People pay millions to listen to a person ramble for hours about how to do good, how to be good or how to feel good, so why is it that nobody bothers to explain what this good is? This is not just some academic question for perfectionist-philosophy professors. It is a question that ideally ought to be answered before we do anything. It is at once the most abstract and the most practical problem we can examine.
We all want something we think will be good for all of us — and yet to get what we want, it sure helps know what it is.
Someone trying to buy a stapler without knowing what a stapler is — just going to a store, trying to decide what feels most like a stapler to him — would be an interesting sight, especially when he starts attaching pieces of paper together with a nail gun.
Yet, this is precisely what lots of people are doing right now; simply going about life, following whatever their blind-fickle emotions tell them is good — instead of rationally determining what good is.
Their method might work, depending on the nature of the good. But of course, we can only know whether their method works if we already know the nature of the good. What makes their plan especially bold is that, should they choose very poorly, their entire life might be wholly worthless – and that, most of us can agree, would not be good.
They are really just putting the rest of their entire life and its years of work up to chance; if their emotions pull them the wrong way, then it was all a waste.
Suppose there is no such thing as good, or that a set of rules objectively determining what we are to do with ourselves cannot be found. But that is an utterly senseless thing to believe.
We certainly cannot prove that good does not exist, and since it would presumably give meaning and direction to our lives, it has to be the most important and useful thing we could ever find.
So only the most sophisticated sort of imbecile could give up the glorious chase and just assume it never was, cynically asking “what is goodness?” to those exhorting them to be better.
Any hypothetical is-ought they might defend themselves with presupposes the non-existence of the good in the first place and is an absurd excuse. It is merely saying, “I have no obligation to search for the good, because I’ve assumed it isn’t there.”
It is not as though we have no clue at all about what good might be; books have been piled up dealing with theories of it. Some say an object’s goodness lies in its fulfilling its complete potential, or performing its unique, specific role.
Others have taken a more Epicurean approach, reducing goodness to human happiness, while the Stoics insist on some mysterious, universal plan that we must conform to. Many have come to identify good with existence – after all, nothing exists which does not have anything good at all about it, and we call things bad mostly when they destroy other things.
Even if our intellects turn out to be too small to find goodness itself, then, at the very least, it is still good to look for the good.
— Gerard Keiser, linguistics and classical languages junior
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leimapapa 1 year, 1 month ago
God is good.