The Definition of Good (Routledge Revivals)

Alfred Ewing, Alfred C Ewing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415526647
• eBook ISBN: 9781136208300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in Great Britain in 1948, this book examines the definition of goodness as being distinct from the question of What things are good? Although less immediately and obviously practical, Dr. Ewing argues that the former question is more fundamental since it raises the issue of whether ethics is explicable wholly in terms of something else, for example, human psychology. Ewing states in his preface that the definition of goodness needs to be confirmed before one decides on the place value is to occupy in our conception of reality or on the ultimate characteristics which make one action right and another wrong. This book discusses these issues.

CHAPTER V

An Analysis of Good in Terms of Ought

Having distinguished the different senses of “good” and “ought” as far as necessary, we can now consider whether it is possible to define the one ethical concept in terms of the other. What Moore was attacking when he insisted that “good” could not be defined was any attempt to define it in purely non-ethical terms. The objections to such attempts are not valid against an attempt to define it by means of other ethical concepts or to give it a mixed definition consisting partly of ethical and partly of psychological terms. This proceeding would not be open to the charge of explaining away or destroying the specific character of ethical ideas; and it is such a definition that I propose now to attempt. I have indeed insisted that at least one ethical concept must be unanalysable, but that concept may perhaps not be the concept of good. Now the only other ethical term besides “good” which could be plausibly claimed to be fundamental is “ought.” We have, however, seen that this term expresses two different fundamental concepts, fittingness and moral obligation. Let us try first whether we can define “good” in terms of “ought” as standing for the former, and then consider the notion of moral obligation afterwards. I do not indeed see any prospect of defining “good” in terms of fittingness alone—that could only be done if goodness and fittingness were simply synonymous—but it might be definable in terms of fittingness together with some psychological concept.

The question at issue between naturalist and non-naturalist is not whether “good” is ever used in a non-naturalist sense, but whether it is always so used. Now the sense of “good” which is usually being considered when we ask whether “good” is or is not analysable is that usually distinguished from others by the use of the phrases “intrinsically good,” “good as an end,” “good-in-itself.” It is this sense of “good” that we shall discuss. When we have arrived at a definition, we can try to derive from it definitions of any other non-naturalist senses of “good.” The term “intrinsically good” may be technical, but in so far as there is no point in anything being good as a means unless something is good as an end it is presupposed in all commonsense talk about what is good.

The definition I shall suggest will be partly in ethical and partly in psychological terms. Provided irreducible ethical terms are introduced at all, even if they do not make up the whole of the definition., this will save it from the charge of being naturalist. I do not claim orginality for the definition;¹ if I show any originality at all, it will be in the consequences that I deduce from it. Now, strange to say, the definition is one actually suggested by Moore himself. For he suggests that we might take as a synonym for “good” as applied to an experience the phrase “worth having for its own sake.”² To say this is not necessarily inconsistent with the view that good is indefinable, for there might be various phrases which could be properly used as verbal synonyms in order to help people to see more clearly what is meant by a term without being themselves eligible as definitions of the term. It might be the case that “worth” in “worth having for its own sake” could itself only be defined in terms of “good,” so that the phrase would be quite useless as a definition of the latter, and yet it might be appropriately used to help some people to become clear as to what they meant by “good,” and especially to distinguish the sense under discussion from other senses of “good.” However I think that in fact “worth having for its own sake” can be analysed in a way which does not make it a vicious circle to use the phrase as a definition of “good”; but, before I propound my analysis, I should like the reader to consider carefully whether the phrase “an intrinsically good experience” is or is not the exact equivalent of “an experience worth having for its own sake.” In this definition, unlike the naturalist definitions, it seems clear both that the definiens and the definiendum are coextensive, and that this is necessarily so. It seems clear that there could not be an experience which was intrinsically good that was yet not worth having for its own sake, nor an experience which was worth having for its own sake that was not intrinsically good. This seems to me not merely a contingent fact but a logical necessity. Now it may well be the case that, say, A B entails and is entailed by C, and yet that A B is not a definition of C; consequently it is impossible strictly to prove that anything is a definition of anything else. So in the present case it is open to anybody to maintain that besides the characteristic expressed by the words “worth having for its own sake” there is another, indefinable characteristic, goodness. He should maintain this, if he thinks he can discern such a characteristic which always necessarily accompanies, but is different from, the characteristic of being worth having for its own sake. But I am not clear that I can discern any such characteristic, and I should point to the fact that, when in ordinary conversation we wish to convey exactly the meaning of the term “intrinsically good” to a person not familiar with it, we should most naturally use the phrase in question. “Worth having for its own sake” seems to be in fact just the phrase which the man in the street, when he is talking about experiences, would use to express what the philosopher calls “intrinsically” as distinct from “instrumentally good.”

