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About this topic
Summary A somewhat miscellaneous category overlapping with some other categories. It  includes works dealing with the meta-ethics of value, the definition of various forms of the good, and substantive axiologies indicating what the good consists in (e.g. hedonism, eudaimonism, perfectionism, etc.).
Key works Being an inclusive category and not a specific theme in itself, please refer to key works in related categories.
Introductions Schroeder 2008 can be regarded as covering some of the ground within this category. Hurka 2011 is an accessible discussion of "the good" in the sense of "what is good, what things have value". Please also refer to Introductory articles in related categories.
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History/traditions: The Good

Contents
96 found
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  1. The Relational Foundations of Epistemic Normativity.Cameron Boult - forthcoming - Philosophical Issues.
    Why comply with epistemic norms? In this paper, I argue that complying with epistemic norms, engaging in epistemically responsible conduct, and being epistemically trustworthy are constitutive elements of maintaining good epistemic relations with oneself and others. Good epistemic relations are in turn both instrumentally and finally valuable: they enable the kind of coordination and knowledge acquisition underpinning much of what we tend to associate with a flourishing human life; and just as good interpersonal relations with others can be good for (...)
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  2. Deserving the Option to Give.Jeffrey Moriarty - forthcoming - Ratio.
    This paper argues that people can deserve the option to give. Discussions of desert tend to focus on the benefits and burdens that people might, in some sense, receive, like wealth and jobs. But intuitively, people can also deserve the ability to decide what to do with their wealth or to select who gets a job. Shaping distributive policies and outcomes in accordance with desert is more complicated than philosophers have realised.
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  3. Pleasure is goodness; morality is universal.Neil Sinhababu - forthcoming - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:1-17.
    This paper presents the Universality Argument that pleasure is goodness. The first premise defines goodness as what should please all. The second premise reduces 'should' to perceptual accuracy. The third premise invokes a universal standard of accuracy: qualitative identity. Since the pleasure of all is accurate solely about pleasure, pleasure is goodness, or universal moral value. The argument proceeds from a moral sense theory that analyzes moral concepts as concerned with what all should hope for, feel guilty about, and admire. (...)
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  4. Laozian metaethics.Jason Dockstader - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (2):1-19.
    This paper contributes to the emerging field of comparative metaethics by offering a reconstruction of the metaethical views implicit to the Daoist classic, the Laozi 老子 or Daodejing 道德經. It offers two novel views developed out of the Laozi: one-all value monism and moral trivialism. The paper proceeds by discussing Brook Ziporyn’s reading of the Laozi in terms of omnipresence and irony, and then applies his reading to moral properties like values and names (ming 名). The paper emboldens Ziporyn’s monistic (...)
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  5. Common Good and Self-Interest in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy.Heikki Haara & Juhana Toivanen (eds.) - 2024 - Springer Verlag.
    This open access volume provides an in-depth analysis of philosophical discussions concerning the common good and its relation to self-interest in the history of Western philosophy. The thirteen chapters explore both renowned and lesser-known thinkers from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, covering also the relevant ancient background. By bridging the gap between the medieval and early modern periods, they provide fresh insights into how moral and political philosophers understood the concepts of the common good and self-interest, along with (...)
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  6. The good life as the life in touch with the good.Adam Lovett & Stefan Riedener - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5):1141-1165.
    What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value when (...)
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  7. Grounds of Goodness.Jeremy David Fix - 2023 - Journal of Philosophy 120 (7):368-391.
    What explains why we are subjects for whom objects can have value, and what explains which objects have value for us? Axiologicians say that the value of humanity is the answer. I argue that our value, no matter what it is like, cannot perform this task. We are animals among others. An explanation of the value of objects for us must fit into an explanation of the value of objects for animals generally. Different objects have value for different animals. Those (...)
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  8. The Possibility of Undistinguishedness.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (2):609-613.
    It is natural to assume that every value bearer must be good, bad, or neutral. This paper argues that this assumption is false if value incomparability is possible. More precisely, if value incommensurability is possible, then there is a fourth category of absolute value, in addition to the good, the bad, and the neutral.
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  9. The Neutrality of Life.Andrew Y. Lee - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):685-703.
