Abstract:
We use the term “good” in two contexts: as the most general term of evaluation, and to refer to the final ends of life and action. I start from the question what evaluative and final goodness have to do with each other. Do we use the same term because when we talk about final goods, we are evaluating ends and lives? If so, how do we go about doing that? Most things are evaluated with respect to their fitness to perform their function, but ends and lives do not have functions. I contrast three theories of the final good: the intrinsic value theory, the hedonist theory, and Aristotle’s account, which identifies a being’s final good with its well-functioning, a form of evaluative goodness. Aristotle’s theory suggests an illuminating relationship between evaluative and final goodness: a conscious being has a final good when she functions by having conscious states that track, and so enable her to pursue, her functional or evaluative goodness. It is therefore the nature of an animal to have a final good, and there are such things as final goods because there are animals. This theory explains the existence of final goods without any metaphysical appeal to intrinsic values.
We use the term “good” in two contexts: as the most general term of evaluation, and to refer to the final ends of life and action. I start from the question what evaluative and final goodness have to do with each other. Do we use the same term because when we talk about final goods, we are evaluating ends and lives? If so, how do we go about doing that? Most things are evaluated with respect to their fitness to perform their function, but ends and lives do not have functions. I contrast three theories of the final good: the intrinsic value theory, the hedonist theory, and Aristotle’s account, which identifies a being’s final good with its well-functioning, a form of evaluative goodness. Aristotle’s theory suggests an illuminating relationship between evaluative and final goodness: a conscious being has a final good when she functions by having conscious states that track, and so enable her to pursue, her functional or evaluative goodness. It is therefore the nature of an animal to have a final good, and there are such things as final goods because there are animals. This theory explains the existence of final goods without any metaphysical appeal to intrinsic values.
Machine summary:
1 It follows from Moore’s theory that there is no way we can know what is good in the final sense except by a power of rational intuition that functions like a sense.
V. The Metaphysical Background to Aristotle’s Theory I am interested in Aristotle’s view because it represents an interesting way of relating the evaluative and the final senses of good.
According to Aristotle’s view, we also use the same term because both the evaluative and the final good are matters of well- functioning.
But in Aristotle’s theory, the connection between being good in the evaluative sense and achieving the good in the final sense is not merely an empirical one, because both kinds of good essentially involve well-functioning.
Aristotle’s view that a thing’s final good is its own well-functioning actually explains why we can say this sort of thing, and why we say it in the case of living entities but not artifacts.
But is goodness in the extended-evaluative sense connected to final goodness in the way Aristotle supposes?
According to Aristotle’s theory, what a being that has a final good is aware of it is own well- functioning, of its goodness in the extended-evaluative sense.
To achieve the good in the final sense, then, is to be aware of oneself as being in a good condition in the evaluative sense—to be aware of oneself as well- functioning, as the kind of thing that one is.
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