Is "good" something that can only be learned through experience?
I don't have much to say about good, because philosophers seem to be so caught up with no clear way of defining it. Hence, I am led to believe that what a person or in even more complex cases, a group of people, define as good can only be gleaned from experience.
Do you agree with this, namely that the notion of good in inherent in the primacy of experience, and not something that can be learned by simply looking up a definition and analyzing it?
Do you agree with this, namely that the notion of good in inherent in the primacy of experience, and not something that can be learned by simply looking up a definition and analyzing it?
Comments (52)
How could one decide if a proffered definition were correct, apart from comparing it to experience?
Yes, the meaning of "good" is shown, not said; found in use, not in analysis.
No, but I think you're in the right ballpark. I think the notion of good is something inherently informed by experience, but its not something that arises from 'experience' already-formed. Notions are human, and they develop over the course of experience/s.
Yet, take the example of good being defined, not by an individual; but, by the very values people or groups enshrine into laws. How do values get inoculated into an individual?
Good can mean beneficial as in bringing one (typically the speaker) benefit, good can mean morally satisfying, pleasing, or acceptable. Often both, but not always. I take it to mean "Pleasing" as in "this pleases me", which seems to fit basically every moment or use of the word "good". Which as you can imagine carries no grounds in morality but personal sentiment alone.
Police: "Your husband just died".
Person A: "Oh no! How will I ever go on?!"
Police: ":Your husband just died"
Person B: "Yay, I'm rich! I mean, oh no."
I take it this thread is meant to be explicitly about morality. In which case varies wholly on the underlying facts of the situation, facts which are never guaranteed to be known in full by those who assert otherwise, even with their life.
So, absent of religion, one might circle back and cast what is "beneficial" to the speaker, as a strictly cellular being as "good". Say, if I eat food and do not starve, that's good. However, if I get cancer and face certain death, that's bad. Anything beyond that is pure speculation and personal preference, in the aforementioned context, at least.
Good is a term referring to the 'as is' or 'it is what it is' factor.
It depends on how you treat 'what is' or 'the good(s)'.
Then, you see the evil in others.
Eventually, you see the evil within yourself.
Ok. That's right, in so far as what is enshrined in law is what we enact. But of course there is no equivalence between the law and the good. There are bad laws.
My question was, "How could one decide if a proffered definition were correct, apart from comparing it to experience?" Along with Moore, I doubt that it is possible to give a satisfactory analysis of "the good"; and along with Wittgenstein I take it that one recognises it when one sees it.
But as well, we are talking here about our interactions with others. Ethics begins as one takes other folk into account.
But, specifically, what about natural laws? Maybe they can be derived from some ethical consideration of the good...
Quoting Shawn
I agree.
Quoting Shawn
I wholeheartedly agree. And there are whole theories of ethics and morality that ignore the good that is ever-present in the word ethical or moral, the good lurking in every moral, ethical statement. Ridiculous.
Quoting AmadeusD
Plato found the good was an object, already formed, out there to be experienced, regardless of the human who forms the notion of good in the first place. I think Plato was pointing to what is formed once the good is developed in the human (so he was wrong to point to an eternal form). To glean the good from experience we have to grapple with the fact Amadeus raises that only our own minds can make the good, and by gleaning we are constructing the contents of our minds. That just means the good never forms without us. But I disagree if the quote from Amadeus means the good never forms. There is an object, a definition, that forms, from our experience, called good.
Quoting Outlander
This is the kind of statement that ignores the definition of good (from philosophers having no clear way to define it) and leaps to a scale with good, worse and better. The relative. So now, with no understanding of good, we say good, worse better. Then we get so enamored with our ability to move the scale, and take the same act, like killing, and mark it as good on one scale, worse by some other measure, and maybe even best measuring again. From all this mess we conclude good is relative. But it is we, the ones constructing the scale who make relativity. But further, we must first fix the good for the scale of relative goods to function at all. We still need to glean a definition of good if we are to leap into judgments of better and worse.
There are distinctions. Gleaned from experience. Constructed into knowable forms. One of these distinctions is between good and not good.
We need the good to be a fixed definition. I am sure every single one of us says good everyday. Every single day we make this distinction. So there is something we have gleaned, something we have constructed that we call good - something we should be able to define.
One person kills another person and a third says good. The other person was killing and attacking your family and you stopped them from killing all the rest and the third person was your mother who said good.
