Has any philosopher in the history of mankind ever accurately defined what is "good" and "bad"?

Like I said, they are categorically unworthy on the grounds that they make this claim.

>10 replies
>Still no answer
You guys could hold your autism for your mothers or something

yeah man fuck kant lol

Philosophy does not apply to real life.

It is theoretical.

Like Epicurus or Descartes...?

Are you seriously trying to imply that any philosopher who categories morality is not worth our time? Do you know how many renowned philosophers are realists?

The answer is: ask a better question, fuckface.
Why the hell would you define it. Creating a system for things makes you inflexible and you start to see everything through that system's lens.
Defining gudnbad is an exercise in imbecility.

I'm no philosophy expert but didn't the greeks agreed that everything that made man virtuous is inherently good?

>Complaining about systems
>Expressing himself in words that are inherent axioms

Good if a value judgment, not a fact. Facts are susceptible to acurate definitions, values are not.

That's not to say subjectivism is true. It's just to say definitions are the wrong approach when it comes to morality.

Which is why philosophers like Plato have preferred a dialectical approach to morality, and philosophers like Kant have said it's always something circumstantial that your power of reason must work out for itself.

Dummies have tried straightforward answers. Consider utilitarianism. But the shortcoming of this approach is that it conflates facts and values. Which is not only a logical fallacy, for analytic fags, but also a pre-historical way of thinking, for continental fags.

>I can act snarky and pretend to be smart: the post

Oh hey whaddup Gadamer

At least say something like The fuck are you even on about?
One is a necessity. The systems I am complaining about are not.

Isn't necessary to know what is good and bad?
How do you then know what should be legal and what not? How can you explain that rape is bad? How can you say that killing one person is good or bad? I'm curious about this shit.

>Isn't necessary to know what is good and bad?
You evaluate things as they occur. Unless you're interested in an assembly line. Precedents are blinding.

/t

You haven't answered me.
When things occur, how do you determine if something is good or bad?

You would need to provide an example to examine. I don't know why you keep asking this.

Dude
You go to buy some groceries
All of the sudden a man punches you in the face and kicks you then robs you
What do you do and why?

>What do you do and why?
I don't stop and ask myself whether what he did was good or bad, mostly because I'm not a bungling retard. I also don't ask myself whether or not my deeming a particular zucchini unfit for my cart is good or bad.
Your situation will practically be restrained by the law of the place you inhabit, not but what is good or bad. You need tighter questions.

You aren't answering because you don't know the answer. You just proven why is necessary to know waht is good and bad.
Thank you.
Now can someone please tell me if any philosopher ever defined good or bad and how?

Nobody defined those things because, well, they are no things per se and just perceptions and therefore fleeting and in themselves empty of content.

Aristotle, you fucking twat.

>You aren't answering because you don't know the answer
No kidding I don't have an answer. How can you be this fucking dense?
And no, not by any measure.

Yes, but can't there be some rule of thumb that defines what is good and what is bad?
Like
Good is X Bad is Z
Obviously they would be subjective answers but I want to know if anyone ever came up with something like that.

And what did he say?

Hitler.

For me, this would be bad, but for him it would be good.

Good= survival

Bad= not survival

Exactly. I'm just searching for definitions of philosophers.

MFW that's the first actual answer to my question

The nature of your question is idiotic. Secondly, your phrasing is poor for the result you wanted.
>Has any philosopher defined, or attempted to define, what is good and bad?
Your failure is in the word accurately. The answer to that is no.
For hundreds of attempts, fucking google a list of philosophers who have worked on ethics.

>accurately

What do you mean by that, user

Everyone has raged on the "idiotic" questioning yet no one has answered or made an attempt to correct it. It seems to me that no one on Veeky Forums knows shit about philosophy. So much for the muh greeks meme

What you want is a supersensous thing in-itself that is somehow immutable and eternal and not related and susceptible to change, and there is no such thing.

You must be an unparalleled genius, you're incoherent to the rest of us.
There are many examples of people who have attempted to do what you want. From Aristotle to Kant to fucking Anscombe.
Countless attempts. I don't see how it is my fault you can't type in 'philosophers ethics' into a search engine.

Look, OP, it's not all been rage or incontinence. You ignored
for example.

But here are a few attempts:

John Stuart Mill: X is more good than Y if X provides more utility to a greater number of people. Therefore, the good is utility.

Kant: You should do that which you can at the same time will to be a universal maxim. Therefore the good is the promotion of a cosmopolitan world order where everybody acts with universality in mind.

Socrates: The highest activity of man is contemplation. Therefore the good is questioning, not answering or acting.

And the list goes on.

