#absolute goodness

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Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

C. S. LEWIS DAILY: FEBRUARY 14 On comfort God is the only comfort. He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.

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By Nomy Arpaly Notre Dame - Philosophical Review: An Electronic Journal Book Review: Against Absolute Goodness by Richard Kraut The obligatory joke -- this book is very good, but not absolutely so -- has essentially been made already in a blurb on the cover. In the blurb, Russ Shafer Landau says the book is excellent, and I have to agree it is. It is also very well written. With its lucid prose -- rare in a philosophy book -- it can be read in one sitting. Kraut defends the view that there is neither absolute goodness nor absolute badness. By this he does not mean that Hitler is not an absolutely morally hideous person, nor does he mean that, as one's undergraduate students are fond of saying, it's all subjective. Kraut means that nothing should be called "good, period" or "simply good". A thing can only be good for someone or good of a kind. Thus a thing can be objectively and noninstrumentally good or bad for a person or any other creature to whose well being it makes sense to refer. Different things can be objectively, noninstrumentally good for different creatures -- I am reminded of Spinoza declaring that music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf -- but some things might be bad for a lot of creatures -- some kinds of pain are perhaps bad for all sentient beings. A thing can also be a good of a kind. For example, a thing can be a good toaster or a good tennis player. The good tennis player is not a person who possesses two qualities -- the property of being good and the property of being a tennis player (though Moore might want us to believe he does). She is a person who is good qua tennis player. Unlike other thinkers he cites, like Geach and Thomson, Kraut does not think that saying that something is "good, period" or "just plain good" is an abuse of language. He just claims that, like phlogiston, absolute goodness simply is not there, and that, just like in the case of phlogiston, it can be shown by pointing to all the work the concept of absolute goodness cannot do as well as the work it does not need to do because other concepts do it better. The entire book review is here.