Richard Taylor, Good and Evil: A New Direction (Prometheus 1984), p. 134:
Goodness . . . is simply the satisfaction of needs and desires . . . the fulfillment of purposes. The greatest good for any individual can accordingly be nothing but the total satisfaction of his needs, whatever these may be.
There seems to be a tension in this passage, and I want to see if I can bring it into the open.
Taylor plausibly maintains that nothing is good or evil in itself or intrinsically. If a thing is good, it is good only relative to a being who wants, needs, or desires it. If a thing is evil, it is evil only relative to a being who shuns it or is averse to it. In a world in which there are no conative/desiderative beings, nothing is good or evil. This is plausible, is it not? Imagine a world in which there is nothing but inanimate objects and processes, a world in which nothing is alive, willing, striving, wanting, needing, desiring. In such a world nothing would be either good or evil. A sun in a lifeless world goes supernova incinerating a nearby planet. A disaster? Hardly. Just another value-neutral event. But if our sun went supernova, that would be a calamity beyond compare — but only for us and any other caring observers hanging about.
Taylor's point is, first, that sentences of the form 'X is good (evil)' are elliptical for sentences of the form 'X is good for Y.' To say that X is good (evil) but X is not good (evil) for some Y would then be like saying that Tom is married but there is no one to whom Tom is married. Taylor's point, second, is that these axiological predicates can be cashed out in naturalistic terms. Thus,
D1. X is good for Y =df X satisfies Y's actual wants (needs, desires)
D2. X is evil for Y =df X frustrates Y's actual wants (needs, desires).
It is clear that good and evil are not being made relative to what anyone says or opines, but to certain hard facts about the wants, needs, and desires of living beings.
Taylor's view implies that there is no standard of good and evil apart from the actual wants, needs, desires, and aversions of conative/desiderative beings. Goodness consists in satisfaction, evil in frustration. But satisfaction and frustration can exist only if there are indigent beings such as ourselves. It follows that nothing that satisfies a desire or fulfills a need or want can be bad. (p. 126) It also follows that no desire or purpose is either good or evil. (p. 136) For if good and evil emerge only upon the satisfaction or frustration of desires and purposes, then the desires and purposes themselves cannot be either good or evil.
Now if goodness is relational, how can there be talk of the greatest good of an individual? Glance back at the quotation. Taylor tells us that the greatest good for an individual is nothing but the total satisfaction of his needs. Suppose I satisfy all my needs, wants and desires. How can this state of satisfaction be called good if a thing is good only in relation to a needy being? There would have to be a higher-order need or want, a need or want for satisfaction, and the goodness of the first-order satisfaction would have to consist in the satisfaction of this higher-order satisfaction. But this leads to a vicious infinite regress.
Taylor should say about the satisfaction of desire what he says about desire, namely, that it is neither good nor evil. Consider the desire to drink a beer. By Taylor's lights, drinking a beer is intrinsically neither good nor evil. It is good only insofar as it satisfies some desiderative being's desire. Thus the goodness of drinking a beer is nothing other than the satisfaction of the desire to drink beer. The desire itself, however, is neither good nor evil, and the same goes for the satisfaction or frustration of this desire.
My critical point is that Taylor is using 'good' in two senses, one relative, the other absolute, when his own theory entitles him to use only the relative sense. By his theory, a good X is a satisfactory X: one that satisfies some desiderative/indigent being's need, want, desire, for X. But then desire can't be said to be good or evil, as Taylor himself realizes on p. 136. Similarly, the satisfaction of desire cannot be said to be good or evil. Otherwise, the satisfaction of desire would have to be relative to a higher-order desire. Hence Taylor is not entitled to speak of the "greatest good for any individual" as he does in the passage quoted.
I nonetheless take issue with the opening premise
'Goodness . . . is simply the satisfaction of needs and desires..'
'Simply' means that there is no other meaning to 'good' than the good vs. bad of bodily need and desire. This is true for animals, for which the good vs. evil distinction is meaningless. Just ask any lion.
But humanity also has the 'higher dimension' of good vs. evil, whereby there can be sinful desire that it is evil to fulfill. Taylor simply ignores this key distinction, sweeping aside all morality, which is as silly as sweeping aside all mathematics beyond counting from 1 to 7, the limit of what animals can do. How does such absurdity get published?
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