    Some philosophers think that life is worth living not merely because of the goods and the bads within it, but also because life itself is good. I explain how this idea can be formalized by associating each version of such of a view with a function from length of life to the value generated by life itself. Then I argue that every version of the view that life itself is good faces some version of the following dilemma: either (1) good (...)
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  10. The good and the powers.Michele Paolini Paoletti - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy:1-30.
    Neo-Aristotelian views of goodness hold that the goodness of something is strictly connected with its goal(s). In this article, I shall present a power-based, Neo-Aristotelian view of goodness. I shall claim that there are certain powers (i.e., Goodness-Conferring Powers, or GC-powers in short) that confer goodness upon their bearers and upon the resulting actions. And I shall suggest that GC-powers are strongly teleological tendencies. In Section 1, I shall present the kernel of Neo-Aristotelian conceptions of goodness. In Section 2, I (...)
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  11. The Things We Envy: Fitting Envy and Human Goodness.Sara Protasi - 2023 - In Chris Howard & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Fittingness. OUP.
    I argue that fitting envy plays a special role in safeguarding our happiness and flourishing. After presenting my theory of envy and its fittingness conditions, I contrast Kant’s view that envy is always unfitting with D’Arms and Jacobson’s defense of fitting envy as an evolutionarily-shaped response to a deep and wide human concern, that is, relative positioning. However, D’Arms and Jacobson don’t go far enough. First, I expand on their analysis of positional goodness, distinguishing between an epistemic claim, according to (...)
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  12. Can desire-satisfaction alienate our good?Willem van der Deijl - 2023 - Journal of Value Inquiry 57 (4):687-700.
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  13. Fetal Reduction, Moral Permissibility and the All or Nothing Problem.Xueshi Wang - 2023 - Journal of Medical Ethics (11):772-775.
    There is an ongoing debate about whether multifetal pregnancy reduction from twins to singletons (2-to-1 MFPR) is morally permissible. By applying the all or nothing problem to the cases of reducing twin pregnancies to singletons, Räsänen argues that an implausible conclusion seems to follow from two plausible claims: (1) it is permissible to have an abortion and (2) it is wrong to abort only one fetus in a twin pregnancy. The implausible conclusion is that women considering 2-to-1 MFPR for social (...)
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  14. An Ebola-Like Microbe and The Limits of Kind-Based Goodness.Berman Chan - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (2):451-471.
    Aristotelian theory, as found in Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot, claims that to be good is to be good as a member of that kind. However, I contend that something can satisfy kind-relative standards but nonetheless be bad—I propose a hypothetical Ebola-like microbe that meets its kind-standards of being destructive for its own sake, but it would plausibly be bad for doing so. I anticipate an Aristotelian objection that evaluations should only be made from "within" the lifeform conception rather than (...)
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  15. The Mathematics of Desert: Merit, Fit, and Well-Being.Stephen Kershnar & Michael Tooley - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (1):18.
    Here, we argue for a mathematical equation that captures desert. Our procedure consists of setting out principles that a correct equation must satisfy and then arguing that our set of equations satisfies them. We then consider two objections to the equation. First, an objector might argue that desert and well-being separately contribute to intrinsic goodness, and they do not separately contribute. The concern here is that our equations treat them as separate contributors. Second, our set of desert-equations are unlike equations (...)
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  16. Are all practical reasons based on value?Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 17:27-53.
    According to an attractive and widely held view, all practical reasons are explained in terms of the (instrumental or final) value of the action supported by the reason. I argue that this theory is incompatible with plausible assumptions about the practical reasons that correspond to certain moral rights, including the right to a promised action and the right to an exclusive use of one’s property. The argument is an explanatory rather than extensional one: while the actions supported by the relevant (...)
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  17. The Value and Significance of Ill-Being.Christopher Woodard - 2022 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 46:1-19.
    Since Shelly Kagan pointed out the relative neglect of ill-being in philosophical discussions, several philosophers have contributed to an emerging literature on its constituents. In doing so, they have explored possible asymmetries between the constituents of ill-being and the constituents of positive well-being. This paper explores some possible asymmetries that may arise elsewhere in the philosophy of ill-being. In particular, it considers whether there is an asymmetry between the contribution made to prudential value by equal quantities of goods and bads. (...)
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  18. A Platonic Kind-Based Account of Goodness.Berman Chan - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (4):1369-1389.
