Philosophical accounts of "the good" are, broadly speaking, accounts of what it is to be an object of value—especially of moral value. A systematic study of these accounts is aided by such distinctions as the following.
Some have questioned, however (see Korsgaard), whether there might not be two differences here: good as a means versus good as an end; "intrinsic" versus "extrinsic" good. The difference between each pair is perhaps clearest in such cases as this. Someone might hold that the good of a beautiful sunset is "extrinsic," that it is grounded in something outsid…
There are actually two major, competing, nondeontological traditions of the good. One, running from Aristotle to the pragmatic naturalism of American philosophers such as John Dewey (1859–1952) and Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) in the first half of the twentieth century, is "teleological"—that is, it construes the good in terms of the fulfillment of such ends as…
Another pervasive difference would involve "subjective" versus "objective" conceptions of the good. At its crudest, a subjective view would simply identify the good for a given person as what that person "prefers" or "desires." This appears to be the working conception of "the good" employed in economic theory. A number of view…
We may notice how Aristotle's conception of the good partakes of both elements of this dichotomy between objective and subject conceptions. For Aristotle, the good is identified in the first instance as what one "aims at" in any given activity—in a word, "the end" (telos) of that activity. Thus the end of running might be health or winning races. Ultimatel…
If the good is somehow objective, one will want to inquire as to the elements or proper analysis of this object. Even G. E. Moore (1873–1958), who argued that goodness was a simple, indefinable property (see below), held that we could say something about the nature of the good as a kind of "organic unity." In this vein, one finds something of a consensus among those philosophe…
Especially during the first half of the twentieth century, for philosophers in the Anglo-American "tradition," metaethics (an analysis of the distinctive language of moral discourse) tended to replace direct ethical and metaphysical argument. Thus in his Principia Ethica (1903), G. E. Moore argued for the indefinability of the term good and against attempts to construe "good&#…
Modern ethical theory is defined largely by its distinction between "the good" as a morally positive goal to be achieved through our acts, and "the right" as a set of rules or moral norms constraining our pursuit of the good. In contemporary parlance, the "consequentialist" takes the good as primary, treating "right acts" as those productive …
The moral virtues might be characterized, roughly, as those qualities apt to be productive of moral good. Yet there is an important difference between consequentialist and virtue ethics. This pertains not only to the split between teleology and consequentialism just described but also to two factors distinctive of virtue ethics and going back to Aristotle. First, virtue ethics rejects the supposed…
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated with an introduction by David Ross, revised by J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Cahn, Steven, and Peter Markie, eds. Ethics: History, Theory, and Contemporary Issues. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Gibbard, Allan. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment. Cambridge, Mass…
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