Theories of Value investigate how people positively and negatively value things and concepts, the reasons they use in making their evaluations, and the scope of a legitimate evaluation across the social world. As a related issue, theories of goodness inquire into what sorts of things are good, and what the word "good" really means in the abstract.

Many people believe that value theory is the most important area of philosophy. All religions and most philosophical movements have been concerned with it to some degree. It can define "good" and "bad" for a community or society. It affects everyone's life - maybe all life on Earth, the way people organize themselves in societies, and even how they think.

Moreover, goodness and value theory affect political economy, which sets relative valuations on factors of production. When governments decide what is good and bad, it affects all manner of policies, such as tax cuts and raises, increased and decreased regulations, the provision and elimination of subsidies, etc.

Descriptive, Meta-Ethical, and Normative fields

Values play an important part in everyday life; everyone has their own set of beliefs about what is and isn't good or valuable. This article also involves the philosophical and academic approach in the fields of ethics and aesthetics, in which these beliefs are not only carefully cataloged and described but rigorously analyzed and judged. These descriptive and normative approaches are usually complementary. For example, tracking the acceptance of slavery across cultures is the work of descriptive ethics, while prescribing that slavery be avoided is normative.

Meta-ethics is the study of the fundamental questions concerning the nature and origins of the good and the just, as opposed to describing how others see the good, or of asserting what is good.

Types of the good

Moral, natural, and economic goods

There is a difference between moral and natural goods. Moral goods are those that have to do with the conduct of persons, usually involving praise or blame. Natural goods, on the other hand, have to do with objects, not persons. For example, to say that "Mary's a morally good person" might have a different sense of good in the sentence "A banana split is good".

Ethics tends to be more interested in moral goods than natural goods, and economics tends to be more interested in the reverse. However, both moral and natural goods are equally interesting to goodness and value theory.

Sometimes, moral and natural goods can conflict. The value of natural "goods" is challenged by such issues as addiction.

The issue of addiction also brings up the distinction between economic and moral goods, where an economic good is whatever stimulates economic growth. For instance, some claim that cigarettes are a "good" in the economic sense, as their production can employ tobacco growers and doctors who treat lung cancer. Many people would agree that cigarette smoking is not morally "good", nor naturally "good", but still recognize that it is economically good.

Intrinsic and instrumental goods

Many people find it useful to distinguish instrumental and intrinsic goods, first discussed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. An instrumental good is worth having as a means towards getting something else that is good (ie, a radio is instrumentally good in order to hear music). And an intrinsically good thing is worth having for itself, even if it doesn't help one get anything else that's good (ie, listening to good music).

But these are not mutually exclusive categories. Some things are both good in themselves, and also good for getting other things that are good. "Understanding science" may be such a good, being both worthwhile in and of itself, and as a means of achieving other goods (ie, producing technology).

Since instrumental goods are always tied to other goods, it may be said (for instance, by deontologists) that the values by which one lives must ultimately be intrinsic. For example, most people pursue the goal of making money so that they can afford what they call "the finer things in life", and since people dedicate their lives to achieving these things, it might be said they hold some kind of intrinsic value. However, some (ie, hedonists) claim that there is only one thing that is an "intrinsic good" -- happiness. And others (ie, skeptics, ethical nihilists) wonder whether there are any intrinsic goods at all.

Contributory, intrinsic, and inherent goods

Another improvement is to distinguish contributory goods. These have the same qualities as the good thing, but need some emergent property of a whole state-of-affairs in order to be good. For example, salt is food on its own, and good as such, but is far better as part of a prepared meal.

Those philosophers that think goods have to create desirable mental states also say that goods are experiences of self-aware beings. These philosophers often distinguish the experience, which thay call an intrinsic good, from the things that seem to cause the experience, which they call "inherent" goods.

Kant: hypothetical and categorical goods

Kant's (1724-1804) thinking influenced moral philosophy. He thought of moral value as a unique and universally identifiable property. He showed that many practical goods are good only in states-of-affairs described by a sentence containing an "if" clause. Further, the "if" clause often described the category in which the judgment was made (Art, science, etc.). Kant described these as "hypothetical goods," and tried to find a "categorical" good that would operate across all categories of judgment.

An influential result of Kant's search was the idea of a good will as being the only good in itself. Famously, this argument was used by Albert Einstein in his writings on the need for humanitarian (rather than military) development.