    I contend there exists a platonistic good that all other good (excellent) things must resemble, supplementing this theory with Aristotelian features. Something’s goodness holds in virtue of the thing’s own properties being such as to satisfy its kind-based standards, and those K-standards resembling the platonic good. As for the latter condition, the K-standards resemble it firstly with respect to requiring activities, and secondly also at the level of what teleology those activities are directed towards.
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  19. Perfectionism and Dignity.Pablo Gilabert - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (1):259-278.
    Perfectionism about well-being is, at a minimum, the view that people’s lives go well when, and because they realize their capacities. It is common to link perfectionism with an idea of human essence or nature, to yield the view that what constitutes people’s well-being is the development and exercise of characteristically human capacities. The first part of this paper considers the very serious problems associated with the idea of human nature or essence, and argues that perfectionism would be more plausible (...)
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  20. On Parfit’s Wide Person-Affecting Principle.Jonas Harney - 2021 - In Michael Schefczyk & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Utility, Progress, and Technology: Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies. Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing. pp. 69–78.
    Parfit (2017) proposed a novel principle for outcome betterness in different people and different number choices. It is claimed to solve the Non-Identity Problem while avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion, and it shall do so in person-affecting rather than in impersonal terms. According to this Wide Dual Person-Affecting Principle, one of two outcomes would be (i) in one way better if this outcome would together benefit people more, and (ii) in another way better if this outcome would benefit each person more. (...)
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  21. Against ‘Good for’/‘Well-Being’, for ‘Simply Good’.Thomas Hurka - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (4):803-22.
    This paper challenges the widely held view that ‘good for’, ‘well-being’, and related terms express a distinctive evaluative concept of central importance for ethics and separate from ‘simply good’ as used by G. E. Moore and others. More specifically, it argues that there's no philosophically useful good-for or well-being concept that's neither merely descriptive in the sense of naturalistic nor reducible to ‘simply good’. The paper distinguishes two interpretations of the common claim that the value ‘good for’ expresses is distinctively (...)
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  22. Conservatisms about the Valuable.Jacob M. Nebel - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (1):180-194.
    ABSTRACT Sometimes it seems that an existing bearer of value should be preserved even though it could be destroyed and replaced with something of equal or greater value. How can this conservative intuition be explained and justified? This paper distinguishes three answers, which I call existential, attitudinal, and object-affecting conservatism. I raise some problems for existential and attitudinal conservatism, and suggest how they can be solved by object-affecting conservatism.
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  23. Completeness, Self-Sufficiency, and Intimacy in Seneca’s Account of Friendship.Carissa Phillips-Garrett - 2021 - Ancient Philosophy Today 3 (2):200-221.
    Examining Seneca’s account of friendship produces an interpretative puzzle: if the good of the Stoic sage is already both complete and self-sufficient, how can friendship be a good? I reject the solution that friendship is simply a preferred indifferent instead of a good and argue that though Seneca’s account can consistently explain both why friendship’s nature as a good does not threaten the completeness or the self-sufficiency of the sage, Stoic friends must choose between intimate friendships that leave them vulnerable (...)
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  24. Arte culinario y creación poética en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.Gallegos Ordorica Sergio & Ortiz Hinojosa Sofia - 2021 - Critica 53 (157):13-44.
    In this paper, we explore the connections between the culinary art and the poetic work by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In particular, following a detailed study of the analogies between, on the one hand, food and culinary preparation, and on the other hand, poetry and composition, we show that culinary art functions as cause and catalyst of Sor Juana’s poetic creation. Also, we show that, for the hieronymite nun, there is an intimate and profound relation between good seasoning, (...)
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  25. Fitting Inconsistency and Reasonable Irresolution.Simon D. Feldman & Allan Hazlett - 2020 - In Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence: Being of Two Minds. New York: Routledge.
    The badness of having conflicting emotions is a familiar theme in academic ethics, clinical psychology, and commercial self-help, where emotional harmony is often put forward as an ideal. Many philosophers give emotional harmony pride of place in their theories of practical reason.1 Here we offer a defense of a particular species of emotional conflict, namely, ambivalence. We articulate an conception of ambivalence, on which ambivalence is unresolved inconsistent desire (§1) and present a case of appropriate ambivalence (§2), before considering two (...)
