or attributivity explains less than the univocist hopes for. Even where it is most apposite, not everything is straightforward.Footnote 8
6. In the face of this defence of von Wright, his critic may be tempted to deploy Ziff's idea that the goodness of a thing depends only on its answering to the interest that is relevant in the context. “Train your thoughts on the varieties of context and of interest,” the critic may say, “not on varieties of goodness.” But now there are other difficulties. Consider von Wright's category of medical goodness, the goodness of organs or faculties or the soundness of limbs. After a bicycle accident in which I break my left leg, I can refer to my right leg as my “good leg”. The critic may think that this option is a product of the context. In opposition to that, von Wright would adduce his separate category of medical goodness. He could agree that it takes a context to activate or trigger the medical reading of “good [such and such].” But context cannot account for everything here, he might say. Suppose Ziff were right and just any old interest relevant to the context would suffice. Then we should have the following result. At the next phase in the history of my accident, where the hospital consultant wants a broken leg to demonstrate to his students and that is the relevant interest, an assistant could whisper to him as the great man hurries into the anatomy theatre, “the patient's left leg is the good leg” meaning that the left leg is the one the consultant needs to demonstrate to the students. That's what he could whisper if Ziff were right. But the assistant can't say that. For the good leg is the other one. It's the right leg, despite the fact that this leg is of no relevant interest. Relevant interest is powerless against the way in which the importance and salience for human life of the healthy or unimpaired has imposed itself on the language we speak and the thoughts that we have. Its imprint is the provision for a separable medical reading of “good”, ready and waiting for the summons of any speaker who would call upon it. (This is the subject of von Wright's chapter three, sections 7–12.)
7. So much then for resistance deriving from the taste for anti-systematic profusion (section 4) and so much for an objection coming from the side of philosophical semantics in blinkers (sections 5 and 6). But in response to the second kind of resistance, I want to supplement the record with a word more about “goodness of a kind” and then to offer a general remark about the whole project of distinguishing varieties.
Unlike instrumental goodness, technical goodness (as in “good orator”, “good carpenter”, “good navigator”) looks as if it would have been highly amenable to being subsumed within goodness of a kind. With technical goodness, there is a real plausibility in the claim that an agent who acts or operates well under some head will belong to a kind that is associated with that mode of doing, acting, or operating. This gives the simple univocity theorist at least one part of what he wanted. But it doesn't release us from the necessity to recognize the technical as a distinct variety of goodness. What, after all, is a carpenter or orator? One only qualifies as such by being passably good or passably skilful at working wood or being well enough capable of persuading others by public speech. Or, as von Wright puts the point: “an attribution of technical goodness of its kind is a secondary valuation. Its basis, the primary valuation, is a judgment to the effect that this being is good at something” (Varieties, p. 33, von Wright's italics).Footnote 9
General remark. Having come so far with von Wright, let us pause to distinguish three different tasks.
(1) There is the task of delimiting and distinguishing different varieties of goodness. See sections 3–7 above and sections 10–11 below. (A small beginning upon a large assignment.)
(2) There is the task of discovering what can be said about goodness as such – about the property of which the varieties of good appear as determinations. (See sections 18–20 below. See also section 8, penultimate paragraph, and see note 12.) I say determinations rather than differentiations in order to stress the point that few if any varieties of goodness can be grasped by grasping a restriction of some self-sufficient higher genus of goodness.
(3) There is one more enquiry we ought to pursue. Of each particular variety of goodness identified in the execution of (1), we may ask: (a) are things that fall within this variety of goodness called most naturally by a predicate that is proprietary to the variety (or to a sub-variety of the variety), “just” (say) or “brave” or “skilful” or “favourable” or “sharp”? (b) are things that fall within the given variety to be described by some construction proprietary to this variety (cf. “good” + “at”, as it figured in the possibility that appeared in the second paragraph of this section)? (c) may the things that fall within the given variety be called or described by the word “good” taken as standing not for good in general but for the particular variety of good that is in question? In illustration of this last possibility consider “[medically] good” as predicated of limbs or organs that are not harmed or impaired (cf. section 6); or consider “[aesthetically] good” as predicated of the legs of a film-star who may have to ensure them for a million dollars or as predicated of the fine bearing or beautiful face of some poet or poetess or hero or heroine or other person singled out for attention; or consider “[vocationally] good” as predicated of the practitioner of a humane calling (see section 14) or “[ethically] good” as predicated with the meaning either of benevolence (see section 15) or of inclusive moral goodness (see section 15).