Moreover, Kant saw a good will as acting in accordance with a moral command, the "Categorical Imperative": "Act according to those maxims that you could will to be universal law." From this, and a few other axioms, Kant developed a moral system that would apply to any "praiseworthy person." (See Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, third section, [446]-[447].)

Kantian philosophers believe that any general definition of goodness must define goods that are categorical in the sense that Kant intended.

Yet it can be objected that hypothetical imperatives sometimes outweigh Categorical imperatives, and intrinsic goods can be outweighed by instrumental goods. If so, then it is difficult to see how these categories can aid in making judgments, or provide guidance to life.

Theories of the good

A correct definition of goodness would be valuable because it might allow one to construct a good life or society by reliable processes of deduction, elaboration or prioritisation. One could answer the ancient question, "How then should we live?", among many other important questions.

Meta-ethical foundations

Moral Cognitivism

Moral cognitivists assert that statements of value stand for beliefs that can be categorized as true or false.

One variety of moral cognitivism is moral absolutism, which claims that there is only one true moral framework.

Non-cognitivism

Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethic that asserts that values and the good are merely attitudes, not beliefs which can be logically analyzed in terms of truth and falsity.

Some philosophers considered goodness as a special property that is not empirically verifiable, like 'redness'. For example, G.E. Moore blamed the sense that morality was a verifiable thing on what he called the "naturalistic fallacy". He believed that people had a nonphysical intuition that could sense goodness, which was then falsely projected onto things and fallaciously treated as a natural property.

One variety of non-cognitivism is called Emotivism. According to this theory, the expressions of "good" and "bad" are simply expressions of attitudes, akin to booing and cheering. It was thought by emotivists that to call something "wrong", or "good", was either to express disapproval or approval.

Quasi-Absolutism

Gilbert Harman, writing in the tradition of use theory of language, gives an account of the meaning of moral statements that is neither absolutist nor non-cognitive. He offers the notion that moral statements about right, wrong, good, and bad have to do with the hypothetical projection of personal evaluations on the world, yet pretend to be absolute for rhetorical purposes. He calls this account a form of quasi-absolutism. In this manner, these statements can be treated as true or false in the abstract, but are not actual properties of the world. On such grounds, moral deliberation and argument can be pursued fruitfully.

Moral Nihilism

It may, finally, be argued that not only are there no moral absolutes, but that there is no point in discussing morality at all. This perspective is called moral nihilism.

Goodness as a property

One attempt to define goodness describes it as a property of the world. According to this perspective, to talk about a good is to talk about something within the object itself. Plato was one advocate of this view.

Transcendental value

Many people support the idea that God(s) created the universe. Such persons may, therefore, claim that the universe has a purpose and value according to the will of such a creator, and which lies beyond human understanding.

One spiritual, transcendental viewpoint is that of Taoism, the ancient Chinese philosophy which advocated quietism and conformity to the Way, or Tao: "The Tao is the natural order of things. It is a force that flows through every living or sentient object, as well as through the entire universe".

When questions of the nature of value are answered with "God", this is called "Summum bonum".

Decomposition

A common and useful tactic in analyzing "goodness" is trying to divide the concept into smaller, more understandable concepts. It has been thought that if some conception of goodness were divided, or causally regressed far enough, the process would eventually come to a logical stopping place, an "ultimate good."

Many philosophers tried to end the regressions by applying an auxiliary evaluation that puts an end to further decomposition. For example, Aristotle considered "The supreme element of happiness" to be theoretical study, because it "ruled all others." (Nicomachean Ethics, 1177a15) In this case, supremity was the auxiliary evaluation that could be doubted. He also supported the ancient Greek view which said that it was not happiness alone which was intrinsically good; it was, instead, a certain kind of happiness called eudaimonia, which roughly translated means "flourishing" or "well-being." Eudaimonia is more than simply happiness; it is a happy life that is well-lived.

Also, for Aristotle, happiness is a subjective state, while eudaimonia is an objective state, literally meaning something like "having a good spirit."

Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) approached the problem by asserting that everything sensed was an effect, with an earlier cause. Each immediate (proximal) cause was less diluted in goodness, and therefore, the first cause would have to be perfectly good. In this case, the concept of dilution might be doubted as an inaccurate metaphor, or that the dilution necessarily scales back to perfection (maybe the first cause was very good, instead of perfect).

However, since this argument has not been demonstrated, one might doubt whether or not the causal regression ends, let alone whether it still avoids circularity.

