The Honorable, the Useful, and the Pleasurable: John Buridan on Good and Goodness

Abstract

ABSTRACT Question 11 in Book 2 of John Buridan’s Questions on the Ten Books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, concerns whether the good can be well divided into the honorable, the useful, and the pleasurable. Aristotle, according to Buridan, claims that it can. But should we follow Aristotle in this respect? Buridan argues that we should not. In his view, the good is extensionally equivalent with the honorable, as well as with the useful and the with the pleasurable. But the relevant division is still important for our understanding of goodness, according to Buridan. He proposes a fitting attitude account of goodness. In its most general sense, the good refers to the desirable, that is, to that which is (or would be) a fitting object of desire. However, we can distinguish between three different ways in which things may be desirable: in themselves (in which case they are honorable), as means to some other good (in which case they are useful) and for ourselves (in which case they are pleasurable). On the substantive level, these always coincide. But that arguably does not follow from the more fundamental account of the nature of the good, according to Buridan.