8. Enough said about von Wright's project, his method, and the prima facie merits of his provisional and professedly incomplete typology of the divers varieties of goodness. We now arrive at the chief question of this paper. In chapter one of his book and in advance of everything else, von Wright raises the question of the unity and the order that persist amid this variety:
The unity in the variety [of goodness]…is not that which a genus gives to the species falling under it. Nor does it appear to be a unity of the sort for which analogy or family resemblance can be held responsible… The meaning pattern of “good” is peculiar and puzzling. It is worth more attention than it has received on the part of philosophical semanticists. It is not however my plan to discuss these aspects in the present work (Varieties, p. 17).
In the face of a similar question about the meaning-pattern of “good”, Aristotle was more forthcoming. He made two positive suggestions:
There is no common account to be had of that which constitutes the goodness of honour, the goodness of wisdom or understanding and the goodness of pleasure. Even in the case of things that are good in themselves, there is no common Form. How then is it that we call each of these things good? It is no mere accident surely that each of these things answers to the word “good”.Footnote 10 This is no chance homonymy. Can it be that all the things that answer to “good” contribute in some way or other to some single thing or derive from a single thing? There is also another possibility: is some principle of analogy at work here? What sight is to the body, intellect is for the soul and so on. Nicomachean Ethics 1096b 24–29.Footnote 11
I agree with von Wright in finding simple analogy insufficient for the explanatory task (even if, as we shall see, it has some subsidiary usefulness). But what about Aristotle's first idea, which von Wright lets pass? Suppose we single out one primary or central sense of “good” as the primary or focal sense. Then how many of von Wright's other and mutually distinguishable ways of reading “good” can we arrange around its focus and account for by showing how they build out from that central sense? That is the question I shall try to answer first. And how well can we understand unspecific goodness by thinking of it as a property whose extension includes everything that can be denominated focally by variation upon the idea that is taken as the originary idea of good? That question, important though it is, will be postponed to section 19, where we shall revert to undifferentiated good. Meanwhile, however, see note 12.
Aristotle figures in what follows because it is his suggestion that I press into service. But it is present-day rather than Aristotelian conceptions of the various varieties of good which will concern us – our own conceptions as I shall try to read them, in agreement or occasional disagreement with von Wright. In so far as Aristotle enters here, that is not in the cause of our interpreting him but chiefly in order for us to make use of his thoughts about a question that was closely akin to von Wright's.
9. Aristotle's most celebrated deployment of the first of the two strategies he mentions for finding order or system within homonymy – the focal strategy, as Aristotelians might call it – is in connection with the multiplicity of be. The thing which is (or has being) in the primary or central or focal sense is a substance, a man, a tree, God etc. Then, in radical dependence upon substances, there are other things which are (have their being) in related but distinguishable senses of “is” or “are”. These other things are by virtue of how some substance is qualitatively – white, say, or healthy – or by virtue of the size it is – six foot tall, say. Others have their being in other ways. Acts, for instance, are by virtue of what a substance does – run, say, or walk (see Metaphysics 1028 a20).
The metaphysically problematic character of Aristotle's proposal about being must not detract from the beautiful plainness of the parallels that he adduces. Consider “healthy” as it occurs in “healthy person”, “healthy exercise”, “healthy food”, “healthy coat” (viz. the glossy, health-evincing coat of a prize dog or cow), or (as per Aquinas' happy addition) “healthy urine”. Here are five occurrences of “healthy” requiring no less than five different explanations. Yet one has only to relate each sense to one and the same focus, namely the condition of the person or animal that is healthy. Urine, for instance, is healthy just if it is such as a healthy animal would pass. It is indicative of health. Exercise is healthy just if it promotes health, and so on. “Everything that is healthy [note here the non-specific use of the word] is somehow related to health, by preserving health or producing it, or being indicative of it or being receptive of it.” (Metaphysics 1003 a34–b1).Footnote 12
That which follows will chronicle the effort to do for “good” that which Aristotle does for “healthy”. In advance of the chronicle, let me say that, in the process of applying Aristotle's idea to the phenomena, we score a handful of successes, but then optimism falters. The multiplicity of the phenomena stretches and complicates the simple focal hypothesis and then confronts it with cases that lie outside its range. Yet that which this failure reveals will not be a scene where all you can say is that “good” is the most general adjective of commendation. Nor will it remain dark why the peculiar character of “good” makes it an insecure basis for scepticism concerning value properties, as well as a singularly odd place to begin upon a general study of the sense and the reference of the great generality of value-predicates.
10. How shall we apply the focal strategy to the meaning pattern of good? The most obvious way to proceed seems to be to take as our focus what von Wright calls the good of a being, always bearing in mind the case which is especially interesting to us, namely the case where we say that the well being or the faring well of the human animal is good.