Then one person says We must sacrifice our eldest to the gods in order to avoid the hurricane, and they kill their own son and say good.
In all of these examples the notion of good remains fixed. It is used in the same way. If we look to compare killing the first person with killing the son we have to look to the same fixed definition of good to come up with our own opinions of the killings. The good, like Plato mistook for eternal without us, is more like something eternal (something we all say every single day) with us.
It is difficult to define the good because it is: Quoting Shawn
Its like trying to define a letter of the alphabet. We have to use letters to make words to make definitions but by then weve gone so far past the single letter of the alphabet that it is easy to forget what we were meaning to define.
But nevertheless, like letters, we fix good in our lives everyday.
We cant avoid the good weve constructed.
If you agree, well then we are good. If you disagree you think my opinions are not good. Right? So you must agree, good hides or screams in every sentence.
We go to the store to buy milk and cant find it and the storekeeper says what are you looking for and you say I see it now, Im good and the storekeeper knows everything he needs to know.
Or someone falls off a street corner and is about to get hit by a car and someone grabs them to the sidewalk and some else says man, that was good - like a superhero..
Or someone is leveling a table and gets the first side good, then the length leveled up, and their boss says, is the table good? And she says all good.
From all of these experiences a distinct good can be gleaned.
Its a universally good word to know, because it is a universal feature of experience, like alphabets and characters are universally present in language and logic. Part of the mix that makes it a distinct mix.
This reply isnt good enough. Doesnt give you a good definition of good. It truly is difficult to say what good simply means, what it is now that we have constructed it. But there it is everyday.
And maybe the good is so basic, we dont really need to define it. It isnt necessary to define the alphabet before I make this post.
Maybe it would be better, if I took advice from the following:
Quoting Shawn
In the end, I think the good we make, that we remake in so many ways, is now distinct and will continue to make sense in every agreement, in every finished piece of work, in every night you lay down a fall asleep (did you sleep good?).
Some might even say this post would have been good if he stopped about halfway up there, but at least its good that its over now.
I had rather thought that discerning the good was the role traditionally assigned to conscience, and that those who do not do good have a deficiency in that respect. And also that while this is something that might be shaped by experience, it is still essentially innate, rather than acquired - in that, someone who lacks all conscience, such as a sociopath, is not going to acquire one through experience.
Couldnt you say that the innate in conscience is where the good is gleaned, where the good is constructed? This still doesnt say what the good is. So you may be agreeing that the good is gleaned from experience, just adding that it is the conscience that does the gleaning with its innate judgments of what is good.
I can see some sense in which it's a 'construct' but I also believe there is an innate good, although not everyone will agree.
I see it as constructed, but objective or innate in that we can agree that what we each construct sometimes agrees. Agreement has good inherent in it, for example.
Yes I agree insofar as. I've come to experientially understand (any) "good" as a reflective practice of negating effectively preventing/reducing disvalue.
In some sense, I agree, but hte idea that its an 'object' to be passed about is, to me, incoherent even on views other than my own. Other than PLatonic Forms things like Love, Good, Apprehension - these are not 'things' they are properties of people or acts. I do not think properties can be considered objects. That said, I lean toward some form a property dualism so maybe i'll have to eat crow on this soon enough
Good topic. :up:
Quoting Shawn
"Inherent" and "experience" are incompatible concepts. "Inherent" is something we have by nature, we are born with. "Experience" is something we acquire in life.
I believe that "good", in the sense of beneficial --the most common meaning and use of the word-- is mainly inherent in a human being --even in animals-- but it is also "shaped" by experience.
Quoting Shawn
Looking up "good" in a dictionary, you need a whole day to check all definitions. You might be lucky and find one or more of them related explicitly to philosophy. But, it would be better to look up the word in a philosophical dictionary to start with. But even then, you can be confronted with a lot of different descriptions/definitions of the word "good", according to different philosophers, philosophical systems, etc.
Now, talking about good, beneficial, ethical, moral, etc. is far from being a simple thing. Because there a different aspects from which one can talk about it. If you are talking from an absolute, objective viewpoint, then you will have to analyze the concept as Socrates did about 2,500 years ago (re: ??????. agathon.) If, on the other hand, you are talking from a relative viewpoint, then you are faced with problems like what is good for me might not be good for you.
