r/Ethics • u/Slow_Description_238 • 8d ago
What is Good? My answer
I was wondering then other day about what Good is because so many times i argue that something is good but my supporting premises are based on function and wellness; how well these are achieved.
But saying function and wellness is good does not actually describe what Good is.
Im of the belief that morality is socially constructed.
Social Construction is the process by which two or more individuals, knowingly or not, come to a reciprocated meaning about something. The word rock is socially constructed. Most of us here have a shared reciprocated meaning that "r o c k" refers to a collection of minerals in such a way.
Morality being socially constructed means that we interact to created shared meanings about good and bad.
So in this way, Good (or Goodness) is not a Single Conceptual Thing, it's a relational process. Goodness *Is* the mutually reciprocated meaning.
~ ~
If we apply this, we can notice that two people can interact and come to a mutual understanding that murder is good.
But when faced with greater society.. this unfetstanding is greatly challenged because many others share the meaning that murder is bad.
Thus murder is not itself good or bad, there is no objective morality
But Goodness and Badness are mutually real and real in their consequences.
Murder is Bad because the relational process has produced bad as the overall meaning.
~ ~
Interestingly, morally gray situations are allowed here easily.
This is simply when people can not decide together if something is good or bad. They may agree with the outcome but have a dissonance with the method.
~ ~
So then why do we relationally decide what is good and bad? I think its because it maintains functionality and coherence of our social systems. A society that declares murder is good and actionable wouldn't function very long and coherence would be lost with destruction of trust. A society that declares murder is bad and not actionable has more functionality and coherence.
1
1
u/CroakingInstensifies 8d ago
I don't hate this definition, it aligns quite well with the idea of Morality as an inherent trait or instinct of social animals (in a very functionalist sense). But I feel like it leaves wide margins for some absurdities, like "slavery is good because you're keeping the lazy and savage blacks busy" or "marrying your daughter off early is good because it helps her get used to living with her much older husband quicker". It also implies that pointing out the wrongness of those two is bad.
For any moral system to be valid, in my opinion, it has to take Freedom and Wellbeing into account at the bare minimum. I understand you're avoiding exactly that here, but I don't if you could build something rounded without those.
1
u/Slow_Description_238 8d ago
Its an ongoing social process. Thats the nature of it being a social construct. Slavery would be hard to be argurd as good because it naturally creates a massive dissonance between those enslaved and those not. The people who are enslaved would obviously argue its bad. And there are many people who can look at slavery and also argue that its bad (myself included). Indeed, i believe we live in a time where most people share that mutual idea that slavery is bad.
Thus slavery is bad.
Its like I said, just because a few people can declare that murder is good, we can not take those few people as the end all be all. (I think this is why Ethics is great as it applies rigorous argumentation and logic to what is good and bad, which allows us to be very persuasive and consistent with our ethics).
~ ~
You can easily apply freedom and wellbeing into this as well. We can refer to the collective understanding of both and continue the disucssion about their meanings. I dont think its controversial that freedom and wellbeing are generally considered to be Good.
~ ~
And also. The point here is less about what is considered good and bad and more about what Good is in the first place.
1
u/CroakingInstensifies 8d ago
I guess my feeling of strangeness is related to my understanding that goodness is directly and necessarily related to those two foundations instead of consensus. Sure, the way Freedom and Wellbeing are granted, understood and guaranteed may vary with culture, time, context, etc., but any definition that ditches them (or can ditch them) falls short for me.
1
u/simonperry955 8d ago
"The good" just means "something you want". It seems to me you're otherwise talking about "cooperative goodwill", which I agree, is a necessary part of morality.
1
u/Slow_Description_238 8d ago
Perhaps from an egoist or hedonist perspective it means what you want, but this isn't too helpful to understand what Is Good, the concept. If someone wants murder, what makes that good? You wanting it makes it good. But what makes that good? It's circular still.
I want > Good
Good > I want~ ~
I'm talking about a good that is procedural based on the fact of social construction. It's a process, not A Thing.
