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There Can Be No Good by baerdric

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philosophy · @baerdric ·
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There Can Be No Good
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 <center> <h2> There can be no good</h2> </center>
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 <img src="http://www.steemimg.com/images/2016/11/28/Thomas_Hobbesabbea.jpg" >
<center>Thomas Hobbes</center><hr>
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<b>In most conversations on Ethics and Morals</b> the question often hovers around a concept that bears definition - the good. Good for a man, good for society, good for the world, good for God, at some point most philosophers try to suggest that their tenets are intended to produce good. Thomas Hobbes says that it is every man’s goal to produce good for himself _(Hobbes 132)_. The goal then is to define it and put our hand on it to be sure we have it and can keep it. <p>

<b>Unfortunately</b>, I don’t believe we can define it and experience shows we cannot take it or keep it.  Below I attempt to find examples of unalloyed, pure, essential good. Against my own desires, I have to admit to failure. Since there is no definition of good that bears close examination, I propose that it does not exist and that when we think we have it, we are mistaking other things for it. Things which often seem good, but are not good, in and of themselves.<p>

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 <img src="http://www.steemimg.com/images/2016/11/28/John_Stuart_Mill_by_London_Stereoscopic_Company_c187070f99.jpg" ><center>John Stuart Mill</center><hr>
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<b>John Mill attempts to define good</b> and admits to the difficulty when he shows that there is little proof that various individual things, such as medicine, health, are or even pleasure, are good in and of themselves _(Mill 4)_. What we can define is rather more limited and is easily confused with good, even though it is equally mistaken for bad. Happiness is often thought of as good, and some few philosophers have rightfully replaced happiness in their ethics for the good they could not define. <p>

<b>Plato goes so far</b> as to divide good into three categories, good that is good in itself, good that is good in its results, and good that is good in itself and in its results _(The Republic 3)_. In this he anticipates the Deontologist and the Utilitarians and even combines their effects for good measure. <p>

<b>But I am not happy</b> with definitions such as “good that is good”. Many philosophers try to define good as that which is beneficial to one or to the group, without daring to describe what things are actually good for those entities. Some admit that defining good is naturally error prone but stop at that point as if it were sufficient. In point of fact, to my knowledge, there is no definitive view of good that can be tested against any set of cases and be found to hold true. Good is at best an emergent property of other, more concrete qualities. Again, it seems to be an illusion created by the addition of or subtraction of other things which we can actually define.<p>

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 <img src="http://www.steemimg.com/images/2016/11/28/Yin_yang.svgf31ff.png" ><center>Yin Yang</center><hr>
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<b>I disagree</b> with Americanized ideas about Yin and Yang. In the East, Yin and Yang are separate properties, neither good nor bad in themselves but good when balanced, bad when out of balance. In the West, it has often been misinterpreted as, “You can’t have good without bad, you can’t have light without dark”. To me there is no light and dark, there is light, lesser and greater. Even in the darkest cave, there is either a tiny bit of light, or no light. You can’t have negative light. There are not handheld battery powered flashdarks you can turn on and shine a ray of darkness into a lit room.  In those things which we understand well, there is either an absence of it, or a quantity of it, and never a negative amount of it. We cannot have a negative amount of light any more than we can have a negative amount of apples. In any situation that seems to have polarities, positive and negative attributes, we find that we can separate out the qualities and define them by absence or presence of one or more qualities. <p>
<div class="pull-right">
 <img src="http://www.steemimg.com/images/2016/11/28/Atom_PSFcc7a7.png" ><center>Atom</center><hr>
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<b>Even in such fundamental things</b> as positive and negative electrical charges, we find that what we really have is either an increase in electrons making a negative charge, or an increase of protons giving us a positive charge. Without the electrons, with only protons, we see only a positive charge, and as we subtract protons we get less positive charge, then even less, then none. At that point we cannot remove any more protons but we still do not have a negative charge. We must add electrons to get a negative charge. The seeming negative is simply an increase in another type of substance or energy. <p>

