The Good and the True

Abstract

My target in this paper is a certain dogma about the rationality of wants. The dogma is that the formal conditions for the consistency of wants mirror the formal conditions for the consistency of beliefs. In so far as the relation of wanting to the good is analogous to the relation of believing to the true, this amounts to the doctrine that the 'structure of the good' is analogous to the 'structure of the true'. The good, like the true, can never conflict with itself: hence it is as irrational to want contraries as to believe them. I shall refer to this doctrine as 'the Unity of the Good'. A few impressionistic historical reminders should suffice to show that it has behind it much of our philosophical tradition. In Plato's middle Dialogues, all good things have a single cause and exemplar in the Form of the Good. The connection of the Unity of the good with the unity of the true is attested by Plato's penchant for the doctrine that the virtues are all one, and that the one which they all are, is knowledge. In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, some doubts are expressed about the unity of the Form of the Good, on the ground that 'good' can be predicated in all the categories. One might try to infer from this that Aristotle thought two goods might conflict, where they belong to different categories: but I do not see how to work this out. In any case, Aristotle appears to settle for an architectonic view of the organization of ends, which is another version of the Unity of the Good. Conflicts are seen to be merely apparent as soon as one takes account of the subordination of all ends to the comprehensive political good [NE Io94b.]. Perhaps as a consequence, Aristotle has bequeathed us a smooth way of getting around the most striking class of counterexamples to the unity of the good: I refer to his explanation of Tragedy as springing from the hero's 'tragic flaw'. (A more plausible view of Tragedy is Hegel's, who sees it as a 'collision' of right with right.) In Aristotle, however, there is no logical link between the Unity of the Good and epistemology: though it happens that the Political Good has something to do with securing the peaceful pursuit of