‘Good’ and ‘Good for’: A Reply to Hurka

Abstract

While many insist that if something is good it is good for some person or persons (or perhaps other living beings or, for that matter, conscious immaterial beings, if there be such), others, Thomas Hurka among them, hold that something can be just good, period. Hurka goes even further and recommends the suppression of 'good for' in the name of clear thinking.1 'Good for' can mean what satisfies a person's desires, in which case, Hurka says, it is purely psychological and the normative expression 'good' therefore inappropriate and misleading, making preference-utilitarianism true by verbal fiat. If 'good for' were used with this meaning, then Hurka would be right, for even if all value resides in desire-satisfaction, value cannot be defined as desiresatisfaction. This would be a naturalistic fallacy indeed. So let us, by all means, dispense with this use, if it exists. (I suspect that while 'good for A' is often casually identified with 'what satisfies A's desires', this is rarely seen as an identity of meaning.) Hurka also says that 'good for' is sometimes used to mean what a person believes good and alas he is right. Subjective relativism of value (what I think is good is good, for me) is a very familiar view (cf. whatever I think is true is true, for me), but the comma after the second 'good' is important. This is a case of 'good for-A' rather than 'good-for A'. Still this use of 'good for' is confusing and misleading and eminently worthy of suppression. What is most commonly meant by something's being good for somebody, however, is that it contributes to that person's well-being, that it is a benefit to her or him. This seenis more in accord with another use of 'good for' that Hurka finds in the language, namely, 'the portion of good that falls within a person's own life'. Hurka has no objection to this notion, but he says that if that is what we mean then that is what we should say if we wish to avoid confusion with the other, question-begging uses. But alas this is in conflict with Hurka's own account of what good, construed objectively or impartially, is. For while the notion of 'a good in her life' is teleological-Hurka's example is the knowledge (impersonal good) she actually possesses-the account that Hurka gives of good, whether personal (agentrelative) or impersonal (agent-neutral) is strictly deontic. The fourth use of 'good for' that Hurka finds is one in which it is equivalent to 'good from a point of view' where a thing is good from some particular person's point of view if she ought morally to do it regardless of her present desires or inclinations. (As in the 'good in her life' case, Hurka says that if this is what we mean then this is what we should say.) It is in terms of this notion that Hurka's impersonal good, or good period, is analysed, as follows: something is impersonally good or just plain good if it is