<b>In this way</b> I assert that either there is good, or there is bad, or there is both good and bad, but they are not opposites, just greater and lesser quantities of different qualities. In my experience, you can remove bad until there is no bad left and declare that you have good. I am not hungry, I have sexual partners, I am undisturbed in my rest, things are good. I am forced to admit that good is the illusion created when bad slips under a certain threshold, in the way that we say a room is dark when we have turned down the light to a certain level. If good did exist, we could remove good until there is no good left and say that it is therefore bad. Instead, normally, we must add bad. For good to exist, it must be a substance, quality or energy in and of itself. You must be able to add good to a system and see it increase. To do that, you must define good and be able to lay your hand upon it somehow. <p>

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 <img src="http://www.steemimg.com/images/2016/11/29/Diogenes18ded.png" ><center>Diogenes</center><hr>
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<b>Let's try to find some good</b>. For some, the excitement of accomplishment is good. But I say it is the excitement of accomplishment. A thing is what it is, not something else. Some say sexual enjoyment is good, or profitable commerce, or increased physical strength. Those are all things in themselves and not something else, not intrinsically good. We know this because, for instance, the sexual enjoyment of a child molestor is not generally considered good. It is sexual enjoyment, but it is not good. We think it is not good because it causes harm to someone else for the enjoyment of another. We can clearly define bad as harming someone else for the enjoyment of another. Molesting a child adds bad, increases the bad, but the sexual enjoyment does not increase the good. <p>

<b>The typical example</b> of this is the man who wins the lottery. Sounds good on the face of it but as we know, the story cannot end there. His father-in-law wants some of the loot and makes trouble for him with his wife. He starts to drink the expensive alcohol and gets addicted. Young women find ways to get large amounts of his money from him and lawsuits take the rest, less than a year later he is found in a dumpster. Of course it doesn’t always happen this way, but it happens enough that it has become a trope in our civilization which is easily recognized. If it happens once, it’s enough to show that winning the lottery, is winning the lottery, and not intrinsic good.<p>

<b>I have tried</b>, in my tedious way, to find things which are unalloyed good in all cases and I cannot. I can easily find things that are actually bad in every measurable way, in that they cause nothing but harm to one person for nothing more than the pleasure of another. So it appears to me that while bad exists and is synonymous with that kind of harm, Good, like the darkness of a dimly lit room, is just an illusion. <p>

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 <img src="http://www.steemimg.com/images/2016/11/29/hqdefault63075.jpg" ><center>From the center, upward</center><hr>
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<b>One might say</b> that the actions which decrease the amount of bad in the world are good, but this is like defining down as ‘moving away from up’. One of the terms is meaningful only in relation to the other, while the other term has meaning by itself and a quality it defines. The former term is a phantom, devoid of a referent for its existence. Because the amount of 'down' can never reach zero (since we can go up as long as we want without reaching zero amount down), it makes more sense to use the amount of 'up' as a referent. Up has a lower limit at the bottom of every gravity well. When you get there, you are zero up. This means that some amount of 'up' existed to be brought to zero, but that 'down' never really existed at all. In the same way, since we can easily refrain from harming one person for the pleasure of another, bringing the amount of bad to zero, and since as long as we live there can not be zero good, then bad is the term which has a referent and good is the phantom.<p>

<b>Some might try</b> to improve upon the conditions of nature to produce good. In this I am reminded of my son’s gymnastics lessons when he was a small child. The assistant instructor wanted to improve his stance on the balance beam, so she would walk beside him reaching out to touch him occasionally, pushing here and pulling there to try to get him in the line she wanted. Each touch further inhibited his action, due to the fear of never knowing when she might push on him again. Within three lessons he was no longer able to walk on the balance beam. Symbolically, every touch was an input of energy to the system, raising some thing from zero to a greater than zero number. In this case, it was imbalance. When balanced, there is no need for energy input. A stone balanced might stand in the desert for ages. Add energy to the system and the only thing you can accomplish is imbalance. In the affairs of humanity, it is rare to find balance. But when found, we usually say it is good. The harvest was on time, no enemies appeared on the hillcrest. Adding energy to that equation must only be to bring bad. Good is the least energy state, bad requires more fiddling around with.<p>