Indeed, all known forms of such regressions are open to charges of circularity by skeptics. Attempts to translate, divide or causally analyze the concept of goodness are accused of failing in a particular way. Every attempt seems to end up with one or more subconcepts prefixed with the word "good", or uses related words like "pleasure," "dutiful," "praiseworthy", or "virtuous." To skeptics, such definitions appear circular, and therefore are believed invalid.

Problems with definitions using properties

The traits or properties that would justify calling a thing good are different for different categories of judgment. For example, the criteria by which we judge art to be good are different from those by which we judge people to be good. But it is difficult to see what the common property of all these things are in terms of what actually exists in the world.

Many judgments of goodness translate to prices, and prices tend to have some stability across people. But this appears to be a summary or effect of judgment, not a cause.

Moreover, if it is a property, it is not one that all people necessarily grasp. For instance, a piece of art found in an attic may be sold for the price of a meal. A collector may then recognise it as a lost work of a famous artist, and sell it for more than the price of a house. The price changed because the collector had better judgment than the owner who kept it in an attic.

And still, if goodness were a common trait or property, we should be able to abstract it, but no one has succeeded.

Of course, this belief (like all beliefs) is open to trivial skepticism. Perhaps philosophers just haven't stumbled across the right definition.

One philosopher named Robert S. Hartman claims he has. He maintains that "good" is a second-order property, a quantifier of qualities. For Hartman, to call a thing good is to contend that it posesses all of the qualities that are required in order for it to fit a certain meaning. See Science of Value.

Goodness as evaluative

It is difficult to figure out where an immaterial trait such as "goodness" could reside in the world. A counterproposal is to locate values inside people. Some philosophers go so far as to say that if some state of affairs does not tend to arouse a desirable subjective state in self-aware beings, then it cannot be good.

Shortcomings of evaluative theories

Evaluative theorists may say that to answer the question, "What things are intrinsically good?" we need only answer "What do I or we think is good?"

There are, however, problems with this approach.

Firstly, people can be wrong about what is good for them. For instance, a deranged man may be convinced that stabbing a fork in their eye is a good idea, but discovers otherwise after the fact. Or, more seriously, a child may not see the danger in crossing the road without looking first, but even in her state of ignorance may believe that crossing the road is a good idea.

Secondly, it can be objected that evaluative theories open the door to a total relativity of values, or ethical relativism. This would make it impossible for any moral laws or norms to exist in an absolute sense except through arbitrary and unstable mutual agreements.

Thirdly, on the surface of it, evaluative theories seem to lean toward subjectivism, or the idea that the individual is the judge and arbiter of values. Yet subjectivism does not account for the fact that often people in cultures agree about their values. This has spawned the view of conventionalism, which poses a challenge to subjectivism.

These two theories are at loggerheads, yet any theorist that seeks to explain values and goodness in terms of evaluations must deal with the issues of individualism and collectivism.

Collectivism versus individualism

The questions now at issue are: Is an individual's life intrinsically good, or is it merely instrumentally good? Is an individual's life, well-lived, something that is desirable for its own sake, or is it desirable, ultimately, only as a means to having a happy society?

Some cultures may want to go beyond selfishness by saying that an individual person's flourishing is valuable only as a means to the flourishing of society as a whole. In other words, a single person's life is, ultimately, not important or worthwhile in itself, but is good only as a means to the success of society as a whole. Some elements of Confucianism and Marxism are an example of this, encouraging the view that people ought to conform as individuals to the demands of a peaceful and ordered society.

The terms "values individualism" and "values collectivism" will be used to mark the dispute. Here are some definitions:

• Values individualism is the view that only individual lives are intrinsically valuable; and so they are valuable not merely as a means to the flourishing of society. This view is most allied with species of egoistic ethical philosophies.
• Values collectivism is the view that individual lives are only instrumentally valuable, i.e., good only as a means to, or as an outcome of the flourishing of society; the flourishing of society (whatever this might be) is the only intrinsically good thing. This view is most allied with altruistic ethical philosophies.

The values-ethicist is then faced with the problem of how to choose, and on what basis, between values collectivism and values individualism.

The view that all life has intrinsic value is reminiscent of the philosophy of Hegel(1770-1831). Hegel rejected individualism as expressed for example in both the American and the French revolutions. Individualism, he felt, runs directly contrary to the nature of humanity and reality, since the individual has value and reality only as a part of a greater and unified whole. Humans, for instance, live only as part of a living planet Earth.

One way to resolve the issue is to focus on empathy -- the ability of a being to feel another's pain, which leads to helping behavior. People tend to value the lives of gorillas more than those of mosquitos because the gorilla lives and feels, and it is easier to empathize with them. This idea is carried forward in the ethical relationship view and has given rise to the animal rights movement and parts of the peace movement.