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  26. The Parallel Goods of Knowledge and Achievement.Thomas Hurka - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (3):589-608.
    This paper examines what it takes to be the intrinsic human goods of knowledge and achievement and argues that they are at many points parallel. Both are compounds, and of parallel elements: belief, justification, and truth in the one case, and intentional pursuit, competence, and success in the other. Each involves a Moorean organic unity, so its full presence or value requires a connection between its elements: an outside-in connection, where what makes a belief true helps explain why it’s justified, (...)
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  27. Natural goodness without natural history.Parisa Moosavi - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:78-100.
    Neo‐Aristotelian ethical naturalism purports to show that moral evaluation of human action and character is an evaluation of natural goodness—a kind of evaluation that applies to living things in virtue of their nature and based on their form of life. The standard neo‐Aristotelian view defines natural goodness by way of generic statements describing the natural history, or the ‘characteristic’ life, of a species. In this paper, I argue that this conception of natural goodness commits the neo‐Aristotelian view to a problematic (...)
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  28. Consequentialism and Robust Goods.Vuko Andrić - 2019 - Utilitas 31 (3):334-342.
    In this article, I critique the moral theory developed in Philip Pettit's The Robust Demands of the Good: Ethics with Attachment, Virtue, and Respect. Pettit's theory, which I label Robust-Goods Consequentialism, aims to avoid the problems but retain the attractive features of traditional consequentialist theories. The distinctive feature of Robust-Goods Consequentialism is a value theory that attempts to accommodate what Pettit calls rich goods: certain moral phenomena that can be categorized under the headings of attachment, virtue and respect. I argue (...)
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  29. Hedonism, Desirability and the Incompleteness Objection.Vuko Andrić - 2019 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 8 (2):101-109.
    Hedonism claims that all and only pleasure is intrinsically good. One worry about Hedonism focuses on the “only” part: Are there not things other than pleasure, such as personal projects and relationships, that are intrinsically good? If so, it can be objected that Hedonism is incomplete. In this paper, I defend Hedonism against this objection by arguing for a distinction between goodness and desirability that understands “desirability” as a deontic concept, in terms of “reason to desire”, but goodness as an (...)
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  30. The Value of Chance and the Satisfaction of Claims.Ittay Nissan-Rozen - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (9):469-493.
    A new explanation for the fairness of lotteries is presented. The explanation draws on elements of John Broome's and Richard Bradley's accounts, but is distinct from both of them. I start with Broome's idea that the fairness of lotteries has something to do with satisfying claims in a way which is proportional to their strength. I present an intuitive explication of.
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  31. Angelique: An Angel in Distress, Morality in Crisis.Necip Fikri Alican - 2018 - Dialogue and Universalism 28 (2):9–48.
    Michael H. Mitias argues that friendship is a central moral value constituting an integral part of the good life and therefore deserving a prominent place in ethical theory. He consequently calls upon ethicists to make immediate and decisive adjustments toward accommodating what he regards as a neglected organic relationship between friendship and morality. This is not a fanciful amendment to our standard conception of morality but a radical proposal grounded in a unifying vision to recapture the right way of doing (...)
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  32. Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment: An Idea to Help Save the World.Nicholas Maxwell - 2018 - Ethical Record 123 (1):27-30.
    Natural science, properly understood, provides us with the methodological key to the salvation of humanity. First, we need to acknowledge that the actual aims of science are profoundly problematic, in that they make problematic assumptions about metaphysics, values and the social use of science. Then we need to represent these aims in the form of a hierarchy of aims, which become increasingly unproblematic as one goes up the hierarchy; as result we create a framework of relatively unproblematic aims and methods, (...)
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  33. The Naturalistic Fallacy and Theological Ethics.Christian B. Miller - 2018 - In Neil Sinclair (ed.), The Naturalistic Fallacy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 206-225.
    What views are the primary target of Moore’s fallacy and his open question argument? A common answer, I suspect, would be naturalistic approaches to morality. It is the naturalistic fallacy, after all. But in fact both his fallacy and his argument apply just as straightforwardly to supernatural approaches to morality as well. In this chapter, I focus specifically on how philosophers of religion have tried to grounds morality in God in ways that are clearly relevant to Moore’s project.