It is a strange thing that, once one decides to proceed in this way, one finds von Wright as if anticipating it – despite his supposed postponement of these questions. Prominent among such anticipations is his treatment of the capacious category utilitarian goodness and its several sub-varieties. See pages 42–3:
In the case of useful things which are also called beneficial, that to which the useful is favourably causally relevant…may be characterized as the good of some being… Physical exercise, for instance, is beneficial because good for the health. “Health” is another name for the good of the body. The good of the human body is an aspect of the good (welfare) of man. Thus to say that exercise is beneficial is to say that it affects favourably, immediately the good of the body, and ultimately the good of man… [So] everything which is beneficial favourably affects the good of some being… [A] thing which affects the good of some being protectively rather than promotively we call (merely) useful rather than (also) beneficial…[V]irtues are protective rather than promotive of [the] good [of a being] …Anything which is an end of action [is] a good. A thing is useful when it is favourably causally relevant to some good [in the sense of “a good” just explained] … [It] is beneficial when it is promotive of that peculiar good which we call the good of a being…
Such claims are prototypical of a focal or Aristotelian answer to the order in variety question, the answer organized around the central notion of the good of a being. (Cp. NE1102a1-4.) But before we go any further at least three points need immediate attention.
First, some might object that pace von Wright virtues are not always or necessarily protective of the person's good, the welfare of the being that he or she is;Footnote 13 and object further that virtues represent other kinds of goodness beside that of being protective (cp. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1097b2-4). We shall come back to these matters in sections 15 and 17.
Secondly, von Wright says that anything which is an end of action is a good. Compare his earlier remark: “By “a good” …one can also understand anything which is an end of action or object of desire or want or need” (p. 10). Things are less straightforward here than they were with beneficial goodness, which is a central case of contributing to the good of a being. We shall have to say that such an end of action or “object of desire, want or need” counts as a good by virtue of its appearing to the agent or subject in question under the aspect of contributing either causally or constitutively to the good of some being who is of concern to that agent or subject. (How much does it matter if the agent or subject is mistaken or the appearances are misleading? Let me bracket that question for the moment. But see section 13.)
Thirdly, a word about von Wright's example “lubrication is good for an engine”. Supplementing the focal strategy with a generous helping of analogy, are we to suppose that artefacts which are dear to us come to concern us in such a special and affectionate way that we cannot help thinking of them as if they had a good of their own? (Compare p. 50.) Better surely to recognize that the way in which lubrication is good for an engine is that it prevents the deterioration or destruction of the engine, thereby preserving a good, namely the good that consists in its working well, where that good can appear under the aspect of contributing to the good of beings.Footnote 14
11. We need to fill out the larger picture within which explanations based on the “good of a being” are to operate, but it serves well enough to quote that which von Wright says (pp. 86–7):
Of the being who does well we also say that it flourishes, thrives or prospers. And we call it happy. If health and well-being primarily connote something privative, absence of illness and suffering; then happiness and well-doing again primarily refer to something positive, to an overflow or surplus of agreeable states and things.
These sentences are the cue to bring into the picture medical and hedonic goodness.
The focal account of the goodness of organs and faculties which are not defective will refer their particular goodness to the particular ways in which organs and faculties normally serve the good of a being. There is a great deal more to say about what those ways are (Varieties surveys some of this ground); but, here as everywhere, the important thing for purposes of the Aristotelian project is not the old ideal of strict definition but that the explication and elucidation of each semantic variation upon good should need to make a non-gratuitous circuit through the idea of the good of a being. At least under this head, and in its application to medical goodness, the focal hypothesis survives well enough.
12. Next then hedonic goodness and the goodness of pleasant experiences or of the pleasures of a life comprising divers enjoyable activities (a life whose circumstances are liked by the one who lives the life). Can we account for their goodness in the same sort of way? These subjects are notorious for their intractability. I begin upon them with von Wright's characteristic contention (p. 62), no less memorable than that last quoted, to the effect that, just as there is a positive notion of health which involves consciousness of fitness or strength, so there is a positive notion of [well-being] which “has a primary conceptual alliance with pleasure. Of the being who enjoys this aspect of its welfare [well-being] we say that it is happy. Happiness could also be called the flower of well-being”.
