There are broadly three different approaches to defining what we mean by ‘good’. First approach is ethical naturalism. Naturalists believe that goodness is something that can be described and defined. In other words, they believed that an ethical statement can be described with a non-ethical one. Aristotle is one of the main naturalists. He believed that you could decide whether something was good by looking at whether they fulfilled their Final Cause. So if you looked at a pen, and you knew what it was meant to do, and it was doing it, then you could say that it was a good pen. An ethical naturalist is one that believes that ‘goof; can be explained in terms of some feature of the world or human life.
Another naturalist, Bentham, decided that you can decide whether things are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ by looking at whether they bring pleasure or pain. Those things that bring pleasure are considered to be ‘good’ and those that bring pain are considered to be ‘bad’. “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.” Bentham also believed that all humans pursue pleasure and seek to avoid plain.
The other approach is ethical non-naturalism. Having this approach you believe that good cannot be defined in terms of looking at something in the world and comparing it to that, like naturalists do. In other words, non-naturalists believe that ethical statements cannot be described by non-ethical ones. G. E. Moore is one of the most well known non-naturalists. Together with David Hume they believed that you cannot define ‘good’ in terms of some more basic fact or idea, and that values were applied to facts, not discovered among them. Ethical non-naturalism does not deny the meaningfulness of ethical statements but points out that they cannot be defined or proven by reference to facts. G. E. Moore also developed the idea of intuitionism and that we all know what good means because we have an intuition which lets us know what is good and what is not. He believed that ‘good’ was the quality that things possessed, but it wasn’t a quality that could be defined, yet it was a quality that we all naturally recognize and understand. He tried to explain his point by comparing it to the famous example of yellow. He said that the colour yellow is something that you cannot simply define or describe without comparing it to something else, yet everyone in the world knows what it is and sees it as the same thing. They may have different names for them, but they all know that it is the colour yellow. He used this example to show that due to our intuitions everyone knows what ‘good’ is without having to know how to define it.
Here both of naturalism and non-naturalism, despite the fact that they have different ideas about how you can and cannot define ‘good’, they both suggest that the ethical language is meaningful. But there are people that believe that ethical language is meaningless especially the Logical Positivists that developed this approach to philosophy in the first half of the twentieth-century. They suggested that the language is non-cognitive (meaningless). They tried to show that ethical language like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is something that people use to express their emotions or wishes. They argued that ethical language was literally meaningless.
In Tractatus 1921, Wittgenstein, who was a logical positivist, argued that the only things that could be said meaningfully were those that could be verified. Anything else might be known by intuition or mysticism, but it could not be described, therefore he argued that there were definite limits to what language could do. His thoughts led to disputes as he suggested that things that could not be known true by definition or those that could not be verified by experience were simply meaningless. This meant that both religious and ethical claims were meaningless, because they were neither a priori nor a posteriori.
A J Ayer also tried to explain what the term ‘good’ and ‘bad’ means. He named his theory emotivism. He believed that ethical language was meaningless, and that saying something was ‘good’ was basically saying that they approved of it, and saying that something was ‘bad’ was saying that they disapproved of it. He believed that there is no factual evidence, because it is based on people’s emotions and personal values.
There is also prescriptivism. R. M. Hare suggested that moral statements were actually doing more that expressing a personal value; they were suggesting that other people, in similar situations, should apply the same value and follow the same course of action. In other words to say that something is right or good is to recommend that other people do it. This theory is called prescriptivism because it prescribes a course of action.