So, except if you are intending to write a paper on the subject, I believe that the best thing to do is to consider the most common meaning and/or use of the word "good". And most probably, you will end up with the concept of "beneficial" that I have already brought up at start. :smile:
There's a logical gap between the ought of ethics and the is of natural laws.
Yes, well if you really drill this down to the very DNA or evolutionary psychology and group behaviors, then what more can be said? Then again, much more can be said...
you will run into Humes is/ought problem.
Not sure, I think that throughout history or if one wants to process historicism, that homo sapiens sapiens has been able to construct certain laws that promote these inherent feelings (such as Hume's hurray and boo value judgements) into practice.
This is from an OP by a philosopher about the shortcomings of such an approach.
Quoting Anything but Human, Richard Polt
Good and evil are more elements of discourse.
You learn morality and effects of specific actions, and of the elements themselves, but they are a priori to life.
I.e. a baby progresses in its learning experience, it tries to understand itself, to reach a state where it can survive.
Yes, well how else are we to decide about who we are without knowledge of our ancestors and how we evolved from then until now?
Quoting Wayfarer
I think the fallacy is in thinking we can separate out the natural from the moral, the is from the ought. Richard Polt, a supposed Heidegger expert, should know bettter, since it was precisely Heideggers point that a science presupposes as its very condition of possibility a set of metaphysical assumptions about how the world ought to be understood, which implies an ethics. Furthermore , Heidegger would argue that Polts own formulation of ethics falls into what Heidegger calls machination, the technological thinking of enframing. Do humans prefer altruism over selfishness? Is one ethically better than the other? Or is this choice between Hobbes selfish beast and Rosseaus altruistic innocent caught up in the same subjectivist humanism that spawned modern empirical naturalism?
Indeed. I think Richard Polt's point is perfectly clear, which is why I often refer to it, although Heidegger's obscurantism can be used to muddy any waters one chooses.
The point about appealing to evolutionary biology in support of an ethic is exactly an instance of the naturalistic fallacy. This fallacy, identified by philosopher G. E. Moore in his work Principia Ethica, occurs when one tries to define what is "good" in terms of natural properties or states of affairs, such as what is "natural" or what has evolved biologically. For example, just because a behavior like altruism has evolved in certain species as beneficial for survival does not necessarily mean such behavior can be considered morally good. Ethical norms typically involve evaluative judgments that cannot be directly derived from facts about the natural world.
Plum claiming we know good and evil from birth is both counter to the evidence, and is somewhat incoherent in it's own terms. What established those 'facts' as they must be on your account?
Unfortunately,the only answers that don't rely on pure, individuated intuition is either functional (not ethical) or it doesn't exist. I take the latter view, but am open to the former. Collective agreement, or co-operative functionality isn't an ethical fact (either case). Morals are developed as a result of the internal comfort or discomfort of S in the face of a moral consideration. This covers it. On this formulation, morals and ethics need no further explanation. Merely, discussion and accepting social groups as morally-aligned rather than 'right' or 'wrong'. Its bizarre that people feel the need to establish an objective moral where there isn't even a chess move open to start that discussion on the facts. It's also irrelevant. Just live among people with whom you generally agree morally. That seems to be, if we set aside what would be considered at the very least, morally unhelpful violence in order to assert one's moral view on others, what history has amount to, socially speaking. I note here, though, that religion as an absolute poison of the mind, has convinced many people that a shitty book can establish the right to carry about hte above. Think what we may, but empirically, using fictional accounts to hoodwink children seems again, at the least, morally unhelpful on any account.
That said, you may find this interesting: It's a book by a prof. of Moral philosophy at St Andrew's - but also, the head of the Phil department I'm in here in NZ.
He argues that teh way to support a purpose of the Universe is through, essentially, theistic reasoning to objective morals - and then just jettisoning the Theism as unnecessary. It would get some way to your position, but it certainly makes clear that human morals are essentially irrelevant to even a successful argument for the account.
Quoting Joshs
Unsurprisingly, another horrible point from Heidegger that doesn't capture anything about hte scientific enterprise.
Quoting Wayfarer
The problem isnt with naturalism per se, but with a reductionistic, objectivist form of naturalism. Even an externalist like Dennett recognized that a freedom is built into biological processes that makes moral deliberation something that cannot be subsumed under any pre-determined scheme. As Dennett argued in his book, Freedom Evolves, the reason ethical norms cannot be directly derived from facts about the natural world is that those facts themselves evolve. What one can take from evolutionary theory and apply to ethics is the notion of the radical contingency of normative schemes of action.