Let us embark upon the goodness of that which is enjoyable or pleasurable with the case that is easiest, namely the goodness of pleasures whose enjoyability is well captured in Aristotelian terms by describing them in terms of unimpeded activity. Such are the pleasures (i.e. activities) von Wright has in mind when he speaks (pp. 64–5) of things one is keen on doing, enjoys doing or likes to do.Footnote 15 (see Nicomachean Ethics, book VII). Surely the goodness of such pleasures does indeed derive in part from the way in which they can heighten an animate being's however indistinct awareness of its own “good of a being”, even as that awareness enhances the pleasures themselves. Pleasures of this sort must have some conceptual alliance with happiness conceived in the way in which von Wright conceives it. Yes. Imprecise though it is, so much seems worth saying. But not all pleasures, nor yet all pleasure, fall very aptly within the ambit of Aristotle's unimpeded activity theory or under the good-of-a-being theory. Consider the mode of attention whose goodness as pleasure is owed to the aesthetic goodness or beauty of its perceptual object. What on earth does that sort of goodness have to do with the good of a being?Footnote 16 The pleasure that engages with such an object feeds or nourishes the good of a being (the subject of experience) – yes, so much can be allowed – but it does so by putting the being into relation with another and antecedent kind of goodness. Cognate difficulties will occupy us later. Meanwhile, before I babble, I pass onward to the next task.
13. So far, not without some difficulty, we have treated utilitarian goodness, beneficial goodness, medical goodness, and hedonic goodness. Next let us try to bring in instrumental goodness. Examples of this are “good house” or “good way of changing a tyre”. Confronting this variety of goodness, the friend of focal meaning will want to say that, once joking and irony are put aside (as in “a good way of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face”), we normally confine our attributions of instrumental goodness to classes of things which second the kinds of aim or purpose that von Wright calls ‘ends of action’ – where an end of action qualifies as good only under the aspect of contributing (or so it is hoped) either causally or constitutively to ‘the good of a being’.
Something similar applies to technical goodness. If someone is a good orator or a good carpenter, it is clear that there must be all sorts of occasion on which his or her knowledge and skill can secure that which will appear there, in that context, as a good – and appear thus under the aspect of contributing instrumentally or constitutively to the good of a being. By contrast, we are less happy with “good assassin” or “good counterfeiter”. For we are less happy with counting what the executant aims at as “a good”. Here the focal theorists must say that such uses rest on analogy. (We shall return to analogy.) In defence of that claim, let me commend an experiment. Say to yourself the words “good highwayman”. Do they not prompt you to think of a highwayman on the side of the good of beings who are poor or oppressed – of Robin Hood, say, rather than of some pitilessly expert predator upon travellers on the road? With “good highwayman” we do not listen (it seems) for a technical sense of “good”. Unless we belong to the criminal world, or we are spectators making sense of John Gay's Beggars Opera, or we are lexicographers interpreting expressions of the admiration in which the criminal world holds most felonious expertises, we wait to hear some sense akin to that of “helpful”, “benevolent” or “good [person]”.
14. This is a proper moment for me to say why one might think that, over and above technical goodness, von Wright should recognize goodness in a calling. Consider being a doctor. As is pointed out at Varieties (p. 37), there is more to qualifying as a good doctor than technical goodness: “[For] most so-called professions…[pure] technical goodness is secondary to instrumental goodness.” This understates the point, however. One who is skilled in healing but decides to redeploy that skill however marvellously well by writing medical textbooks may in that way (as von Wright puts it) “serve the ends and purposes of men and institutions” (the phrase is from the same page of Varieties). But even this falls short of that which is required in the calling of doctor. The bad temper or misanthropy of someone who is skilled in healing but prefers the life of a writer of textbooks, lest he betray the strong aversion he has discovered in himself to the close presence of other human beings, surely stands in the way of his being fully or unqualifiedly a good doctor. Being a good doctor depends upon more than skill and more than the biomedical knowledge that goes into writing textbooks. It depends inter alia upon a particular formation of character and will and a distinctive sort of concern with the good of beings. May it be that there is here a separable variety of goodness, one with its own relation to the good of a being? At this point, another thing we come to anticipate is the possibility of an ambiguity in the claim “x is a good doctor”, an ambiguity that has nothing to do with any ambiguity in “doctor”. Minimally, “x is a good doctor” may mean that x is diagnostically or in other ways technically adept. But its further meaning is that, beyond his or her undoubted technical mastery, x follows the humane vocation of doctor.
There are other vocations, but rather than pause to narrow or to refine the proposal, let me try to say how full or plenary goodness in a calling such as a doctor's relates to our semantic focus, the good of a being. Like this perhaps: one who follows such a calling leads a life that is centred upon concerns special to one with a particular insight or understanding directed at a humane purpose. In a way which these define, persons of this sort have to be ready at any instant of night or day to recognize the claims that the good of a being can make upon their capacities and their will.Footnote 17 In respect of the provision of the things that flow from his or her having that vocation, such a person puts himself or herself at the beck and call of the good of a [human] being.