This is compatible with Enlightenment views, expressed e.g. in David Hume's views that the idea of a self with unique identity is illusory, and that morality ultimately comes down to sympathy and fellow feeling for others, or the exercise of approval underlying moral judgements.

Hedonism

Some have defined goodness and that which is intrinsically valuable as the experience of pleasure, and the bad as the experience of pain. This view is called Hedonism, a monistic theory of value. It has two main varieties: simple, and Epicurean.

Simple hedonism is the view that physical pleasure is the ultimate good. However, the ancient philosopher Epicurus used the word 'pleasure' in a more general sense which encompassed a range of states from bliss to contentment to relief. Contrary to popular caricature, he valued pleasures of the mind to bodily pleasures, and advocated moderation as the surest path to happiness.

One of the benefits of tracing good to pleasure and pain is that both things seem to be easily understandable, both in oneself and to an extent in others.

Possible objections to hedonism

There are potential problems with identifying goodness as pleasure.

Some deontological theorists allege that it is strange to say that carrying out one's duty (which they hold is obviously good) has anything to do with pleasure. In reply, Epicureans defend the doctrine of psychological hedonism, responding that all action proceeds from some sense of gratification.

Also, the sense of achievement following completion of one's work is rarely considered pleasure in the physical sense of the word. The Epicurean view of pleasure, however, considers it to be pleasurable.

Necessarily accompanying hedonism is the consideration of consequences. For example, going to a dentist has a small amount of pain now, but avoids more later. However, for the intuitions of many deontologists, consequentialism is strained when considering duty: following the order of a good rule, for example, involves no reflection on consequences at all, but rather involves immediate action. Epicureans reply that carrying out an action is different from recognizing its goodness, and that the latter necessarily involves thinking about pleasure and pain.

Much like the definitions of the good discussed above, situations producing happiness or pleasure are different in different categories of action. What is good in one situation is bad in another. These differences need to be explained.

Furthermore, the conditions and consequences of pleasure, or pain, can seem to be either good or bad, and thus seemingly undermine intuitions about that pleasure or pain. A sadist, for example, may enjoy torturing children, and gain pleasure from it, but surely their action is bad. The hedonist responds by pointing out that the principle holds even in this counterexample: the suffering of the child makes the act bad.

Neither happiness nor pleasure has been conceptually divided in a way that permits deductive choices of real-world alternatives. However, the Epicurean replies, this is an issue for most (if not all) theories of the good.

So imagine that the only intrinsically good things in the world are good pleasures. But this would be a circular account of "good". For, if one were to say that good things are good pleasures, then they would be using the word "good" to define itself.

Alternatively, one might try to find out which pleasures will result in the most other pleasures. Call them "optimal pleasures". Then, one could call optimal pleasures "intrinsically good," and then say: "the only instrinsically good things in the world are good pleasures". That would avoid the circularity problem.

But this, perhaps, is flawed. Imagine a nation of sadists. The public torture of one person in such a nation may produce more pleasure than any other event, since everyone's horrible urges would be satisfied. But many people would say that such an action would be bad. The hedonist might agree that the action is bad because of the avoidable pain of the person suffering, and in spite of the happiness generated by the people. This is seemingly paradoxical. However, the hedonist can continue to hold their position via one of at least two routes: they may weight the avoidance of pain above the pursuit of pleasure, and they may point out that the lives of those who have to live in a sadistic society are a hidden social consequence.

Pragmatism and intrinsic goodness

John Dewey (1859-1952) in his book Theory of Valuation saw goodness as the outcome of "valuation," a continuous balancing of "ends in view." An end in view was said to be an objective potentially adopted, which refined or rejected based on its consistency with other objectives or as a means to objectives already held.

His empirical approach did not accept intrinsic value as an inherent or enduring property of things. He saw it as an illusory product of our continuous valuing activity as purposive beings. When held across only some contexts, Dewey held that goods are only intrinsic to a situation. When across all contexts, goodness is best understood as instrumental, with no contrasting intrinsic goodness.

Dewey's formulation asserts, among others things, that:

• What is good cannot be defined in abstraction from situations and our experience of them.

• There seems to be no enduring thing which can be said to be absolutely good in itself.

• An inductive, empirical based investigation of goodness as the outcome of situations of valuation activity would be a more productive approach.

