Definition of good

Carsinian Thau

How do we define something to be good?
Sociologically we seem to have a collective sense of good and bad but when you start to try and work out what individual characteristic(s) of something make it good or bad, you find merely aspects that are just neutral in the grand scheme of things.
Take a generic person for example.
No matter what characteristics of that person you choose, they tend to be neutral. They may seem good but they could be pushed in that direction by selfish desire or fear.

FionnMatthew

Well, to start with, we relativise the definition of 'good', thereby changing what 'good' means in any given usage.

Examples of 'good'.

'good for' something. - ie. good for getting splinters out, or for scraping dirt out of the ridges on the sole of your shoes. This is a 'good' relative to utility.

'good as' something. - this is even broader. For instance, Robbie Williams' albums might be considered good as vacuous, over-produced pop-albums. But they might not be considered good as works representative of aural art. Hitler might have been a good womaniser, but he wasn't a good mathematician, and he wasn't a good pro-semite.

'good moral agent' - this is often what is meant by 'good' in philosophical discourse. There isn't a commonly held definition of what this means, but most people would agree that there is a vague idea of a good person, which functions as a working model. It has been subject to argument for as long as history goes back, but you might sidestep it by saying that you know a good person when you see one.

I think Jean-Luc Picard was the epitome of a good person. He was the particular of a general category, not the definition, but the instantiation. There are only ever individual good people, I think, there is no general 'good person', and hence, no definition.

Stoner

not that this is relevant, but what really rocks my concept of “good” is when I see something I consider to be "evil" (for want of a better broader word) and the person/s involved consider that their actions are "good".
Once I naively thought that peoples sense of good was to some degree the same, and that people carrying out acts of "evil" were completely aware of it. But the more I see to the contrary the more worried about the world I get. Then again sometimes you see the complete opposite and someone from a different culture can restore faith in humanity .