The good

What is ultimately worth pursuing - and whether there is one such thing or many.

Theme: Ethics and character
Tradition: Cross-tradition
Term: τὸ ἀγαθόν · to agathon
Term fixed: c. 380 BC

In plain terms

Everything anyone pursues is pursued for something. Money for what it buys, the job for the money, the training for the job. Ask far enough and either the chain runs on forever or it stops somewhere.

If it stops, whatever it stops at is wanted for itself and not for anything further. That is the good - not a good thing, but what makes anything worth having at all.

The candidates have been proposed for two and a half thousand years and have not converged. Pleasure. Flourishing. Virtue. Knowledge of the good itself. The satisfaction of desire. Union with the divine. And the strongest recent position is that the question is malformed - that there are many things worth wanting and no single item they are all instances of.

As a philosopher would put it

Plato makes the Good the highest Form, beyond being, and the source of intelligibility as the sun is of sight - a position that makes goodness objective and knowable, and famously hard to state.

Aristotle's objection is the standing one. Good is said in as many ways as being, so there is no single Form under which honour, sight and virtue all fall; and even if there were, a separate Good would be of no use to a doctor or a general. His own answer is eudaimonia, the complete and self-sufficient end, but as a structural role rather than a single content.

The modern division is between accounts that make goodness a real feature - Moore's non-natural property, indefinable and known by intuition - and those that make it a matter of attitude, preference or function. Moore's open question argument is the pivot: for any proposed natural definition, it remains an open question whether things so defined are good, which he takes to show the definition fails. Whether the argument works has been disputed since 1903.

Where you meet it

Every health system in the world has to decide what to fund, and doing so requires a common measure across incomparable goods.

The quality-adjusted life year is the standard instrument. A year in full health counts as one; a year in a described worse state counts as some fraction, and those fractions are derived from surveys asking members of the public to trade off time against health states. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in England uses a threshold in the region of twenty to thirty thousand pounds per QALY when appraising treatments.

What the instrument requires is that a hip replacement, a course of chemotherapy and a mental health service be commensurable - that there be one scale on which each contributes. That is Plato's assumption operationalised, and every objection to it is Aristotle's: that goods differ in kind, that a scale flattening them distorts, and that the resulting number carries an authority the underlying survey cannot support. Both sides are arguing about the same thing, with a budget attached.

What is actually disputed

Whether goodness is one thing.

Monists hold that there is a single ultimate good and that apparent plurality reflects different routes to it; this makes practical reasoning tractable, since options can in principle be ranked. Pluralists hold that friendship, knowledge, beauty and health are each worth having in their own right, that they are not reducible to a common currency, and that genuine incommensurability is a feature of the moral landscape rather than a failure of analysis.

The cost of pluralism is that some choices become rationally underdetermined - not hard, but without a right answer. The cost of monism is that it forces a common measure onto things that visibly resist one, as the QALY case shows. And underneath both sits Moore's question of whether goodness is a property at all or an expression of attitude, which divides metaethics into camps that have not converged in a century.

Commonly confused with

morally right An action can be right and produce nothing good, and something can be good without any action being required. The two questions are separate and consequentialism is the theory that links them.
what someone wants Wanting something does not make it good, and the gap between the two is where most of ethics lives.
goodness of character A good person and a good outcome are different subjects, and which is prior is the oldest division in ethics.

Defined against

Value The good is what is worth pursuing; value is what it is for anything to matter, and the two are so close that keeping them apart is itself a substantive position

Philosophers

Plato The Good as the highest Form, and the source of intelligibility
Aristotle The objection that good is said in many ways
Epicurus Pleasure as the good, carefully specified
Immanuel Kant A good will as the only thing good without qualification
John Stuart Mill The greatest happiness, with higher and lower pleasures
Al-Farabi The good as the perfection of a nature, joining Greek and Islamic frames

Works

Republic Where the Good is the highest study
Nicomachean Ethics The critique of a single Form, and the alternative
Principal Doctrines Pleasure specified as absence of disturbance
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals The good will
Principia Ethica Goodness as indefinable, and the open question argument
The Virtuous City The good as the end of a political community

Schools

Old Academy Where the Good is a Form
Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism) Where it is an end rather than an entity
Epicureanism Where it is pleasure
Early Stoicism Where it is virtue alone
Classical Utilitarianism Where it is aggregate welfare
Cambridge Analysis Where its definability is the question

Related concepts

Value 1887 · Virtue c. 340 BC · Happiness c. 340 BC · Flourishing c. 340 BC · The good life c. 400 BC

Plato's Form of the Good is the first attempt to make it a single thing that everything else is good by reference to; Aristotle's objection in the Ethics is that good is said in many ways and does not name one item.