Some philosophers have criticized theories of the pragmatic sort by distinguishing between "what is" and "what should be." They claim that there is an unsurmountable gap between facts and values, the "fact-value distinction". The clearest proponent of this viewpoint was David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature, who famously questioned the move from statements about facts to statements about what ought to be.

Choice optimization theory

One more recent philosophical idea being passed around is defining Good as "That which increases the quality and quantity of choices available overall."

This maxim might be countered by the phenomenon of opportunity costs observed by social scientists. Opportunity cost is when people who are confronted with a greater number of choices also experience greater dismay at their choices after the fact, because of the missed opportunities.

Conceptual metaphor theorists

Conceptual metaphor theories argue against both subjective and objective conceptions of value and meaning, and focus on the relationships between body and other essential elements of human life. In effect, conceptual metaphor theories treat ethics as an ontology problem and the issue of how to work-out values as a negotiation of these metaphors, not the application of some abstraction or a strict standoff between parties who have no way to understand each other's views.

Objects of the good

The value of plenty and scarcity

Jeremy Bentham's book The Principles of Morals and Legislation prioritized goods by considering pleasure, pain and consequences. This theory had a wide effect on public affairs, up to and including the present day. A similar system was later named Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill. More broadly, utilitarian theories are examples of Consequentialism. All utilitarian theories are based upon the maxim of utility, which states that that which is good is that which provides the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It follows from this principle that that which brings happiness to the greatest number of people, is a good.

By contrast, both in economics and in folk wisdom, the value of a thing seems to rise so long as it is relatively scarce.

The value of fairness

John Rawls' book A Theory of Justice prioritized social arrangements and goods based on their contribution to justice. Rawls defined justice as fairness, especially in distributing social goods, defined fairness in terms of procedures, and attempted to prove that just institutions and lives are good, if rational individuals' goods are considered fairly. Rawls' crucial invention was "the original position," a procedure in which one tries to make objective moral decisions by refusing to let personal facts about oneself enter one's moral calculations.

One problem with both Kant's and Rawls' approach is that they are overly procedural. Procedurally fair processes of the type used by Kant and Rawls may not leave enough room for judgment, and therefore, reduce the totality of goodness. For example, if two people are found to own an orange, the standard fair procedure is to cut it in two, and give half to each. However, if one wants to eat it, while the other wants the rind to flavor a cake, cutting it in two is clearly less good than giving the peel to the baker, and feeding the core to the eater.

Applying procedural fairness to an entire society therefore seems certain to create recognizable inefficiencies, and therefore be unfair, and (by the equivalence of justice with fairness) unjust.

This strikes at the very foundation of Kantian ethics, because it shows that hypothetical goods can be better than categorical goods, and therefore be more desirable, and even more just.

The value of labor

In the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and in its critique by Karl Marx, human labour is seen as the ultimate source of all new economic value. This is an objective theory of value (see value theory which attributes value to real production-costs, and ultimately expenditures of human labour-time (see also law of value. It contrasts with marginal utility theory, which argues that the value of labor depends on subjective preferences by consumers, which may however also be objectively studied.

The economic value of labor may be assessed technically in terms of its use-value or utility or commercially in terms of its exchange-value, price or production cost (see also labour power. But its value may also be socially assessed in terms of its contribution to the wealth and wellbeing of a society.

In non-market societies, labour may be valued primarily in terms of skill, time, and output, as well as moral or social criteria and legal obligations. In market societies, labour is valued economically primarily through the labour market. The price of labour may then be set by supply and demand, by strike action or legislation, or by legal or professional entry-requirements into occupations.

The value of the old and the new

An event is often seen as being of value simply because of its novelty in fashion and art.

By contrast, cultural history and other antiques are sometimes seen as of value in and of themselves. Philosopher-historians Will and Ariel Durant spoke as much with the quote, "As the sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories, so the sanity of the group lies in the continuity of its traditions; in either case a break in the chain invites a neurotic reaction" (The Lessons of History, 72).

Meta-Ethics and Inherent values

Values pluralism and the grading of values

There is a succession of things which can be considered as intrinsically good: from particular events of pleasure, to an individual's happiness, to an individual's eudaimonia, to the flourishing of a society, to the flourishing of an entire ecosystem. So it can be seen that there is a rather difficult problem about the scope of the theory of value.

As a values pluralist, you might say: every item in this succession of items is intrinsically good. The goodness of a particular experience, of an individual's whole life, of society, and of an ecosystem, are all worth having for their own sake, and not merely as a means to something else. So as a values pluralist one might say: "I don't have to decide which of these things is intrinsically good, because they are all intrinsically good".

