From Plato's Form of the Good and Plotinus' One to Bentham's pleasure, Moore's indefinable quality, and Murdoch's sovereign Good — the highest of concepts examined.
What is goodness itself — a transcendent source, pleasure, the will of God, or an indefinable simple quality?
Everything, said Aristotle, aims at some good — but what is the Good at which all aiming finally points? Plato set it above being itself, the sun of the intelligible world; Plotinus identified it with the One from which all things overflow; Augustine and Aquinas made it God, in whom being and goodness coincide. The moderns pulled it back to earth: Bentham reduced good to pleasure, Kant located it in the good will alone, and G. E. Moore insisted it is a simple, indefinable quality that any naturalistic definition commits a 'fallacy' to explain away. Nietzsche asked instead about the value of our values, while Murdoch and Levinas tried to recover the Good as something sovereign, prior to us, calling us out of ourselves. To ask what the Good is remains the most demanding question ethics can pose.
Ancient Greek (Academy)
The Good is the highest Form, 'beyond being' in dignity and power, the source that makes all other Forms knowable and gives them their reality — as the sun makes things visible and lets them grow. It is the ultimate object of knowledge and the goal of the philosopher's ascent out of the cave. To know the Good is to be transformed by it, for it is the ground of both truth and value.
Republic, Books VI–VII (the Sun, Line, and Cave).
Ancient Greek (Peripatetic)
There is no single Form of the Good; 'good' is said in as many ways as being, differing across the categories. The good for a thing is the end at which its nature aims, and the human good is eudaimonia — activity of the soul in accordance with virtue over a complete life. He rejects Plato's transcendent Good as useless for action, since ethics needs the good achievable by us.
Nicomachean Ethics, Book I.
Neoplatonism
The Good is the One, the utterly simple first principle beyond intellect and being, from which all reality emanates like light from a source without diminishing it. All things desire the Good and strive to return to it; evil is nothing positive but the privation and darkness at the farthest reach from the One. The soul finds fulfilment only in mystical union with this transcendent source.
The Enneads.
Christian (Patristic)
God is the supreme, unchangeable Good, and every created thing is good insofar as it has being from him. Evil is therefore no substance but a privation of good, a turning of the will away from higher goods to lower ones. Our restless heart seeks the Good in scattered things until it rests in God, the one Good that satisfies without being consumed.
Confessions; The City of God; Enchiridion.
Islamic theology (Ash'ari) / Sufism
The good is fixed by the will and command of God, not by an order of value independent of him; what God commands is good because he commands it. True human good lies in knowing and loving God, and the heart is purified through worship and the discipline of the Sufi path. Reason and revelation together direct the soul to its ultimate felicity in the vision of God.
The Revival of the Religious Sciences; Deliverance from Error.
Scholasticism
Goodness and being are convertible: to be is to be good, and a thing is good to the degree it fully realizes its nature. Everything acts for an end and so seeks the good, and all finite goods are participations in God, who is goodness itself and the last end of all desire. The Good is what all things seek, and its perfect instance is the divine.
Summa Theologiae, I, q. 5; I–II, qq. 1–5.
Confucianism
The good is not an abstract metaphysical principle but the way (dao) of humane conduct, embodied in the exemplary person and the harmonious society. It is realized concretely through benevolence, ritual, and the reciprocity of the golden rule — 'do not impose on others what you do not desire yourself.' Goodness is a practical, relational achievement rather than a theoretical object.
The Analects.
Utilitarianism
The good is pleasure and the absence of pain — the two sovereign masters under which nature has placed mankind. The rightness of any action is measured by its tendency to increase the sum of happiness, each person counting for one and none for more than one. Good is thus fully reducible to quantities of pleasure, in principle open to a 'felicific calculus'.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789).
German idealism / critical philosophy
Nothing can be conceived as good without qualification except a good will; talents, wealth, and even happiness can be put to evil use. The good will is good not through what it achieves but through its willing of duty for its own sake. The 'highest good' unites virtue with a proportionate happiness, an ideal whose possibility requires the postulates of freedom, God, and immortality.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason.
Analytic philosophy
Good is a simple, non-natural, indefinable property, like 'yellow', known only by intuition. To define it in terms of any natural property — pleasure, desire, evolutionary fitness — commits the 'naturalistic fallacy', since of any such property one can always sensibly ask 'but is it good?'. What has value is intrinsic goodness, and the greatest goods are the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beauty.
Principia Ethica (1903).
Genealogical critique
The very opposition of 'good and evil' is a historical invention we must question: what is the value of these values, and whose interests do they serve? An original noble sense of 'good' meant strong, healthy, life-affirming, until the resentment of the weak reinterpreted it as 'evil' and enthroned meekness. The task is a transvaluation of values, creating goods that enhance life rather than deny it.
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887); Beyond Good and Evil (1886).
Moral philosophy / Platonism
The Good is a transcendent, magnetic reality, a modern heir to Plato's Form, which draws the self out of its egoistic fantasy toward a just and loving perception of what is real. Morality is chiefly a matter of 'attention' — the patient, unselfish looking that lets us see others truly. Great art and the discipline of unselfing are exercises in this vision of the Good, which is sovereign precisely because it is unattainable and endlessly demanding.
The Sovereignty of Good (1970).
Phenomenology / ethics as first philosophy
The Good is not a value I posit but a claim laid on me from beyond being, encountered in the face of the Other whose vulnerability commands 'thou shalt not kill'. Goodness precedes freedom: I am responsible for the Other before I choose, and this infinite responsibility is 'ethics as first philosophy'. The Good is thus otherwise than being, prior to and higher than any theory of it.
Totality and Infinity (1961); Otherwise than Being (1974).