Quoting AmadeusD
Its pretty much the same point that Thomas Kuhn makes about science.
Is that really Heidegger's point? Because that seems to apply to much more than just science.
Quoting Lionino
Heideggers point about science is that it is not equipped to question its own presuppositions, and that when it does so it is no longer doing science but philosophy. One can liken this to Kuhns distinction between normal and revolutionary science.
:chin:
It comes across as straightforward to me that this applies to pretty much everything. X is not equipped to question the presuppositions of X, by questioning it you are doing something other (more basic) than X. It almost makes me think of Goedel.
I think you could say that about everything. Take apple. I wasn't born knowing it. Nor did it ever instantly come to me. As I first learned it, I might've confused it with peach or pear. But for obvious reasons apple, like many Signifiers purporting to (re)present the real natural world (and physical objects we construct using signifiers) has evolved to seamlessly trigger the "same" response for all of us.
"Good" is not only abstract, and therefore "infinitely" broader in its triggering, but we use the same Signifier triggered by and to trigger different very different "newpaths". Good time, person, taste, work etc. Anyway, that's why we ask the question about Signifiers like "good" and not "apple".
But not only do both apple and good have to be learned through experience. But they are both continuously having to be learned, though sometimes seemingly imperceptible, incessantly becoming (learned by experience). Everythung settles at that moment settlement (knowledge/belief) is triggered (the illusion of being present). But nothing settles permanently.
I might taste an apple tonight which subtly changes the Signifier Apple and how/what it triggers for me by way of more Signifiers and ultimately feeling. My thoughts right now may have subtly engaged new signifiers. This has caused so called clarity. Apple seems brighter to me now.
I might learn something in this thread which changes Good for me. I might even say forever. But though the revised chain of Signifiers structuring Good which I picked up here may remain for me forever, Good will yet change for me, as new Signifiers are triggered to trigger newly revised chains.
What can we learn by just picking up the definition and analyzing it? 1+1=2? I think no. First you experienced difference, that took months, then quantity, etc etc. Am I being strangely meticulous, or misunderstanding that the question was intended for a moral assessment?
I think morality is the good, and both, related chains in the evolution of Signifiers and how they structure knowledge/experience, are never discovered by an instant assessment. They are never discovered; but are always becoming. And when we "want" to use them as they quickly move, when we are triggered by a fitting function, we just pick up our
latest version. And call that Good.
And that's when you finally see the good in the world?
It only occured to me right now, based on what you said, that the highest good for you must be appreciation and with that, axiology? Am I right on this?
Quoting Fire Ologist
Nice
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes. I get that [now]. You're probably properly using "object" associating it with "objective" and thus present, not a fleeting nothing. Fair enough.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I agree. But because let's not ignore, our constructing of good serves a functional end, [survival and prosperity. But ignore that if its distracting]. Not because there is an innate thing, "Good", in Nature.
Quoting Fire Ologist Yes we do
Quoting Wayfarer
I'd love to agree. But where? Where can you show me innate good without walking me through constructs?
I think if there is an innate good in nature/reality, we can only Be good, but we cannot know that. The instant we know it we have constructed it. So we can be good but we'd never know if we were. That is, if we're talking about Good in the real world independent of Mind. (If we cam even so talk: which, we can't. So Good is not a thing innate in nature)
Quoting Alkis Piskas I agree. But I also assumed the word wasn't used to denote the contradiction, but rather, in tge sense of "belongs" to experience, "is derived" from etc.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
The way I read "natural from moral" above is to infer you mean morality at least has its basis in nature (a lessening of the two are one, and inseparable). Ought is derived from is. And you cite Heidegger above. But I read H (assuming you depicted H precisely not loosely (as I might)) as implicitly saying not that the pursuit of any knowledge requires a natural framework, Laws of Nature, [to re-present?] or that the two are actually inseparable, but rather that there be convention on how some basic structures should be framed and settled upon as "true"; i.e., how to "construct" a universal framework for our further constructions, or pursuits.
With respect, he had to. We all do. Even in our mundane interactions. If we don't do that (agree on a constructed framework), "I love you" becomes what it is structurally and inherently, empty and meaningless. If he didn't do that, for example, he could not have reflected so profoundly on the dynamics of what was necessarily restricted to the becoming Mind, and present it as though it had captured Being.