So OP, what do you mean by an "accurate" definition of the good? Let's start by asking which of these three you like best?

This is Aristotle:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. NE I 1

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else [...], clearly this must be the good and the chief good. NE I 2

Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness [eudaimonia], and identify living well and doing well with being happy; but with regard to what happiness is they differ. NE I 4

[T]he function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle, [...] if this is the case, and we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete. NE I 7

It's not our responsibility to "correct" your question for you

At least try to be accurate.

Mill identifies the good with pleasure and lack of pain. Utility is a function of the pleasure and pain that's caused by an action.

Kant believes that the only thing that we can call good without qualifications is a good will. A good will is a rational will, and this means that it acts because of a rational principle: the categorical imperative.

The standard conception is that for Socrates virtues are a kind of knowledge, which is why he's always trying to define virtues. Saying that he believed that 'questioning is better than answering or acting' is incorrect. He said, if Plato's Apology is accurate, that "the life which is unexamined is not worth living", but this does not imply that the only good thing is to examine one's own life.

take an analogy is food. say a child is hungry; if the child is not so hungry as to eat anything that is given to him, the child will take the tastier food present. let's say broccoli and ice cream. a child, given these two choices would almost certainly rather have the ice cream, thereby making him happy. what's an important distinction is the healthiness of the two foods--the broccoli is good for the child, and the ice cream bad for the child. we can assume that in this case, good means proper nutrition and low calories, broccoli is a proven healthy food. if the child chooses to be happy, he therefore chooses what is bad for him.

yr argument sucks. also, who gives a shit about "you"? we're talking about humanity, not you, the unrepresentative outlier.

political philosophy? jurisprducence? ethics? aesthetics, even? morality and the notions of justice, liberty, and human rights?

>"real life" isn't theoretical

>"good" and "bad"

It decides if you get presents.

Protagoras.

Whatever is good, is whatever makes an individual come closer to "eudamonia" and whatever is bad is whatever makes an individual less likely to do so.

>whatever is bad is whatever makes an individual less likely to do so

This does not explain shitposting.

Fail.

>This does not explain shitposting.

Shitposting is pleasurable for some, and as Aristotle said, you need at least some measure of pleasure in life to reach eudaimonia, just like you need some measure of wealth, honor, respect etc.

Your life just can't be based solely on those things.

Exactly, his ethics are a perfectly internally consistent logical system. . . . with no practical application to reality.

Fuck Kant with a garden rake for wasting his considerable intellect building a scale model fantasy system of ethics for his internal autist world.

>pleasure is good.

Yes pleasure is good, it's just not *as* good as the feeling of well-being and happiness, because pleasure is also associated with deep pain if it is used to a degree that is pathological.

Would you like some blocks to play with?

Why did you make this thread?

Is it not pleasurable?

good is that at which all things aim

So pleasure is good then. Then you should retract this

So good is Will. Which is why we "fire at Will"

The good is undefinable.

- Yours truly, G .E. Moore, the solver of Metaethics

Retract it to please you?

No, because you agree with me.

good and bad are defined by the zeitgeist in which you grew up, there cant be any definition for them because they are learned through propaganda and are learned prolly by individual cases where your parents said lmao dont do this it not good and the rest you prolly induced yourself nor are they objective and anyone who says otherwise is an analytic or just very old back in history

>propaganda

cuckoo alert

Pleasure inhibits your growth.

radical freedom ;^DDDDDDDDDDD

Excellent.

Conversely, so does a complete absence of pleasure.

Those who dwell in perpetual suffering cannot learn or grow because they are in constant pain.

In many ways, for a contented man pleasure occurs simply through the absence of pain.

You can sit a while and appreciate your life, eat and drink, speak with loved ones and not worry, and this is truly the best thing.

Pleasure is not the absence of pain.

Is it not?

I consider the absence of pain to be wholly satisfying.

I look at my life and I breathe in and out and I feel happy because there is no problem.

Everything is going fine.

If you need some real distraction in the form of entertainment, sex, or the like then perhaps your life is unsatisfying, and so you feel the need to reach outside it to bring sensations of goodness and contentedness into yourself from elsewhere?

Do you know the nature of your own poverty?
Did you suspect others were all as you were?

The happy idiot.

Jesus christ newfag pseuds these days

Oooh this is embarassing. Including Mill in a list of philosophers was obviously a joke. OP obviously never read Kant so the phrase "categorical imperative" does not help. And who said the only good thing is to examine ones life for Socrates? No its the *highest* way of life, not the *only* good thing you can do. Sheesh.

Wow it's sad you never read him. Maybe put down the Nietzsche and try going to sources?

>examining one's life is the utmost

Ya'll trolled.

