Goodness is a Measureable Relationship - Not a "Thing"
What is good?
This is a problem that has plagued the human race since the dawn of civilization,
but there is a coherent solution to it.
Plato wrestled with this problem over 2000 years ago, and I believe he actually
solved it, but the solution was lost from the general public.
I think Plato either:
a)
did not reveal the solution to the world; or,
b)
he did reveal it, and most people did not understand it.
Some say that Plato taught the solution to his close friends,
and it has supposedly been passed down through the centuries by an “inner circle”
of people. At any rate, regardless
of whether Plato did solve the problem and regardless of whether it has been passed
down through some “inner circle,” the solution does seem to have recently come to
light in the twentieth century in the life and writings of Robert S. Hartman.
Let’s turn
now to look at the solution to this most ancient problem.
There are actually two ways to interpret the question: “What is
good?” It can either mean:
1) What things are good?
Or
2) What does it mean for something to be good?
Each of these interpretations is on a different logical
level. The first interpretation is
specific and practical. It seeks
to identify what things fall in the
class of all good things. The second
interpretation is theoretical and abstract.
It attempts define the rules for saying what makes something a member of
the class of all good things. It attempts to understand the
meaning of the word good.
Most people have only pursued the answer to the first question,
and they end up with a lot arguments and confusion.
From a historical perspective, most people have tried to find what
things are good in the same way that the early biologists attempted to define
what animals were mammals. The early
biologists tried to identify common physical characteristics that were shared by
all animals that they wanted to group together in a class called mammals.
They came up with a list of characteristics (like being warm-blooded, giving
birth to live young, and so on), and that list worked quite well.
However, when philosophers tried to take a similar approach to figuring out
what things were good, they ran into
some serious problems.
The search
for the common characteristics that were shared by all good things began with a
group of philosophers that believed all good things just had one thing in common. However, problems kept popping
up when someone would find an example of something bad that had that characteristic. For example, pleasure seems to be a
common characteristic that is shared by all good things, but some take pleasure
in hurting others, and this is obviously not good.
Other single characteristics were tried out.
For example, knowledge might be something that was shared by all good things. It does seem like knowledge is a good
thing, but sometimes knowledge can be used to cause harm, which is obviously not
good. Many other singular characteristics
(like beauty, survival, etc.) were proposed, but none of them seemed to cover every
example of things we know to be good.
This is when
another group showed up on the scene, and declared that since there is no one single
characteristic, there must be many.
This group of people was called the pluralists.
The pluralists say there are multiple things that are good, and they believe
goodness cannot just be reduced to one single thing.
However, the pluralists ran into the same kind of problems that had preceded
them. There were always cases of things
that lacked one of the goodness-making qualities that seemed good or there were
other things that did have them, and yet the things were bad.
There is
actually no way to settle this dispute about what things are good unless
one first understands what it means for something to be good. Thus, we need
to look at the second interpretation of the question regarding goodness before we
resolve our disputes about the answer to the first one.
We need to know what goodness means
before we can specify what things are
good. Here is what goodness means: Goodness
is a relationship between an actual thing and the ideal we have for that thing. We call the thing “good” when
it completely matches the ideal we have of it.
For example, a “good car” is one that fulfills the ideal we have in our head
of what a good car should be. The degree
to which the actual object matches the ideal determines how good it is.
For example, a map that exactly describes the terrain is called a good map,
but one that poorly describes the terrain is a bad one because there is not a good
“fit” between the map and the terrain.
If two people
will agree on the ideal of what something should be, it is a simple matter to empirically
determine if something has all the properties of the ideal.
However, if two people have differing opinions about what an ideal for an
object should be, it is possible for different things to be good for the
two people. This has been the source
of many disputes - one person says one thing is good and another person says it
is not because each person has a different ideal for that particular object or situation.
How
are we to arrive at a consensus between multiple ideals of what an object should
be? We can compare the ideals in the
light of our new understanding of what it means for something to be good. Our new understanding says, “We call something
good when it fulfills the ideal we have of it.”
When something fulfills the ideal we have of it, this adds
meaning to our lives because concepts contain meanings and fulfilling them completes
them. There is a deep-seated need
in the hearts of human beings to find meaning in the world, and that is why we call
the process of fulfilling ideals goodness.
How do we choose between competing ideals?
We do it by choosing the ideal that leads to a more meaningful life –
a life where there is more fulfillments of ideals.
In simple terms, we should seek to build up more meaningful lives
rather than trying to destroy them, which leads to a more meaningless world.
How does
all this apply to our daily lives?
It helps us to narrow down in what direction
we should be aiming. For each actual
object there are almost unlimited possibilities for what it could become, but it
ought to only become one thing – the ideal we have in our minds.
Of course, we do not have the time or the energy to transform every actual
thing into its ideal so where do we start?
We start with ourselves. There are
millions of possibilities for what each one of can become, but there is only one
of those possibilities that we should be aiming for – the ideal one.
Once we have narrowed down our focus to who we want to become, we can narrow
down what actual objects in the world we need to be worried about transforming into
the ideal. We do not need to go about
straightening up every crooked lamp post.
All we need to concern ourselves with is what will help us the most to become the
people we ideally want to be.
There is
a tension that exists between each actual object and its ideal just as there is
a tension that exists between the north and south fields of a magnet.
We reduce this tension by taking actions to transform the actual object into
the ideal.
On a practical
level, we can think of ourselves as trying to build a six-story building.
On the bottom floor, there is our actual self.
This is the foundation of the building.
On the third floor is a large room filled with all the possible selves we
could seek to become. However, only
one of those possibilities is the ideal one, and that ideal one is seated on a golden
throne in that room. The second floor
in this building represents the tension that exists between the actual self and
the ideal one. The second floor also
has a set of stairs in it going from the actual self on the first floor to the ideal
self on the third. These stairs represent
the actions that we need to perform to transform our actual self into our ideal
self.
Floors four
through six are similar to floors one thru three, except these floors are divided
up into many rooms – one for each object or situation in the world about us. For each object or situation, there
is a room on the fourth floor that represents the actual object or situation. On the sixth floor, there is a corresponding
room that represents all possibilities for each object.
At the center of each of these rooms on the sixth floor is a golden throne,
and seated on the throne is the ideal for what that particular object could become. The fifth floor again represents the
tension that exists between each actual object and each ideal one.
We
choose what objects on the fourth floor are most important for us to transform from
their actual state to their ideal ones based on which ones will help us the most
to become the ideal person we want to be.
First, we decide who we want to become, and then, we can narrow down our choices
of what we need to do in world to help us become who we want to be.
This gives us a focused approach to reducing tension in our lives rather
than a random approach that goes about trying to improve every little thing that
is wrong in our world.
Instead
of spending our lives searching for that one
thing (pleasure, knowledge, survival, etc.) that will make us happy, we
need to start out by focusing on a single relationship – the relationship between
our actual self and our ideal one.
Removing the obstacles that separate our actual self from the ideal one is no easy
task, but it can be rewarding.