The part of you that would love to agree is an indication.
Quoting ENOAH
I meant that morality has its basis in the qualitative schemes we construct out of our interaction with our world. Within the realm of science, there has been a longstanding tendency to call these constructed schemes models of nature, as though our schemes were representations of some natural reality external to and independent of these schemes. In fact, Heidegger protests against not only the idea of a world independent of our models of it , but the very idea of a subjective or intersubjective scheme, model, narrative , theory that we impose on the world. He wanted to get away from a subject-object dualism entirely, and the accompanying assumption of a normativity or conventionalism within which we view each other and the world.
He claimed that we fall into such inauthentic conventionalism (Das Man, the they) when we fail to understand the underlying basis of experience in authentic Being, which is not a subject representing a world to itself, but a self continually changed by coming back to itself from its world. And this world , for its part, changes reciprocally with self.
At any rate, whether we go with Heideggers attempt to abandon subject-object normative schemes and representations , or retain the idea that humans construct normative models from their interactions with a world, in both cases what is is already organized on the basis of prior expectations and anticipations. Scientific as well as ethical facts are made intelligible on the basis of pre-existing assumptions. What is is always an interpretation, biased in advance in one direction or another, relative to already in-place goals and purposes. Science can never be a neutral bystander in relation to ethical concerns because its determination of what factually is is loaded with its own presuppositions about what ought to be, which is inextricably entangled with all other aspects of the culture in which those scientists live. The consensually arrived at ethical principles guiding the culture of an era do not exist in counterpoint to the scientific understanding produced in that era. Rather, they are variations of the same biases.
The role of moral structures can be seen most clearly not within a community closely united by shared understandings, but between communities divided by differing intelligibilities. The individual deemed in violation of one groups moral norms has found themselves caught between two communities, just as is the case with scientific heretics. It is unfortunate that the very bonding around shared intelligibilities that forms a unified community inevitably leads to alienation from those outside of the community. It then becomes necessary to protect that community from foreign ideas and actions which threaten to introduce dangerous incoherence into the normative culture. Thus the need for moral codes and structures.
It should be mentioned that , like our scientific models, our ethical norms arent conventions in the sense of optional fashions that we put on or take off as reasonable members of a consensual community. These are deeply held commitments grounded in presuppositions that guide central aspects of our lives. When such presuppositions are brought into question , we risk the loss of our anchoring in the world , our ability to makes sense of it and our place in it. This is why wars are fought over ethical principles.
Quoting Lionino
Youre right that the place to question axioms is not within the axiomatic system itself. I think the issue has to do with how far one is prepared to go in ones questioning of the origin of presuppositions, and the groundlessness of grounds. Goedel himself was not prepared to engage in a radical questioning of the basis of mathematical axioms, which is why he remained a Platonist. Similarly, a philosophy of science like that of Popper is not willing to radically put into question the assumption of universal norms of method in science.
Quoting Joshs
Very nice.. I misunderstood. Not anymore.
Thank you.
Quoting Joshs Here, I diverge. But no worries, armed with the info above, it is clear to me, how and why.
Quoting Joshs
Understood and agreed
Quoting Joshs
Insightful!
Quoting Joshs
Of course not. I'd go a step further and say they "dictate/code" our feelings and actions, in spite of being "constructed". But I do not need to insist upon that "dangler" in order to "fit" your admittedly helpful depiction here.
:down:
You ask if someone agrees, you receive an answer and you then ignore it. This is quite impolite, @Shawn.
Yes, I agree with you Alkis Piskas. In that, good, is beneficial. But, I wouldn't know how to outline good as beneficial in different circumstances, because what can be beneficial is subject to interpretations. So, once again I would have to agree with you. :cool:
Isn't the negation of disvalue, the meaning of appreciation - or maybe you meant this in terms of aesthetics?
For me, axiology is the highest good.
No.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/902327
Also in terms of ethics and logic.
Axiology is the study of value.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiology
Yes, and the study of value is of the highest importance to the appreciation of value, or what you call the abating of disvalue in appreciation.
:ok:
Sorry I mistook the negation of disvalue as a feature of appreciation of value.
Thank you, Shawn.
Quoting Fire Ologist
There is not. I defy you to point at it.