15. So far so good – but only so good – for the focal hypothesis. Now though we must treat some of the other varieties that von Wright mentions.
What shall we say about “good man” or “good person”? Would that von Wright had said more about it. In the event, all we have are his brief remarks at chapter six, section 12. Their gist may be conveyed in his own words as follows:
When the phrase “a good man” is used, not in the sense of instrumental or technical goodness but with a moral tinge, it is related to the notions of doing good and of having good intentions. But it has no clear and distinct relationship to these notions… I think it is true to say that, when the phrase “a good man” is used with a so-called moral meaning, it is related to our idea of a benevolent man.
In explication of “you're always so good to me”, as of “you are always too good to me”, an ordinary dictionary will lend support to the last suggestion. But, as von Wright anticipates, we shall certainly want more. Can we not put “good person” into some definite relation with “good act” and “good intention”? And, at the same time, must we not make a proper allowance for the thought that a properly good person will not allow their benevolence to trump their sense of justice?
At the outset – because von Wright does so and not because we expect this to issue in an Aristotelian outcome – let us go back to Aristotle. To judge from Nicomachean Ethics I.7 and II.6, Aristotle thinks that the aretê or goodness of a man, depends on how he carries out the ergon that is proper to man, the ergon Aristotle identifies with activities and acts of the soul that arise from reason (1098a14). Ergon is commonly translated as ‘function’. Man is to his ergon as a flute-player is to flute playing, a builder to building, an eye to seeing, a hand to the things we do with a hand, a foot to walking or running. The trouble is that, as explained in terms of function, none of these analogies is very illuminating. It is not as if Aristotle is party to the thought that man is to be compared with a cog or spindle in a machine, or compared with a limb or an organ that serves some larger organism. Aristotle is no more party to such thoughts than we are. Nor is it easy to model the goodness of a human being on the functional or technical goodness of a craftsman or musician. You can't be a builder without possessing some training, skill or aptitude; and it is hard to conceive of a builder or a musician in the complete absence of the framework that creates such roles, crafts or métiers. But you can be a human being or anthropos without having any particular skill or aptitude at all (cp. Varieties, p.133). Nor does simple human beinghood appear to presuppose much of any framework.
At this point, since von Wright has carried us here, let us make an experiment. Taking our cue from Richard Bentley, restoring the initial digamma to [w]ergon, and seeing the English and Greek words reveal one and the same Indo-European root, let us start afresh with the idea of work. As rational beings with the nature that we discover we are blessed or encumbered with, what work do we assign to each other or to ourselves? Then think of man as akin to Mensch or homo and think of homines as each and all candidates to be recognized as partaking in the solidarity of a community of persons or the party of humankind (as Hume might call it). Think of the party of humankind as the community whose members recognize one another by the human form and hold to one another (in so far as they do hold to one another) in the causes of solidarity, reciprocity and mutual protection under the constraints and requirements of natural virtues such as benevolence and artificial virtues such as fidelity or justice. A good human being is one who serves these ends and fulfils in these particular ways the watching brief which he or she holds on behalf of the good of a being, that is on behalf of human beings. (A watching brief. The good person need not be a busybody. As likely as not, one part of his/her originary motivation is the sense of the badness of disregarding the harm that will result if no one seeks to protect or defend the good of human beings.)
This is miles from von Wright – and, glossing ergon as it does in a way that Aristotle does not, miles more from Aristotle. But it does prepare the way to treat “good act” and “good intention” in a quasi-Aristotelian way by saying that a good intention is the sort of intention with which we expect a good person to act and a good act the sort of act we expect of a good person.Footnote 18 What is more, this whole proposal leaves us free to explore the chance a good person has of happiness (or to compare and contrast their chance of true felicity and the chances of other kinds of people) without confusing the goodness or virtue of a human being (their eu zen taken in the sense one explains by reference to ethical virtue) with the good of a being as understood in the sense of the good for a human being (or eu zen in the sense of the good person's welfare or happiness). It lays bare the openness for us of that question.Footnote 19
16. When we conjoin this proposal with the focal hypothesis, there are two kinds of doubt.
First doubt. By this account, “good act” or “good intention” is scarcely a simple derivative from the “good of a being” in the way in which “healthy food” or “healthy urine” is derivative from “health” or “healthy animal”. It depends on the intermediation of something which has itself to be explained focally. So, “good intention” or “good act” is an offshoot from an offshoot from “good of a being”, namely “good person”. That is in the spirit of the original hypothesis, but let us not omit to record this development.Footnote 20 It must be allowable for focal explanations to be nested.
