by Jason Stotts
As a philosopher and psychotherapist, I have a unique access to people’s psyches and often spot philosophic problems creating psychological problems. One poignant example of this is the goal that many people have to be “a good person.” On its face, no one would think to argue with this goal. Yet, if you push someone about it just a bit, you often find that what they mean by “a good person” is that they want to be “better than” so-and-so. This is deeply philosophically problematic and causes significant psychological issues. In order to see why, we need to unpack several important philosophic points and, through doing this, we shall see exactly why this premise is philosophically mistaken. If you retain nothing else from this essay aside from its title (“Good is Not Comparative”), then I will have done an adequate job. But, if you remember the reasons why, then I assure you that it will improve your life and happiness.
Of course, you might be wondering what it means that “good is not comparative” and it’s an excellent question. It’ll take us the rest of the essay to really plumb its depths, but we can start with start with its simplest form. The judgement that something is “good” is radically different than the judgement that something is “better than.” For example, to say that pencil A is “good” is to say that it writes well (that is, it fulfills its function), but it is a completely different kind of judgement than to say that pencil A is “better than” pencil B (that is, there is at least some respect in which A is superior to B). Indeed, it’s compatible that A is better than B and yet neither is a good pencil. Or, to use a different example, that a person is a good person is a different judgement from one person is better than another: for example, both C and D might be moral monsters and while C is a better person than D, neither is a good person; or, vice versa, both person E and F might be moral exemplars and while E is a better person than F, neither is a bad person. To be briefer, the best Nazi is a probably still not a good person and the worst among a group of moral saints is still good. Goodness has nothing at all to do with comparisons to others: that is, good is not comparative.
All comparisons are judgmental in nature as they are comparing two things. This judgment is a kind of what we call teleology. Teleology is the study of ends (telos is Greek for “end”). To say that comparison is teleological is just to point out that when we compare A to B, there must be some end for which we are comparing them. For example, when we said that A is a better pencil than B, the end is writing and this is given by the function of the pencil (since pencils are artifacts created to write with). To say that A is better than B is to merely say that for the sake of some end, A is better at achieving this than B.
From a psychological perspective, many of the people I treat who hold this view were only praised for achievement (by their parents, teachers, etc.) and in a culture that values competition highly, this means the only praise they got, and the only time they were told they were good, was when they were better than others. And this conflation stuck for them because it was one of the themes of their childhood which they internalized into their core beliefs. That is, they were taught that good was the same as better than and then never challenged this view as they matured.
To equate “good” to “better than” is to fundamentally misunderstand ethics. The goal of a proper ethics is not to compare one person to another, it is to help us understand how to live the best lives open to each of us. This misunderstanding arises from what I call “judgemental ethics.” This is a system of pseudo-ethics that is based in rules that are imposed by force from an authority figure: anything from a political authority to a mystical god. In these systems, the judge sits in moral judgement of individuals and judges the better ones from the worse ones. The then rewards the former and punishes the latter. But, there’s an inherent problem here: this is no system of morality. If there’s no real morality that the judge uses, then he’s just the biggest bully. If there is a system of morality behind the judge, he’s unnecessary. All religions make this mistake; indeed, for this reason, there can be no such thing as religious morality.
So, what then does proper morality look like? The goal of a real moral system is the flourishing of the individual in question in a rich sense that includes both internal goods like moral and intellectual virtue as well as external goods like lovers, families, money, and a good society. We call this kind of system “Eudaimonism” from the Greek tradition stemming from Aristotle that put an individual’s flourishing as the central moral aim. Because there is a goal here, this kind of morality is teleological. However, just because it is teleological does not mean that morality is comparative. The principle moral question is whether the individual is living well. What benefit would it be to that enterprise to add comparison to others? Indeed, comparison is not a useful moral tool and since it leads so many astray, we should reject the very idea of moral comparison entirely.
But, we can say much more about Eudaimonism and we must to really understand why good is not comparative, especially because it is not a common moral framework today. As we have just said, the goal of eudaimonism is the flourishing, in a rich sense, of an individual. This means that something is “good” to the extent that it contributes to a person’s living well and “evil” to the extent that it hinders or harms this. This kind of ethics is not imposed on us by outside. Rather, the only force it has over us comes from our choice to live (whether we make this choice explicitly or implicitly). This makes Eudaimonism what philosophy calls a “hypothetical” system of ethics. All this means is that the only binding power it has over us is conditional on our choice to live.
Since we are humans and the lives we live are human lives (i.e., not dog lives or tree lives), our human nature (and the nature of reality) will set constraints on what it means to live a flourishing life. That is, what it means to flourish will have to take into account the reality of physical and psychological nature, the means of our survival as humans (that is, reason), and the nature of the world in which we live. This will set the general constraints on what it means for a human in general to flourish. Of course, we are all more than “humans in general” and so ethics will need to be also be sensitive to our unique constitutions and values. This is a radically different conception of ethics than what most people think of when they hear “ethics” and think of religious prohibitions against this or that.
The goal of eudaimonism is to flourish and live a good human life, not to be “better than” others. For a eudaimonist, what it means to be a “good person” is to have a good character, including having cultivated the virtues, so that we tend to make the right choices and so we cultivate flourishing lives. But judgemental ethics has snuck in a different conception of “good person” that we must briefly dispel. The philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe argues[1] that in judgmental ethics (especially based in the mysticism of a “god”), the judge as a moral lawgiver gives rise to the idea of an in toto judgement of a person; that is, of a completely good person or completely bad person. In this judgmental, being a “good person” is an absolute verdict (like being “innocent” in court). But in real life, no humans are totally good or totally bad. Rather, some of us are living well and some of us are living poorly, but no one is living well without mistake or so poorly as to have no good qualities. This makes the very phrases “good person” and “bad person” worse than useless: they not only don’t match reality, they obscure it. In contrast, in eudaimonism, we talk about a person as living well or not in general and of being honest or dishonest, for example, with respect to the particular virtues. For this reason, we should discard the very idea of “good person” or “bad person” as illegitimate arising from a false conception of ethics.
Now, of course, you might reasonably say that we are social animals and that hierarchy is something natural for us. It is true that we are social animals, but the argument that something is good for us just because it’s natural is called the “naturalistic fallacy.” And this is easy to see: arsenic is natural and deadly. Or, some people argue that rape may be a natural strategy to propagate genes far and wide with no paternal costs, but most of us can clearly see that even if this is true and rape is natural, it wouldn’t make it good. Vice-versa: air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and medications are not natural but they are good. So, just because we naturally engage in this hierarchical judgement doesn’t mean it’ll help us live good lives. Indeed, it takes us off the very path to living a flourishing life.
So, where do we go from here? We must abandon these morally comparative judgments if we want to live well as not only psychologically damaging, but philosophically empty and morally destructive. Instead, if we want to live well, we must aim at living a good and flourishing life. A life of virtue, of connections with certain others of our kind, and that aims to maximize our values and bring about a joyful existence.
[1] In “Modern Moral Philosophy”, originally published in the journal Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 124.