But, while “worth having for its own sake” is equivalent to “intrinsically good” when applied to an experience, there is an objection to taking it as equivalent to “intrinsically good” without qualification. It is this: though it is often held that experiences are the only things which can be intrinsically good, we must not define “intrinsically good” in a way which would make it a verbal contradiction to say of anything but an experience that it was intrinsically good. To say that the State is good-in-itself or to say that beautiful things are good-in-themselves may be wrong but is not verbally self-contradictory. Now on the definition of “intrinsically good” suggested it would be verbally self-contradictory or meaningless, because experiences are the only kind of things that we can be said to “have” in this sense of “have,”³ though there are other senses of “have” in which it is possible to have, for example, beautiful objects. But this does not prevent the definition from being adequate when we are talking of a person’s experiences as such. What is an experience which is worth having for its own sake? It is one that it is reasonable to choose for its own sake, or that a man ought, other things being equal, to bring into existence for its own sake. Now these phrases themselves are not by the very meaning of the words limited to experiences. So, if we are looking for a definition which will not be confined to experiences, we might define “intrinsically good” as “worth choosing or producing for its own sake.” However, though this definition will mostly serve, there may be cases where it cannot well be applied, and it is difficult to find a single form of words which is always applicable. But we might adopt a technical term and define “good” as what ought to be the object of a pro attitude (to use Ross’s word). “Pro attitude” is intended to cover any favourable attitude to something. It covers, for instance, choice, desire, liking, pursuit, approval, admiration. The variety of these attitudes would go far to explain how it is that “good” may be used in so many different senses. “Worth having” as applied to experiences seems to mean that the experience in itself is a suitable one to choose for one’s own or to give to somebody else, and to entail that it should be welcomed and not avoided or deplored. It may be reasonable to renounce or avoid it on account of some bad consequences which it may have or for the sake of obtaining something still better, but as an experience it is not only desired but desirable in the absence of any positive reason against it. So we have obtained a definition of “intrinsically good” in terms of “ought,” and while the phrase “worth having for its own sake” can without verbal contradiction be applied only to experiences, the definition now given can be applied more widely, if there are indeed things other than experiences which are good in the sense under discussion. When something is intrinsically good, it is (other things being equal) something that on its own account we ought to welcome, rejoice in if it exists, seek to produce if it does not exist.⁴ We ought to approve its attainment, count its loss a deprivation, hope for and not dread its coming if this is likely, avoid what hinders its production, etc. A definition of this sort is indicated by the very common tendency to take “desirable” as a synonym for “good” in ordinary speech. I do not think myself that in most cases where “good” is used it is best defined in terms of desire, but it may well be that it is best defined in terms of some similar attitude. We must, however, unlike Mill, remember that “desirable” signifies what “ought to be desired,” not just “what is desired’; and this same point will apply, whatever mental attitude we select for our definition in preference to desire. It need not always be the same attitude. When we call something good, we may be thinking sometimes rather of the fact that we ought to welcome it, sometimes rather of the fact that we ought to seek it, etc. But we can see various attitudes I have mentioned to have something in common that is opposed to the common element in condemning, shunning, fearing, regretting, etc., which would supply the corresponding definition of “bad.” The former may be called pro attitudes, the latter anti attitudes. The former are positive and favourable to their objects, the latter negative and hostile.

