Goodness

Good is a word we use to compliment things that we desire.

Suppose you say, “It’s raining.” I might respond, “That’s good,” if we really needed the rain, or “That’s bad,” if we are having a lot of flooding. Sometimes we say that something is “good for” something else if it leads to something we think is good. We may like the first thing or not, as when we are told, “This is good for you,” and the implication is that you may not like this, but that it is worth it for the good it will bring.

So we use the word good for things that we desire in themselves or that we desire because they lead to something else that we desire. Why then does “good” sometimes have the connotation of something that is going to ruin a “good time”? Because we have conflicting desires. On the one hand we may want to have the good time, but we may also be fearful (or our parent’s may be fearful) of the possible consequences, which we don’t want.

Each of us has our inventory of, often contradictory, desires. Some of the desires are basic, such as the desire for survival. Others are derived. Part of our struggle in life is to sort through our conflicting desires to determine what is really in our “best interests”.

This leads into a natural conflict between our interests and the interests of others. We consider someone selfish if they only consider their own interests, and we consider someone a “good person” if they are concerned about the interests of others. If they take this to an extreme so that their own most basic interests are threatened, we may consider them a hero, a saint, or a fool depending on the circumstances.

All of these uses of the word good seem to resolve to desire in one form or another. Something may be good in one circumstance but not in another, or to one person and not to another. There are goods that many of us do agree on. But still this all seems to provide a very unstable definition for good. How do we know what to seek when good is such a shifting sand? Isn’t there an ultimate good that can provide a firm foundation?

But how would we find this ultimate good? We could list out all of the goods we know about and try to arrange them in a hierarchy, then pick the highest. But wouldn’t this hierarchy vary from person to person or culture to culture? There does not appear to be any object in the world of experience which is “the good”. Good is an evaluation we make of such objects. So where does that leave us? Back with desire.

All of this doesn’t mean that we are on the brink of chaos though. There are in fact many desires that most people agree on. Otherwise we would not have survived as a society or as a species. For example, most of us want to survive, to have a few enjoyments in life, and to be a part of a group, to have friends, be a member of a family, to belong. These basic desires give us enough in common with others so that we are often in agreement with what is good with members of the social groups we belong to. Most people are more than willing to allow others these basic goods within a system in which they can also enjoy them.