What is Good?

[Martin Hash]

I was working on a theory I call Liberty Binaryism, and was trying to come up with the root word for “good” (verses bad). As you can see below, all of these words are circularly defined, a breeding ground of subjectivity and fuzzy thinking. (From Dictionary.com)

Good - moral righteousness.

Morals - principles or habits with respect to right or wrong conduct.

Principles - guiding sense of the requirements and obligations of right conduct

Right - in accordance with what is good, proper, or just.

Just - based on right

Wrong - not in accordance with what is morally right or good.

Bad - morally reprehensible.

Maybe a similar term?

Ethics - a system of moral principles:

However, there are some words in the definitions that carry a modicum of objectivity.

Habits - customary practice.

Proper - conforming to established standards of behavior or manners.

I think I can work up from those.

[Speaker to Animals]

Maybe ammend the good to acting in accord with moral righteousness rather than moral righteousness itself. For most humans, that just means doing the will of God as opposed to violating it. Natural law can work too.

It's sort of like confusing law-abiding with the law. When we do something legal, we act in accord with the law; legal act does not mean the law itself.

[TheReal_ND]

Do your own crossword puzzles. Not your personal army.

[Martin Hash]

Maybe ammend the good to acting in accord with moral righteousness rather than moral righteousness itself. For most humans, that just means doing the will of God as opposed to violating it. Natural law can work too.

It's sort of like confusing law-abiding with the law. When we do something legal, we act in accord with the law; legal act does not mean the law itself.

"Objective" means leave out the mysticism.

However, I do think you identified why determining what "good" is, is so muddy; it's because historically preachers told us what it meant, and they got their info from God. (I missed that.)

[Speaker to Animals]

Maybe ammend the good to acting in accord with moral righteousness rather than moral righteousness itself. For most humans, that just means doing the will of God as opposed to violating it. Natural law can work too.

It's sort of like confusing law-abiding with the law. When we do something legal, we act in accord with the law; legal act does not mean the law itself.

"Objective" means leave out the mysticism.

However, I do think you identified why determining what "good" is, is so muddy; it's because historically preachers told us what it meant, and they got their info from God. (I missed that.)

It wasn't preachers but philosophers who came to this conclusion.

The Good is a thing in itself. Right moral action is action that is in accord with the Good. If you conflate righteousness with the Good, then you end up with an arbitrary set of actions deemed "the good", but you need some justification for them. What makes an act righteous is whatever the Good is.

This was why Nietzsche despaired at the idea of the death of the idea of God and why Sartre spent his philosophical career grappling with existential angst.

If you want, you can use natural law in the place of God, or the Greek Logos, but you need *something* that justifies an act as morally righteous. Otherwise, you are justifying acts based on your subjective feelings, which really just leads you towards the degeneracy of the left. Eventually you will decide some form of dialectic is the best people can arrive at as a collectively agreed upon justification. That's what communism was. People abandoned the idea of God, but had to replace it with something. Marxism filled the void and provides people with some means to justify an act as moral or condemn an act as immoral. The entire division of humanity into oppressors and oppressed is the easiest way to accomplish the goal.

[Martin Hash]

"Natural Law" is also mysticism.

[Speaker to Animals]

"Natural Law" is also mysticism.

No, it's not. You just don't know what it means. You engaged in it yourself on several occasions and didn't know it. Applying reason to human nature is natural law. That's all it is.

[Ex-California]

I am Good.

[SuburbanFarmer]

[Martin Hash]

"Natural Law" is also mysticism.

No, it's not. You just don't know what it means.

???
Okay, I'm a Martian who just landed on planet earth, stuck my flag in the ground, popped one of my pseudoeggs which I use for reproduction into my mouth for food, and you showed up. Explain "Natural Law."