A second and graver doubt goes back to the originary notion of the good of a being from which we tried to arrive at “good person”. In thinking about the good of (for) human beings politically and socially gathered together, a good person has not only to attend to the welfare towards which a good person directs his or her benevolence – that was the good of a being as we understood it when we were concerned with instrumental, utilitarian, beneficial, medical etc. goodness – not only to attend to the solidarity of the human qua human and the absolute prohibitions that defend human beings from one another, but to attend also to certain special and further necessities, namely those in the providing for which the collectivity creates and defends the arrangements through which trust is concerted and expectations are made dependable.Footnote 21 This is the province of Hume's artificial virtues. Once these are brought into the picture, however, we can no longer think of the good for a human being as simple benevolence conceives it or characterize the full goodness (virtue) of a human being simply in terms of benevolence. Indeed the plenary goodness of a human being will require under some circumstances that he or she oppose that good-benevolent disposition within him or herself (along with the aggregative propensities to which that may give rise) by dispositions that exclude that which solidarity prohibits or that demand the agent's attachment to justice or fairness or fidelity. The upshot is this. Even as we seek to connect the varieties of goodness to the unitary focus of the good for a being, the focus transforms itself. As a result, the good of (for) a being seems to comprise or contain within itself two or three distinct varieties of good of (for) a being. A focal theorist must be ready to separate, and then to relate to one another, the good for a being that we ask of benevolence, the good for a being that consists in the solidarity of fellow beings with him or her, and the good for a being which it is the office of fidelity, fairness or justice to defend and to maintain.
17. Very soon we must review the prospects for the focal theory. First though let us go back to the very beginning and engage in our own way with the claims that Aristotle makes at NE 1096b23–26: ‘there is no common account to be had of that which constitutes the goodness of honour, the goodness of wisdom or understanding, and the goodness of pleasure. Even in the case of things that are good in themselves, there is no common Form or Idea.’ Straying from Aristotle to any extent that we need, what account should we ourselves give of these several goodnesses?
Pleasure has its own relation to the good of a being, as we have seen, even if it has directed us toward varieties of goodness whose goodness seems to resist being represented as deriving from the good of a being (see section 12 above).
Honour is the tribute, the recognition pleasing to the receiver, that befits his or her virtues or achievements. In a non-degenerate case, the recipient receives such honour as a good in itself, not as a means to some further or alien benefit. What qualifies honour so conceived to count as such a good? It is accorded to the recipient by those who know him or her, accorded freely, and accorded on the basis, as Aristotle notes, of the recipient's aretê – their bravery perhaps, or their endurance, or their love of the polis, or their artistry … or, as (as we might insist) their moral virtue or personal goodness. Such honour confirms and assures the recipient in his or her possession of something that s/he can value for what it is in itself.
On the supposition that so much is correct about honour, it seems that, without von Wright's encouragementFootnote 22 but in tandem with that which the idea of honour discovers to us, we are filling out our account of other things too. Not least, we are enlarging that account of the goodness of a good person (section 15) with an account of the goodness for him or her of attaining to the goodness of a good person. That goodness for the possessor can be all of a piece with any pleasure s/he takes in his or her acknowledged membership of the party of human kind. Suppose we go on to conclude that the attainment of ethical virtue is an end in itself and a good for the possessor of that goodness. How then to explicate what we must mean in saying this? Stealing a turn of phrase from Eudemian Ethics 1218b4–7 (‘… one good is prakton another not. The good which is prakton is the sort of good which is a thing-for-the-sake-of-which (hou heneka)’)Footnote 23, we might interpret ourselves as saying that ethical virtue is a thing-for-the-sake-of-which and something we might seek not only for the sake of its beneficiaries, but also for its own sake and for what it is in itself. That surely amounts to saying that being a good person is a constituent of the practical good. But then, in so far as we are persuaded of this, we have to ask: have we not added yet one more variety of good to the varieties which are comprised in the good of a being?
A cognate question arises about the distinguishable goodness that I take third, the goodness of wisdom or understanding. This wisdom would still be a practical good, something we might strive for and a thing-for-the-sake-of-which, even if we did not depend on its instrumental contribution to our welfare. But how can this further goodness that we attribute to it be completely or properly subsumed under the good of a being that we took to be our focus in explaining either the good/goodness of the varieties of goodness we were mostly concerned with in section 5–7 and 10–14 or in explaining focally the good/goodness of benevolence and of ethical virtue more generally?Footnote 24
18. It is time to ask how much can be achieved by persevering so single-mindedly in the line of enquiry that we began upon in section 8. If we want to answer von Wright's question about the (“peculiar and puzzling”) meaning pattern of “good” then Aristotle's focal hypothesis will scarcely give us an account of “good” with the perfection and apparent completeness of Aristotle's account of “healthy”. It is true that by allowing the idea of the good of a being constantly to develop, then arranging in some way for different varieties of the good of a being to represent different aspects of a being's ‘flourishing’ (?), and allowing focal explanations to be nested within focal explanations (see section 16, paragraph two), we might regain some ground for the focal theory. But further progress will also depend, or so it appears, upon integrating that which can be achieved in this way into some larger strategy. What shall that be? The only obvious candidate is a speculative, quasi-historical or reconstructive account of the whole history of the English word “good” (or a corresponding word in any other language) set out in a narrative hospitable to focal explanations, hospitable to the differentiation of different aspects of the good of a being, and structured also in divers other ways yet to be characterized.