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  34. Consequentialism, Goodness, and States of Affairs.Fergus Peace - 2017 - Journal of Value Inquiry 51 (1):51-68.
    Consequentialists claim that their theory is simply that the right action is whichever one will lead to the best state of affairs - and that this formulation provides a powerful intuitive ground for accepting consequentialism. Recent arguments in value theory threaten to show that this formulation lacks either coherent meaning, because states of affairs cannot be good simpliciter, or philosophical power, because their goodness provides no reason to bring them about. I respond to two such arguments - from Judith Jarvis (...)
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  35. Effort and Achievement.Hasko von Kriegstein - 2017 - Utilitas 29 (1):27-51.
    Achievements have recently begun to attract increased attention from value theorists. One recurring idea in this budding literature is that one important factor determining the magnitude or value of an achievement is the amount of effort the achiever invested. The aim of this paper is to present the most plausible version of this idea. This advances the current state of debate where authors are invoking substantially different notions of effort and are thus talking past each other. While the concept of (...)
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  36. In defence of good simpliciter.Rach Cosker-Rowland - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (5):1371-1391.
    Many including Judith Jarvis Thomson, Philippa Foot, Peter Geach, Richard Kraut, and Paul Ziff have argued for good simpliciter skepticism. According to good simpliciter skepticism, we should hold that there is no concept of being good simpliciter or that there is no property of being good simpliciter. I first show that prima facie we should not accept either form of good simpliciter skepticism. I then show that all of the arguments that good simpliciter skeptics have proposed for their view fail (...)
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  37. The Virtues of Happiness: A Theory of the Good Life. [REVIEW]E. Sonny Elizondo - 2016 - Philosophical Quarterly 66 (262):181-183.
    A Review of Paul Bloomfield's book _The Virtues of Happiness: A Theory of the Good Life_ (OUP 2014).
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  38. How to accept the transitivity of better than.Justin Klocksiem - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (5):1309-1334.
    Although the thesis that the moral better than relation is transitive seems obviously true, there is a growing literature according to which Parfit’s repugnant conclusion and related puzzles reveal that this thesis is false or problematic. This paper begins by presenting several such puzzles and explaining how they can be used in arguments for the intransitivity of better than. It then proposes and defends a plausible alternative picture of the behavior of better than that both resolves the repugnant conclusion and (...)
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  39. Fairness and the Strengths of Agents' Claims.Nathaniel Sharadin - 2016 - Utilitas 28 (3):347-360.
    John Broome has proposed a theory of fairness according to which fairness requires that agents’ claims to goods be satisfied in proportion to the relative strength of those claims. In the case of competing claims for a single indivisible good, Broome argues that what fairness requires is the use of a weighted lottery as a surrogate to satisfying the competing claims: the relative chance of each claimant's winning the lottery should be set to the relative strength of each claimant's claim. (...)
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  40. Goodness: Attributive and predicative.Michael-John Turp - 2016 - Les ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 11 (2-3):70-87.
    Michael-John Turp | : There is little consensus concerning the truth or reference conditions for evaluative terms such as “good” and “bad.” In his paper “Good and Evil,” Geach proposed that we distinguish between attributive and predicative uses of “good.” Foot, Thomson, Kraut, and others have put this distinction to use when discussing basic questions of value theory. In §§1-2, I outline Geach’s proposal and argue that attributive evaluation depends on a prior grasp of the kind of thing that is (...)
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  41. Is anything just plain good?Mahrad Almotahari & Adam Hosein - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (6):1485-1508.
    Geach and Thomson have argued that nothing is just plain good, because ‘good’ is, logically, an attributive adjective. The upshot, according to Geach and Thomson, is that consequentialism is unacceptable, since its very formulation requires a predicative use of ‘good’. Reactions to the argument have, for the most part, been uniform. Authors have converged on two challenging objections . First, although the logical tests that Geach and Thomson invoke clearly illustrate that ‘good’, as commonly used, is an attributive, they don’t (...)
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  42. Perfectionism in Practice: Shusterman’s place in Recent Pragmatism.Mathias Girel - 2015 - Contemporary Pragmatism 12 (1):156-179.
