The Ethics of Well-Being Richard Kraut
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
“Good,” its linguistic relatives (“better,” “best,” “well”), their opposites, and corresponding terms in other languages pervade the vocabulary of everyday life. With their help, we arrive at conclusions about what to choose and what to do. We want not just to eat, but to eat good food; not just to make plans, but to make good plans; not just to have friends, but to have good friends. If we lacked a vocabulary for making such evaluations and still finer distinctions (“good, but not as good as”), decision making would be an impoverished enterprise. “Good” goes even deeper than that. When followed by the preposition “for” or “of,” it purports to tell us where our interests lie. To deliberate about what is good for someone, or the good of someone, is to ask about what is beneficial or advantageous—not what is beneficial or advantageous in general, but for or to him in particular. It is to inquire about how to place that person in a more favorable position than he would otherwise occupy. If we lacked words like “good for,” “in his interest,” “to his advantage,” “beneficial to,” we would have no linguistic resources for thinking about how to improve our circumstances or how to prevent them from deteriorating.
Without such terms, we would lose the grounding for the evaluations we make. For when we use “good” as a grader of members of a kind (good food, plans, friends), we are guided by our ideas about what is good for this person or that. Food is good by being good for the person who eats it. 1 Plans are good when their results are likely to be good for those affected by them. A good friend is good for the person to whom he is a friend. Behind our evaluative practices and our practical reasoning lie countless assumptions, normally unexamined, about which things are good for us.
In this study I reflect on those assumptions in order to find their underlying rationale. Common sense, we will see, tends to make systematic errors about what is good for us, and philosophers have sometimes incorporated those errors into their theories. If we learn how to guard against these tendencies, we should arrive at a better understanding of how to live our lives. In doing so, we will not be entirely abandoning common sense—far from it. Much that will be said here about what is good for us will be obvious. The trouble with common sense, in this area, is that it accepts too many ideas; they cannot all stand up to scrutiny. We have to lay bare our underlying assumptions about what is good for us in order to see that our house is not in order and to set about rebuilding it.
We will be moving to a level of abstraction that seems far removed from the exigencies of daily life. We want to know not only which things are in fact good for someone, but what is being said about a thing when it is judged to be good for someone. What, in fact, is the nature of the relationship that holds between G and S when G is good for S? (“G” will be our placeholder for goods, “S” for individual subjects.) Since we want to scrutinize the assumptions we make about what is good, we should ask what we commit ourselves to when we call something good for someone. We should, in other words, try to understand the nature of goodness.
That abstract question is the sort we can imagine Socrates asking an interlocutor in a Platonic dialogue. In Meno he tries to discover which property all the virtues have in common—a property that justifies calling each of them a virtue—and he might have asked the same sort of question about what is good. “When you say that eating certain kinds of food is good for you, and that making certain plans is good for you, and that having these friends is good for you, what is it that you are asserting about each of these things? What justifies your claim that each of these things is good for you?”
There is no guarantee that this is a fruitful question to ask—that it is well formulated, that it has an answer, or that we need an answer. Perhaps there is nothing that all good things (things that are good for someone) have in common. Perhaps nothing is amiss if they do not. Perhaps In Search of Good 3 we would do better to think in terms of what is good absolutely—just plain good—than to inquire about what is good for us. Or, even if what is good for us is a matter of great importance, perhaps the assumptions we make about this matter in our everyday lives are entirely in order as they stand. There is no way to tell, at the start, whether philosophical reflection that presses, as this study does, toward greater abstraction and systematicity will bear fruit by detecting pervasive errors in our thinking. There is no guarantee that we are asking a good question when we ask about the nature of goodness. We simply must be on guard to avoid unwarranted assumptions as we seek a theory that withstands all the critical tests we can bring to bear upon it.
The question we are pursuing in this study is extremely broad—perhaps, it will be said, too broad. What is good for S? What do we commit ourselves to when we say that G is good for some individual, S? These questions leave entirely unspecified who or what S is. S need not be a human being; it might be a plant or a nonhuman animal. For an immense variety of living things—trees and shrubs, no less than every member of the animal kingdom—certain things are good and others bad. They can be healthy or diseased. It is good for them to be healthy, bad to be diseased, to be stunted, to die before they mature.
S does not have to be a living creature for it to be the case that G is good for S. Dry air is bad for pianos. Sugar is bad for gas tanks. Sand is bad for watches. Whatever enhances the performance of an artifact or its ability to play its role is good for it; whatever damages it or detracts from its suitability to achieve its purpose is bad for it (sections 34, 68). 2