But what is the sense of “ought” when we say we ought to have a pro attitude to what is good and an anti attitude to what is bad? In the last chapter I have distinguished the concept of fittingness from the concept of moral obligation. It is clearly the former which is involved here, not the latter, though there may be other senses of “good” in which the latter comes to the fore. When we are saying that something is worth pursuing for its own sake, we are not saying that one morally ought to pursue it. That may be impossible for a particular person and therefore not morally obligatory. Nor are we necessarily even saying that a man morally ought to pursue it if he can and if there is no positive objection to his doing so. Most⁵ pleasant experiences are worth having for their own sake, but, if the experience is merely a pleasure of an innocent but not very elevated kind, most people would hold that I should not be morally to blame for deliberately neglecting to obtain that experience for myself. Now this, whether a right judgement or not, is certainly not verbally inconsistent with saying that pleasure is intrinsically good. As I have pointed out, the word “ought” (without its strictly moral implications) is constantly used in such cases, for example, “You ought to have seen that film.” It does seem clear that, when I say that such a pleasant experience is intrinsically good, I am asserting that it is preferable to have it rather than not, or that, other things being equal, I ought to choose it in my first or third sense of “ought.” Whether I should be morally to blame or not for declining to choose to have it when I could do so without corresponding harm, at any rate it would be fitting, rational, desirable for me to choose the experience in question. If we mean by “good” what ought to be desired, approved, or admired, it seems still more obvious to me that we are thinking of “ought” in the sense in which it signifies fittingness rather than moral obligation. For I cannot by an act of will desire, approve, or admire something. Yet it is perfectly plain that there is a sense in which it can be said that I ought to have these emotional attitudes to certain things—and not merely that I ought to cultivate them as far as I can. “Ought” here signifies that these emotional attitudes are fitting. It is more appropriate, or fitting, to feel disgust than pleasure at cruelty, more appropriate to desire reconciliation than revenge, to admire fidelity than clever cheating, to feel aesthetic emotions on contemplating great works of art than not to do so. When we say this, I do not think we are directly considering whether the person who has the appropriate or inappropriate feelings has done what he morally ought or not. His feelings are still unfitting even if he was so badly brought up that he could not be expected to see their wrongness or try to improve his feelings. He may not be to blame for them, but that does not make them fitting. If it did, the fact that he had been badly brought up would not be so deplorable; indeed if his bringing up did not produce unfitting feelings and actions he could not be said to have been “badly brought up.” Similarly an action may be condemned as unfitting in the circumstances under which it is done even if the person who does it has not the intelligence to foresee the likelihood of the consequences which make it unfitting, provided only these consequences were humanly foreseeable.

So we are in the definition of “good” using “ought,” not in the second sense, earlier distinguished,⁶ to signify moral obligation, but to signify fittingness. We may therefore define “good” as “fitting object of a pro attitude,” either without qualification (my first sense of “ought”), or as qualified by the terms “so far as is in the light of the available evidence foreseeable” (my third sense of “ought”). (While we could never be confident that any complete action we did was one we ought to do in the first sense, we can be confident or even know that we ought to treat certain objects as ends-in-themselves, have certain mental attitudes, and feel certain emotions in this sense of “ought.”) When I say this I think I am giving a strict definition of what “good” means, or at least approximating as closely as a philosophical analysis ever could to an exact definition of a commonsense term. I am not merely saying what being good entails, still less amending the commonsense meaning so as to fit in with my philosophy. The position is complicated by the variety of the different senses of “good” but I think it is a strong point of my definition that all the different senses can be brought under it or at least closely related to it. In its primary sense as intrinsically good, “good,” I think, usually means “worth producing or pursuing for its own sake, other things being equal.” To apply “good” to something is to say of this that it is fitting, other things being equal, to bring it into existence. That, as we have seen, is shown by the naturalness of the equation of “good” with “worth having” when applied to experiences. It has been several times proposed to define “good” as “desirable,” meaning by this word not, as Mill apparently did in a famous (or notorious?) passage, “actual object of desire” but “fitting object of desire.” But, if “desire” means a certain uneasy emotion, it is not true that we ought to feel desire towards whatever is intrinsically good. The less we feel this emotion towards what we cannot obtain, or in any degree bring about, however good that object may be, the better on the whole. For such desire will only make us less happy and distract us from our other activities without doing any good. On the other hand, if desire means something more than an uneasy emotion, it becomes a striving to pursue and bring about the existence of its object, and if so the definition in terms of desire merges into the definition in terms of pursuit. This is in fact, I think, what we almost always mean when we say that something is desirable; we do not mean that we ought to feel a certain emotion towards it, but that the object is worth producing or pursuing. It is therefore better to say this frankly in our definition than to use a word which is more ambiguous. There may well be cases in which “good” is used to signify rather “what it is fitting to desire” than “what it is fitting to produce or pursue,” but I think they will be rare. I am in this objecting to “desirable” as the standard definition; but “fitting object of pursuit,” though a great improvement as a definition, cannot itself be substituted for “good” in all cases even of what is pronounced intrinsically good.

