The notion of “good” is used in a variety of ways, including good (all senses), Political movements such as socialism and conservatism and moral philosophies such as consequentialism and deontology make very different claims about the primacy or importance of ‘good’ in their systems. The word ‘good’ has been used to indicate ‘well’ or some other meaning for more than a millennium, although its dominant usage in English over the last century has been as an adjective (“I feel good.”).
The philosophy of religion deals extensively with the nature of goodness. The philosophical task of providing a precise definition for “goodness” is ongoing. Much about what constitutes “good” continues to be open for debate, depending on cultural perspectives and individual values.
Religion often involves conceptions of good and evil. Such ideas are central not only to religious morality but also to law, politics, art, aesthetics, agape (love), linguistic normative ethics, meta-ethics, epistemology, God, philosophy of history, decision theory, and many other fields.
Linguistics contains several basic theorems regarding the relationship between “good” and “well.” For one thing, “good” can mean well in all senses except for aesthetic ones. It is possible to say that a book or movie is good even if it’s poorly written or directed. Similarly, one cannot say that an apple tastes good without qualification; indeed, this would call into question how it can be eaten at all. There is no contradiction here because taste pertains only to the sensory domain rather than the cognitive domain, whereas meaning always pertains to intellective experiences (e.g., thoughts). One exception here concerns idiomatic language in which saying something tastes good signifies that it tastes bad. That is because taste has a cultural dimension to it and can thus be used metaphorically to refer not just too literal senses but also to non-sensory intellectual experiences.
To say that something tastes good or sounds good may also mean that one likes the experience of consuming it, even though taste and sound pertain only to the mental state of what one finds pleasant. Here we can see how “good” in an extramental sense (e.g., taste, sound) is distinct from what one finds pleasant. The former involves both cognition (what tastes or sounds like this) and feeling (how pleasant the experience is), whereas the latter concept concerns only how pleasant the experience is with no necessary reference to cognition.
Some philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche have argued that whatever is good in any sense is also pleasurable, and vice versa. They stated that everything we find pleasant is also good in some way: the satisfaction of our desires, pleasure itself, and so forth. This line of thought is often ascribed to Plato who held the view that pleasure cannot be evil because what we naturally strive for should be considered good (see Hedonism).
Although there are no recorded arguments against this position by Plato himself, this is not to say he was entirely in agreement with it. In “Gorgias”, Socrates says pleasure does not contribute “to a person’s virtue or excellence” because it provides too many incentives for bad behavior.
Aristotle also argued that pleasure is not good in itself, but only insofar as it provides an incentive for performing virtuous or moral actions. Instead of being good, he states that pleasure is beneficial. The more virtuous someone becomes the more capable they are of enjoying pleasure while still allowing them to be motivated by their previous desires for other pleasures which were initially experienced through ignorance. For Aristotle, “it is when we know what really causes goodness and pleasure together, and when we have escaped from the misconception…that they are naturally connected (for nothing links them) — it is then, and then only, that we shall attain complete happiness.”
However, David Hume stated that treating what simply feels good as good is not a consistent approach to ethics. A person may feel pleasure when they commit murder, but that would hardly make them moral according to Hume; we must look beyond mere feeling and examine the behavior of the person in question.
Hedonists hold that pleasure is the single most important intrinsic good: morally, more value should be assigned to it than any other thing. For hedonistic utilitarianism, for example, justification of action on moral grounds can only be achieved by comparing the net benefit (pleasure minus pain) of every possible option available to a sentient agent considering reasoned reflection under various ethical theories such as virtue theory and non-hedonistic consequentialism.
