Re: Conversation Resumes: good&bad, part 2

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: : Bart, : : I think your definition--if I understood it correctly, no offense but you need to be more precise in your phrasing--is accurate to a degree. Howver, I believe when defining terms like "good" and "evil" you need to be much more specific. : I was VERY specific. Mine is a precise definition; it is absolutely clear, if you have the right information, all of which has a definite true/false value, whether something is good or bad. I would venture that your definition is a LOT more ambiguous than mine is. Of course, that view may change if you can give me clear, definite definitions of "positive" and "healthy". : : Here's my view: : : There is a objective, universal defintion of good and evil, respectively. In other words, what is "good" or "evil" is INDEPENDENT of an individual's SUBJECTIOVE opinion. Sometimes they may march--other times they won't. : There isn't anything outside of your own subjective view in this universe, or in any possible one, that is possible to know of. Anything anyone comes up with, by definition, is their own subjective view. If your definition is the correct one, then it is logically impossible to supply conditions for it. I hope that you are incorrect, because if you ARE correct, we can't use the terms "good" or "bad" at all because we have no way of labeling anything "good" or "bad". : : As you stated, I made this clearwith my example re: the mental patient. In a past post you equated good with desirous. I equated it with beneficial. YOu then said that i couldn't use beneficial becasue it mean tthe same thing as good. We went over this once before in our discussion of reason and intelligence. Different words--no matter how similar in meaning--have different connotations and implications when used in different contexts. Thjat's why we have so many different words. The term "good" is much more general than either "desirous" or "beneficial". The latter two may be used interchageably with "good" on a regular basis but not necessarily with each other. What is beneficial is always desiorous, but what is desirous is not ALWAYS benficial(a person may desire a cigarette, but a cigarette is not beneficial to that person. Different shades of meaning occur in different contexts. As such I may very well use beneficial as my definition of what is good. Since I define good as beneficial, then I must now define beneficial: : : That which produces a positive, : "Positive" is the nearest synonym with "good" that I know of, even more of a synonym than "beneficial". I will therefore discard this part of your definition. If you choose to explain it, I will be happy to include it again. : : healthy result : Define "health". Is it the state in which a person can go the longest without dying? In that case, my farfetched alien situation is a good one, and you already agreed that it isn't. Is it the state in which a person is the most powerful? In that case, would you say that if all of humankind were given supernatural powers with the proviso that they will be in excruciating pain their whole lives is a good one? I wouldn't say that. Is it the state in which a person is the closest to "normal"? In that case, Buddha's purported state of enlightenment and wisdom and joy was a bad thing. "health" is much too ambiguous. Please define it, and remember that I will subject your definition to the most outlandish hypothetical situations I can imagine as a test of how universally correct it is, like I did with the definitions of health as power, normality, and longevity. : : (in the long run) or that which does NOT produce a negative harmful result(in the long run). The menatal patient may have positive reaction to being released but in the long run--as I shopwed in my Mr. Jones example--a more positive healty outcome occurs in the long run if he is hospitilized. : My definition works perfectly for this. From your perspective, hospitalization is a good thing for Mr. Jones, but from his perspective, it isn't. : : Kant, the German Philosopher of some reknown, had some good ideas and some messed up ideas. One of his really good ideas was the creation of the categorical imperative: When deciding whether or not to take an action, base your decsion on the premise that your action will become a universal law. The idea is that if something is good then do it becasue it would become universal law but don't do anything bad for same reason. : That is an amazingly stupid definition. Let's say I am considering riding a bicycle. Should I refrain from doing so because if everyone had to ride bicycles all the time, the world economy would collapse and everyone would starve to death? That makes no sense. There's nothing wrong with riding a bicycle. And if you are going to put case-specific conditionals on the universal law – for instance, riding a bike is only imperative if doing so would not cause pain to anyone or make people die younger because of it – then it is no longer a “universal law”. You might as well kill people, with the justification that the universal law that resulted from your actions would say that only people only need to kill people if they happen to be you, and they happen to be in your situation exactly, and they happen to want to. That wouldn’t cause much of a deterioration of society – only a few people dead, no matter how much of a serial killer you decide to be, is not going to hurt the human race as a whole much. : : Persoanlly I believe good in moral conduct can be summed up in that old classic, the GOLden RUle:do unto others as you'd have done to you, or don't do to other what you wouldn't want done to you. : Right. So if you're an anesthesiologist, how the hell would you do your job? Or even better, what if you specialize in chemotherapy? : : To summarize, "good" in any particualr situation is that which has the most positive, healthy, benefical effect in the long run. : All three of those terms are undefined. That's the most important thing for you, if you are sticking with your old definition - define "healthy" or "positive". You can ignore my other objections if you can define "healthy" in such a way that, given a set of conditions, it is possible to definitely say that something is healthy or unhealthy or neither. : The chief difference between our definition is, you are trying to explain what YOU mean when you say “good,” and I am trying to explain what ANYONE means when they say “good”.

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