    Building on recent texts, I give a characterization of Richard Shusterman’s specific variant of pragmatism, understood as a melioristic or perfectionist pragmatism, where ethical and political dimensions are deeply intertwined with the epistemological one. To do so, I focus on what seems to be Shusterman’s latest contribution to his inter- rupted dialogue with Richard Rorty in Thinking through the Body.
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  43. Wish, Motivation and the Human Good in Aristotle.Gösta Grönroos - 2015 - Phronesis 60 (1):60-87.
    _ Source: _Volume 60, Issue 1, pp 60 - 87 Aristotle invokes a specifically human desire, namely wish, to provide a teleological explanation of the pursuit of the specifically human good in terms of virtuous activity. Wish is a basic, unreasoned desire which, independently of other desires, or evaluative attitudes, motivates the pursuit of the human good. Even a person who pursues what she mistakenly believes to be good is motivated by wish for what in fact is good, although she (...)
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  44. Still Not ‘Good’ in Terms of ‘Better’.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2015 - Noûs 50 (4):854-864.
    Erik Carlson puts forward a new way of defining monadic value predicates, such as ‘good’, in terms of dyadic value relations, such as ‘better’. Earlier definitions of this kind have the unwanted feature that they rule out some reasonable axiologies by conceptual fiat. Carlson claims that his definitions do not have this drawback. In this paper, I argue that they do.
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  45. (1 other version)Review of Meaning In Life: An Analytic Study by Thaddeus Metz. [REVIEW]Antti Kauppinen - 2015 - Ethics 125 (2):600-605.
  46. The Common Good, Rights, and Catholic Social Thought: Prolegomena to Any Future Account of Common Goods.Jeffery L. Nicholas - 2015 - Solidarity: The Journal for Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics 5 (1):Article 4.
    The argument between Jacques Maritain and Charles de Koninck over the primacy of the common good is well known. Yet, even though Mary Keys has carefully arbitrated this debate, it still remains problematic for Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly because of the role rights play in both Maritain and Catholic Social Thought. I examine Keys’ argument and, in addition, Deborah Wallace’s account of MacIntyre’s criticism of rights in Catholic social thought. I argue, in the end, that what Maritain, and in consequence Keys (...)
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  47. Torture and Incoherence: A Reply to Cyr.Duncan Purves - 2015 - The Journal of Ethics 19 (2):213-218.
    John Martin Fischer and Anthony L. Brueckner have argued that a person’s death is, in many cases, bad for him, whereas a person’s prenatal non-existence is not bad for him. Their suggestion relies on the idea that death deprives the person of pleasant experiences that it is rational for him to care about, whereas prenatal non-existence only deprives him of pleasant experiences that it is not rational for him to care about. Jens Johansson has objected to this justification of ‘The (...)
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  48. A New Problem with the Capabilities Approach.Thom Brooks - 2014 - The Harvard Review of Philosophy 20:100-106.
    Martha Nussbaum’s “influential capabilities approach” offers us a powerful, universal standard of justice. The approach builds off of pioneering work by Amartya Sen in economic development. Much of the contemporary interest in the capabilities approach has focused upon how we might spell out a list of precisely which capabilities must be made universally available and protected, a list that Sen has not provided himself. Nussbaum’s list of capabilities is arguably the most successful attempt at defining these capabilities. In this paper, (...)
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  49. Neither 'Good' in Terms of 'Better' nor 'Better' in Terms of 'Good'.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2014 - Noûs 48 (1):466-473.
    In this paper, I argue against defining either of ‘good’ and ‘better’ in terms of the other. According to definitions of ‘good’ in terms of ‘better’, something is good if and only if it is better than some indifference point. Against this approach, I argue that the indifference point cannot be defined in terms of ‘better’ without ruling out some reasonable axiologies. Against defining ‘better’ in terms of ‘good’, I argue that this approach either cannot allow for the incorruptibility of (...)
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  50. A Moorean View of the Value of Lives.Kris McDaniel - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (4):23-46.
    Can we understand being valuable for in terms of being valuable? Three different kinds of puzzle cases suggest that the answer is negative. In what follows, I articulate a positive answer to this question, carefully present the three puzzle cases, and then explain how a friend of the positive answer can successfully respond to them. This response requires us to distinguish different kinds of value bearers, rather than different kinds of value, and to hold that among the value bearers are (...)
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