Among the things which are spoken of as “intrinsically good” are actions. Now in this case I do not think that people are generally using the term in the same sense as when they use it, for example, of pleasant experiences. We regard, for example, a particular act of self-sacrifice as intrinsically good. Do we mean to say that it is fitting that the person who makes the sacrifice should choose, produce, or pursue it for its own sake quite apart from consequences? Surely not. That would lead to irrational asceticism. To sacrifice himself when it does no good to anyone is not something which a man ought to choose to do. The self-sacrificing action does not seem to be intrinsically good in the sense in which, for example, innocent pleasures, aesthetic experiences, personal affection, intellectual activity are held to be so. If it were, ought we not to spend most of our time torturing ourselves in order to realize the value of self-sacrifice, since moral values are generally admitted to be higher than happiness and their absence in beings capable of them a worse evil than pain? But intrinsic goodness as applied to actions may still be analysed in terms of fittingness, provided the psychological term of the analysis is different. Now we certainly regard righteous acts of self-sacrifice as admirable in themselves even if they fail to achieve the desired result. So I suggest that we usually mean by “good actions” simply actions that it is fitting to admire or approve. This is certainly not the usual meaning of “intrinsically good” in the earlier cases. A pleasure, however innocent, is not something to be admired, though it is something to be liked and, other things being equal, pursued.

But we must add a qualification and say “morally admired” or “morally approved.” For we may also admire or approve a cleverness which does not display moral qualities, though our admiration even for the cleverness in itself is lessened if it displays immoral ones. Nor must we use “admired” or “approved” here to stand for “judged good,” since in that case we should be guilty of a vicious circle. The word must, in the analysis given, stand for an emotion or a state of mind tinged with emotional qualities. I do not wish to discuss the psychological question whether moral emotion is a single emotion or a class or blend of emotions; but it does seem to me that there is something specific about this kind of admiration which distinguishes it from other kinds. And it is quite clear that there are certain actions to which this kind of feeling is the appropriate reaction, as sympathy is to suffering and certain aesthetic experiences to a great drama. There is, however, a curious point here to note in passing: with persons other than the agent himself the appropriate reaction is admiration, but with the agent himself it is not. A man should not admire himself. Such a difference between the emotion appropriate to a quality in another person and that appropriate to the same quality in oneself is, however, not unparalleled; sympathy and pity are appropriate emotions when directed towards another’s pain, but one should try to avoid self-pity, and it is doubtful whether there is any sense in talking about feeling sympathy with oneself. Moral disapprov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• I. Subjectivism
• II. Naturalism
• III. The Coherence Theory of Ethics, and Some Other Non-naturalist Definitions of the Fundamental Ethical Terms
• IV. Different Meanings of “Good” and “Ought”
• V. An Analysis of Good in Terms of Ought
• VI. Consequences of the Analysis for a General Theory of Ethics
• Index