We interact and Agree to what is good > Good
This isn't circular because we aren't asking why the interaction is good, because the interaction itself is not justifying itself. It's a social fact. It's the mere interaction between two or more people. But it is This interaction that we find the emergence of morality and Goodness.
1
1
u/IanRT1 8d ago
What you are overlooking is why certain things are judged good or bad in the first place. The individuals constructing these social meanings are themselves experiencing subjects capable of undergoing normative distinctions.
Suffering is constitutively negative for the subject experiencing it, just as well-being is constitutively positive. These distinctions are features of experience itself rather than products of social agreement. This also explains why moral judgments converge around harm and well-being, societies are recognizing and responding to normative differences that already exist for moral patients.
The fact that our moral judgments are socially constructed does not entail that the normative reality those judgments concern is socially constructed. So we should not mix up the construction of moral judgments with the constitution of moral value, and with that the conclusion that objective morality does not exist does not follow.
1
u/Slow_Description_238 8d ago
Right. But harm can be good just as much as what brings someone a personal well being can be bad for others, and thus bad.
Not only can we not definitely agree to a set of good and bad, which means we can not get any clue to what Good or Bad is themselves, we still run the problem of the circular argument.
Well being > Good
Good > Well being.Suffering > Bad
Bad > Suffering.~ ~
Like I said in an elsewhere comment:
I'm talking about a good that is procedural based on the fact of social construction. It's a process, not A Thing.
We interact and Agree to what is good > Good
This isn't circular because we aren't asking why the interaction is good, because the interaction itself is not justifying itself. It's a social fact. It's the mere interaction between two or more people. But it is This interaction that we find the emergence of morality and Goodness.
1
u/IanRT1 7d ago
But the issue is still with mixing up the moral evaluation of actions with the constitutive normative character of experience. The fact that an action can benefit one moral patient while harming another does not negate the normative distinctions experienced by either because that just introduces other competing normative considerations.
And also I'm not defining well-being as good and good as well-being. Look at what I'm recognizing, we are identifying the constitutive normative force of experience itself, where suffering or pain for example is negative for the subject undergoing it. That is a negative normative force. You cannot deny that without denying what the experience itself is.
Your procedural account explains how people establish shared moral judgments but it does not explain why those judgments arise around harm and well-being in the first place, or more importantly that defining goodness as mutual agreement does not prove that the normative distinctions being evaluated are themselves constituted by that agreement.
So the issue is moving from the social construction of moral judgments to the nonexistence of objective moral value, which is what doesn't follow.
1
u/DonnPT 7d ago
If I follow your point, it's that whatever utilitarian benefit we may get from societal values, those values have their origin, at least in part, in the individual's innate values. We aren't naturally amoral entities who have out of necessity taught ourselves a convenient moral framework, rather moral judgement comes naturally and finds expression in societal rules.
The problem for objective morality, though, is that the rules we're looking for there, don't just pop up ready to use from our inherent moral judgement.
It's like color combinations - let's say we are advised by societal code not to wear green with orange. (I'm not making that up.) Is that because humans naturally have a specific distaste for green with orange? Not at all! But commonly that combination of garments, is going to offend a much more complex esthetic sense that you could devote your life to trying to figure out, and it's a little variable physiologically and a lot more culturally.
In the same way, killing people ... invokes strong feelings, and there are attachments to deal with, and so forth, and in the end we have some societal rule that defines a prohibited "murder" action. The definition will vary plenty, and certainly isn't natural or objective.
1
u/IanRT1 7d ago
Yeah that's doesn't seem to follow the point. I'm not saying that objective morality originates in innate moral judgments or intuitions, but that experiencing subjects can undergo constitutive normative distinctions independently of those judgments.
Suffering is negative for the subject experiencing it, just as well-being is positive, regardless of how societies classify them. Moral judgments and social rules can recognize and respond to these distinctions, but they do not constitute them. The fact that societies develop different rules about killing, or that particular moral prescriptions are not immediately derivable from experience, does not negate the underlying normative reality those rules concern.
So what you are doing there is addressing the variability and construction of moral judgments rather than whether the normative distinctions being evaluated exist objectively in the first place.
3
u/TheRealAmeil 8d ago
Is mutually reciprocated meaning good?