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 <img src="http://www.steemimg.com/images/2016/11/29/8f95af649f9c112c871360cba377fcd333472.jpg" ><center>Balancing Rock</center><hr>
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<b>Others might say</b> that when thrown off balance, sometimes the attempt to recover brings about a higher state of being, a more firm balance, an improvement on the condition of nature - in a word, good. I admit the possibility. What I do not admit is the idea that the only possible way to reach this higher state of balance is to create chaos first. While random thrashing about might create an improved state occasionally (but probably not even half the time), a measured change with foresight and knowledge will bring it about more dependably with less concomitant bad. One method requires massive amounts of energy thrown in at random with a hope that maybe this time it will all work out for the best, the other simply requires finding a way to remove more of the bad imbalance, lowering the system to a more zero state. Further, to actually do this, to improve by throwing off balance first, there has to actually be a higher condition available. <p>

<b>In her Anthropology class</b>, “People and Plants”, Dr. Renée Bonzani (03/09/2015) explains that in ritual plant medicinal magic, there are two main camps. Good magic, which seeks to use plants to restore health, and bad magic, which seeks to make people sick or kill them. I was struck with the various terms she used to describe the good magic. To these ancestral peoples, good was “restored”. Balance was found, humors were relieved, tensions were released, to do good, things were brought back to their natural state. To do bad, poisons were administered, imbalances created, fevers built up and sores erupted. The bad was an active energy which imposed itself on people, the good was finding a way to get those energies out. People who added things to your food while you weren’t looking added bad to your condition. The action of the healer was to remove that bad, extract the toxins, restoring good.<p>

<b>Even in a traditionalist</b>, orthodox, monotheistic, judeo-christian religion, Good seems to be the rest state. God created the world, and just like that, it was good. He didn’t have to keep futzing around with it. In fact, when He did add something to it, by tossing in Lucifer, it made things bad. Later on we find that people are bad when they have demons in them, and when you get the demons out, they become good. We have sin, but when the sin is removed, we are sanctified.<p>

<b>In other religions</b>, strife is to be avoided, karma is to be reduced, desires are to be eliminated, sins are to be avoided. Rituals and sacrifices are made to keep away the bad things, leaving the experience of good in their place. Even the agnostics are content with the lack of ability to know about God.<p>

<b>In science</b>, for an experiment to be good, extraneous variables are excluded, outside influences are shielded, everything but the things sought for is brought to as close to zero as possible. In government, a good law reduces the amount of crime, or recompenses for bad that has happened. A bad law messes with people for no reason, cause trouble where none existed, stirs up things which were at rest. In personal relationships, good is when things are stable, stable marriages, stable jobs. Trouble arises when other things, sexual enjoyment with another person, conflicts with personnel, occurred to disturb the stability.  In every way, good is the experience of less bad, and those things we call good which can be added are, in fact, something else entirely. Things which might be either good or bad depending on their use. <p>

<b>In no way</b> can something be added to a system which does anything but reduce the imbalance to a point at which it is balanced, a zero state, or which adds to the imbalance. When Utilitarians say they want to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people, I say they mean to remove the most amount of bad from the largest number of people. When Deontologists say their precepts are those of Universal good, I say they are concepts which avoid the bad. There are no polarities, nothing is opposite anything except by comparison. Even left and right, north and south, exist by comparison to your present position (actually, magnetism was a disturbing example of polarities until we invented monopole theory). <p>

<b>Either you have something</b> or you have nothing, there are no negative quantities of a real thing. Since bad can be shown to be a real thing, purposeful harm to persons solely for the pleasure of others, and since those things we call good are actually other things with no discrete ethical value of their own, I conclude that Good does not exist. It is an illusion created by simply leaving me the heck alone.<p>
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<center>All images either open source or public domain</center>
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Hobbes, Thomas, and J C. A. Gaskin. Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Mill, John S. Utilitarianism and the 1868 Speech on Capital Punishment. 2nd ed.
Plato. Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html
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vote details (257)
@aaanderson · 
An excellent piece! Your arguments that "The Good" does not line up with anything real are compelling. I wonder if you could flip this argument and say that "The Bad" is equally arbitrary.

The Bad in your examples is linked to pain and suffering. Does this make bad something in itself, or is suffering simply suffering in the same way pleasure is just pleasure? A slippery sloap to nihilism for sure, but one we may have to accept.

btw - I selected your piece for today's #philosophy-review. keep up the *good* posts! https://steemit.com/philosophy/@aaanderson/the-philosophy-review-nov-29-2016
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@baerdric · 
Hi, thanks!