If that possibility seems obvious now, then why did it not figure at all in our deliberations in section 8, or in Aristotle's or von Wright's deliberations? Well, in so far as the unitary focus becomes problematic, it is exposed to a doubt that the first focal proposal was less liable to provoke. Would an account of the long and complex history of “good” and its immediate cognates such as “well” (cp. German “gut” and “wohl”, French “bon” and “bien”) be an account of any well-made single however capacious idea? This is a more than purely theoretical doubt. On a recent visit to Stockholm (May 2008), I encountered Swedish-speakers who asked how readily von Wright could have translated the name of his own book into his native language. Raising similar questions about Russian, they asked why I was so sure that there was some overarching goodness whose varieties von Wright had enumerated. If these interlocutors were not teasing me and if their doubts about Swedish are well considered, does that mean that other languages have greater expressive power? Or do languages such as Swedish subvert the pretensions of languages whose speakers take themselves to grasp some comprehensive property as wide as that which “good” appears to stand for?
Prescinding from the particular question about Swedish, let me set out some of the difficulties of denying the existence of some large and comprehensive idea whose several or many determinations can be unfolded as the varieties of goodness.
19. I start on this from a subordinate question. When one says that something is a good in itself, which variety of goodness is that?Footnote 25 It is hard to dispense with the thought that the good in itself first invokes the same comprehensive property whose determinations will be recorded and brought into intelligible relation with one another by the lexico-cultural narrative, but then, within the ambit of that property, invokes some further condition (such as the one Aristotle sketches at 1097a30–31, for instance).
A second question. In his first chapter von Wright says:
We may feel astonished at the fact that a smell as well as a general, rainfall as well as lungs, can be good. It may, that is, be astonishing to consider how diverse good things can be. But we should not hesitate to call the pleasant or the skilful or the useful or the healthy forms of the good. (Page 17.)
What are we to say about these occurrences of “good”? It may indeed seem astonishing, where good has such a variety of significations, that von Wright can say this. Yet it seems evident that he can.
If it seems evident that von Wright can say this, how can he? Well, a parallel may be useful. At the beginning of Book 5 of Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle warns us that “just” is homonymous. But this is no random homonymy, he says. Transposing Aristotle's use of the term, however utterly recklessly, into ours, I redeploy and paraphrase freely the observation he makes at this point:
[where] homonymy is close, it does not trouble us in the way it does where the denotata are too far apart and the mutual incongruity is as evident as it is with kleis meaning the collar bone of an animal and kleis meaning the thing one uses to lock the door. Nicomachean Ethics 1129a26–31.
It would be absurd for a Greek speaker to declare himself astonished at the variety of kleides (keys). Door keys and collar bones, like money banks and river banks, have only an analogical-cum-etymological connection. Such things themselves really don't belong together. By contrast, the varieties of justice do belong together, even if you have to be careful when you try to generalize about all these justices taken together. In various ways they all help to preserve some thing, a political constitution, a res publica, a joint concern… that partners hold in common (cp. Eudemian Ethics 1241b13–16). But this is not to say that distributive or rectificatory or commutative justice should be seen as carved out by restriction from justice undifferentiated.
If the varieties of justice are close enough together to allow one to see “just” as working by means of something analogous to typical ambiguity, why shouldn't something similar apply to the varieties of goodness? Of course, they will cease to belong together if we try to count as good everything that is called good on the basis of merely analogical or etymological connection (see section 13, also note 17). But let us insist that all analogical widenings of the extension of “good” be validated and validated strictly on their merits.Footnote 26
All right, someone may say, but what then positively assembles the far-flung various varieties of goodness and justifies counting them together as varieties of “goodness”? What is the principle?