Not always, but I've found that thinking about life and the nature of happiness only makes it more elusive.

Navel-Gazing impedes one's ability to function in life; those who can devote themselves to the here and now are the happiest.

Oprah endorses you.

Listen, if I read every Tractatus and Leviathan and Summa Theologica going I'd not have much time to do things that I'd actually consider worthwhile, so I'll stick with the Sparknotes; but a man who's Categorical Imperative precludes lying under any circumstance, even to prevent a greater misdeed (the classic Axe-Murderer asking you where your family is scenario) is clearly treating morality as a sort of mandate from above that has inherent merit beyond that of preventing harm from occurring to human beings.

Which is a load of pig shit dressed up in flowery rationale, if you'll pardon my expression.

I'm afraid I don't think much of him, nor you for defending him.

People often say the food is delicious, or playing videogames is enjoyable, or having sex is pleasurable, or jogging feels good.
All this could be generalized into "good" in a broad sense. So, good-evil can be summarized to biological triggers of pleasure and biological triggers of pain/disgust etc...
But then you can say something is good for a plant or for the universe. Or you could say that something can trigger pleasure and make you addicted, ultimately destroying your life, that would be bad.
So, maybe a broader entity is necessary instead of biological triggers:

Good and bad/evil is about EXISTENCE and INEXISTENCE.

I hear the Buddhist lessons,
primarily the Eightfold,
of the Right Action, Right Concentration etc..

What's right is what brings you closer to liberation.

What's wrong is what strays and hinders your path to liberation.

>Ctrl+F spook
>no results

a day slow on meme is the path to ru-in.

I don't really get what you guys are looking for. Are you looking some transcendent definition that transcends or precedes us or what? I think these two words mean something only in relation.

Its very important to define what we mean by good and bad. If you were to weigh fruit or vegetables at the supermarket, you'd use an objective, logical system of measurement. Yet when choosing between good and bad, people generally don't use any logical system of measurement. We're capable of being rational, yet we employ a logical system of measurement for differentiating weights, and not for differentiating between good and bad, which is a far more important choice.

>"But most are deceived in the same manner as Theopompus the orator, when he blames Plato for defining everything, " For what," says he, "did none of us, before you, use the words good and /art, or did we utter them as empty sounds, without understanding what each of them meant? " Why, who tells you, Theopompus, that we had not natural ideas and pre-conceptions of each of these? But it is not possible to adapt pre-conceptions to their corre- spondent subjects, without having minutely distinguished them, and examined what is the proper subject to each." - Epictetus

In practice, good is what we perceive to be the most advantageous, and bad what we perceive to be most disadvantageous. Different conceptions of good and bad arise because people have differing opinions as to what their advantage is, and bad occurs when people are mistaken about their advantage.

But how are we to define good and bad in a rational manner, according to a logical system of measurement as rational beings should? We must consider what we mean when we say anything is good or bad, like "this is a good knife" or "this is a bad soap". A good knife cuts well, and a bad soap cleans poorly. Generally speaking then, we call 'good' those things which fulfill their function, or possess a large amount of their definitive quality.

This definition of good is objective, universal and based on reason. To demonstrate this, let's apply it to humans, rather than objects. We must begin by asking, what is the definitive quality of human beings? The rational faculty. Following this logic, a human is good in so far as he is rational, and consequently bad in so far as he is irrational.

Nietzsche made pretty clear distinctions between the separate paradigms of "good and bad" and "good and evil". He continues and describes the tensions and consequences of their existence and interactions with one another. Check out On the genealogy of morals for an in depth exploration of these ideas

By this system of measurement, most of the moral laws we are familiar with follow. Moreover, this system identifies where good and bad exist: In our choices. This is a positive approach, because our choices, and consequently good and bad, are entirely in our own control. This means that good and bad lie only in our own choices. It is not about what happens to you, but how you respond to external events and appearances that matters.

"Why should reason and the rational faculty be the most important measure?" you might ask. "Why is it the definitive quality of a human being?"

The answer is two-fold: Firstly because reason is the primary means by which we experience, comprehend and interact with everything external to us. Secondly because the rational faculty is the only part of us that is capable of comprehending, examining and controlling itself.

i dont agree 100% with Kant, but i think his "The only thing good is a good will, consequences are irrelevant" sounds legitimate to me

Was about to post this.

'Good' and 'Evil' is the wrong dichotomy.

Don't waste your time.

>tfw dualisms

marquis de sade might want to talk with you

That's "pleasure comes with pain."

Fail.

>MFW so many of these definitions make no substantive reference to social life and are essentially meaningless tautologies
>utility
>kant
>übermensch