That position does not seem to be amenable to the choices that people face in life. Sometimes we have a choice, for example, to sacrifice our own pleasure, or happiness, or even our own lives, for the sake of many other people. In these cases two things are weighed: your own individual happiness, and the more general happiness of a lot of other people. And if one concludes that one should sacrifice their own happiness, does that mean that the individual's happiness is of less value, or has no intrinsic value?

An example of a philosophy that faces this problem of scope is existentialism. For an existentialist, being precedes essence, and personal choices are paramount in setting values. It makes little sense to evaluate one action over another: if they are real choices then they are expressions of our being, and of our ultimate freedom. Jean Paul Sartre faced the famous difficulty of being unable to decide whether it was better to stay at home to care for his elderly mother, or to go to war in the defence of his country.

In addition to the problem of scope, there is also the problem of rank-ordering one's values, and whether or not it can be done.

W.D. Ross was an ethical philosopher who coined the notion of prime facie duties, or duties that have some weight on the surface of them. For example, "non-maleficience" and "beneficience". Each duty that he listed can be understood as a value, except in the form of a command with relative weight, and which may be balanced against other considerations.

Some philosophers have suggested that values can be graded on a scale from the most important to least important. This has been called the "Constancy Assumption". By contrast, some (like Dewey) have suggested that values are relative to the context, or situation, that the actor is in.

We are left with unresolved issues: the issue of the relative importance of intrinsic values. If these things are to be ranked in order of importance, how would the ranking go? On what basis should actors choose in cases of conflict? Why is one value better than another?

Values monism and alternatives to hedonism

Monistic theories of value assert that there is exactly one intrinsic good, from which all other goods are instrumental.

The intrinsic goods that have been discussed up to now are pleasure, happiness, eudaimonia and the flourishing of a society or an ecosystem. There is a strong similarity among those four goods: for example, a flourishing individual or organism is almost always much happier than a non-flourishing one.

But any survey of candidates for the intrinsic good would be incomplete without considering goods that are essentially unrelated to pleasure, happiness, etc. The most familiar examples are religious. For example: there is a tradition in Judaism that one should obey God's laws as an end in itself, without fear of punishment or expectation of reward (now or in the afterlife). To obey God's laws might require one to value, e.g., one's neighbor's flourishing, but in that case the neighbor's flourishing is merely an instrumental good.

There are non-religious examples, too, such as the evolutionary ethic of John David Garcia. Garcia believed that humanity will destroy itself if happiness remains the people's ultimate goal and that the only choice of intrinsic good that can be pursued indefinitely without leading to self-destruction is creativity. This warning is not an offhand remark, but rather the central point of Garcia's thirty-year career as writer and public speaker. (It is made for example in the first paragraph of the preface and again in the first paragraph of the introduction of his first book.)

Note that Garcia does not hold that happiness is bad or wrong, just that when forced by circumstances to choose between happiness and creativity, one should choose creativity. Moreover, Garcia recognizes that a certain minimal level of happiness is a prerequisite to being creative: e.g., if one finds that one never takes pleasure in anything, then one has a big problem that will tend to outweigh all other considerations. In this situation, there is no conflict between the goals of increasing happiness and increasing creativity: both goals are increased by solving the big problem, e.g., by pursuing treatment for depression.

Skeptical worries

The entire project of investigating the good is, to some skeptics, worrisome.

For many skeptics, the investigation into the good is not a fruitful quest. The prospect of the investigation being successful, with goodness finally analysed, satisfactorily defined, and universally agreed is unsettling for some people. They assert that perhaps the definition could be used in a totalitarian way, or perhaps the world would lose some of its ambiguity, or there may be a loss of diversity in society and in ways of life. So the fact that some existing choices may be threatened, produces the paradoxical situation that ultimate, incontrovertible knowledge of what is good may to some people not seem good or desirable.

Some skeptics question the rise of literature about the description of ecology as good or bad. Some green ethicists ask what the role of the ecosystem is in terms of values and the good. It seems that goodness, or value, exists within an ecosystem. In that case, values and the people that hold them, seem subordinate to the ecosystem. If this is so, then what kind of being could validly apply the word to an ecosystem as a whole? Who would have the power to assess and judge an ecosystem as good or bad, and by what criteria?

Similar questions can (and have) been made concerning evaluations of deities by theists.

See also: Meta-ethics, Descriptive ethics, Inductive reasoning, Common good, Supreme good

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