Before we reply, let us remember that we have already proposed an answer to that question (section 8) and then a redeployment of that answer (section 18, first paragraph). Like undifferentiated justice, undifferentiated good is known to us without reference to any biconditional equivalence. On the other hand, nothing yet excludes its possessing certain marks (in Frege's sense of “mark”) or necessary conditions. One candidate for consideration is this: in one way or another, everything that falls under the determinable good relates somehow to a thing-for-the-sake-of-which, a thing (such as health, security, knowledge, understanding…) that it is worth acting to secure, to care for, to safeguard, to achieve… What the philosophical lexicographer recapitulates under “good”, we might say, is the history of our constant interrogation of the life that we lead and the place where we lead it, our constant interrogation of things that concern us or might concern us or ought to concern us.Footnote 27 The philosophical lexicographer's work needs to be all of a piece with this constant engagement on the part of human beings. In this way, the lexicographer's work traces the complexity of a whole network of uses of “good”. It will be his/her work that reveals the coherence of that network – if it is coherent. There is no transcending test. All we can ask is this: as the network grows, is there still a real point in our using one predicate here – what would be lost if we did not? – or are the denotata now “too far apart”?
20. We now have three further questions.
First, do we grasp the undifferentiated good by abstracting to it from its determinations? That is implausible. Or do we begin with the good and then learn its determinations. That is even more implausible. The answer I prefer is that, at the beginning, we are striving to achieve, secure, care for, safeguard… all sorts of things and we are subsuming these things under various categorizations which it will become possible at a later stage, after countless refinements, to understand as varieties of goodness. But the grasp such as it is of the larger property and the grasp of its determinations develop in tandem and pari passu.
Secondly, will a property such as the one I have tried to characterize have room within it for all the varieties of goodness? That will be the subject of section 21.
Thirdly, what understanding does the schema encapsulate of goodness as such? That will be the subject of section 22.
21. With the second question, let us start upon what may appear as one of the hardest cases, cosmological goodness (as one might call it). Consider from among the early verses of Genesis the following:
1.3 And God said let there be light; and there was light and God saw the light, that it was good …
1.10 And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering together of the waters he called the Seas and God saw that it was good… .
1.31 And God saw everything he had made, and behold it was very good.
Whatever the word's etymological history, we now hear these occurrences of “good”/“tov” as carrying a resonance not well explained by hearing them as invoking technical or utilitarian goodness or as variants upon “well-made” or “the product of God's technical goodness” or “God's provision of that which would minister to the good of beings (not least human ones)”. Someone may say that the goodness spoken of in Genesis is not worth bothering with – is either unintelligible or at best the product of idle analogizing; still less, they may say, can it qualify as a thing-for-the-sake-of-which or as an end of human concern or endeavour. Yet I believe that pre-theoretically we understand it.Footnote 28 I note further that, when Thomas Hill, Jr. asks what we are to think of someone who uproots his whole front garden to make a concrete parking lot for three cars and a tool shed, we can ask why the beauty of grass, flowers and shrubs was not for him a thing-for-the-sake-of-which-not, namely not to lay waste the goodness of the world. Why suppose that everything we can care about – every thing-for-the-sake-of-which – is something we ourselves create or confer goodness upon, or is something that owes its goodness to the fact that it contributes to our good?
22. On this basis, it may seem for a moment that the characterization we have offered of good accommodates within it not only cosmological good, but also the aesthetic good that troubled us in section 12. By the same token, it may seem that there is room within undifferentiated good so conceived for that which is interesting or beguiling or beautiful among the concerns of wisdom or understanding; that it is by ministering to these concerns that wisdom or understanding qualifies as a constituent of the good of our being. (This by way of supplement to section 17.) Now, however, having followed this line, we come to the third of our three concluding questions and to a doubt.
How much real understanding can we achieve of the goodness of the kinds of good last mentioned by pointing out that they bear in this way upon the good of a being? The fact that they can on these terms become things-for-the-sake-of-which shows something important about human beings and their susceptibilities. But, in itself, this fact need not show very much about these varieties of good. The interesting or beguiling or beautiful nourishes the good of human beings, but precisely by coming to us from without. It is an antecedent sort of goodness which impinges upon us. It will be topsy-turvy for the focalist to try to trace this antecedent goodness itself to the good of a being. Let the lexico-philosophical reconstructors of the evolution and of the meaning of “good” not confuse the fact that theirs is an inquiry into the human scale of values with the utter falsehood that the human scale of values is a scale exclusively of human values.Footnote 29 It is a human scale of human and non-human values – of both. The narrative which shows the coherence (such as it is) of the network of uses of “good” must make room for this, as well as for much else that it is hard to understand.Footnote 30 Even on the most optimistic view, the focal theory can aspire to engage with only one however large and important subclass of the phenomena. It does however point to the possiblity that there really is order to be discovered amid the randomness and multiplicity of the good.