I'll have to check out your review! I don't think the argument can be flipped, but I could be wrong. I was careful to talk about "harm" instead of suffering. Harm is always measurable but suffering is subjective.  Bad is causing harm, and we might experience that as suffering, but suffering also warns us that we are too close to the fire or ate too much chocolate cake.
👍  
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@aaanderson · 
Harm is less subjective than suffering, but still seems a little slippery. Is harm anything that causes physical or psychological pain? If so, doctors are constantly violating their oath in attempts to promote health. 

We could get around harm that leads to overall reduced pain by saying harm is situations that net a positive amount of pain. In that case though, what timeline should we consider?

Maybe harm isn't pain at all, but that seems like the easiest way to measure it.
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@aaanderson · 
Follow up post as promised! https://steemit.com/philosophy/@aaanderson/response-to-baerdric-there-can-be-no-good
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@creatr · 
Thanks for once again getting me thinking... Your post reminded me of this:

[And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.”](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+19%3A17&version=ESV) - Matthew 19:17
👍  
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vote details (1)
@discernente · 
Good is empathy, the respect for others desires the same way you respect yours.
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@baerdric · 
Empathy is empathy. Respect is respect.  If you are saying that good is some combination of those two things (which excludes love from good, or honesty, or fun), then empathy would not be good without respect, and respect would not be good without empathy.  That can't be true. Good, then, might be the lack of disrespect.

In fact, all these things are the rest state of human behavior, they are what we do if nothing stops us. Like water becomes ice if you stop heating it, when bad things stop messing with us, we become "good" by default.  We are not separated from our fellows, we do not show disrespect, we do not lie, we have fun and we love. 

Poor upbringing, abuse, bad childhood experiences, hateful teachings, these things are added to our behavior and change it into a lack of respect. The only way to get respect back is to work at removing those things, and when they are gone, respect and empathy will naturally appear in our foundational self. Balance will be restored, the balance of not having bad added to our system.
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@discernente · 
Empathy gives you the ability to know when you are harming others, when you are doing something against their will
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@kevinwong · 
A nihilist approves this message. Good one :p
How's everything I vouch for usually good, if not the best?
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@baerdric · 
Must be your natural talent!
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@kevinwong · 
Nope..  one only has to add adjectives..
👍  
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@krnel · 
Does humanity exist? Does love? Does the universe? Does truth? Does any universal exist in itself? No. Descriptions referencing reality using definite words allows us to express meaning and enhance understanding of reality through abstracted concepts. Nothing that isn't a thing in itself exists, yet we can still refer to aspects of reality through these words and understand what we are talking about in reality. To say humanity, universe, reality, truth, love or good doesn't exist, is to just point out a literal meaning of things existing in themselves, not a philosophical meaning. Just because something isn't physical in itself doesn't make the meta-physical after-physical aspects of human life non-existent. Color doesn't exist in itself, it's a universal grouping category for colors we do see, green, red, etc. Color still exists.
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@baerdric · 
I agree, and I wasn't saying that good doesn't exist because it is not a physical object, or else I would have to say that bad doesn't exist either. My point is that you can make a scale of bad, from zero bad to infinite bad, but you can't make the same scale with good. There is no situation that is zero good or any higher number of good, Good seems to be simply the absence of Bad.
properties (22)
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@krnel · 
Sorry then hehe. I agree, it's a scale, but for both. You even admit so in your own words. Follow through with me. You make the case for dualities requiring comparison. Indeed, for comparison to work, you need two things, hence why it's called a duality. The scale does not work any other way. More of one, is less than the other, no matter which way you go on the scale. 

One side is the "polar", "absolute", "infinite", "pure" good and the other the same for evil. These are ideal extremes that can never be attained. They are direction to head towards on a path. More in one, less in the other, vice versa. 

To argue one alone exists, and the other does not, can be made for the side of good as well, and more strongly. Darkness is simply nothing. What 'is', is light, the something. That is what exists. Darkness therefore, is the absence of light. Cold, is the absence of heat. Evil, is the absence of good. The case for good being what actually exists, is stronger and is more of a directly referenced analogous reality, if one wants to make that case.
properties (22)
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@linkback-bot-v0 · 
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properties (22)
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@tanemahuta · 
Nice article
properties (22)
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@baerdric · 
Thanks!
👍  
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vote details (1)
@technovedanta · (edited)
Excellent article. Transcending duality and be "jenseits von Gut und Böse"! And resteemed ,)
👍  
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