What is "Good" and what is it "good" for?
A jaunt through a non-physical world of pentary values
Imagine this. Mars veers out of its orbit one day, and before anyone can muster the starships to escape, it hits Earth. All life is vaporized other than a few extremophiles hitching rides on satellites.
That’s… bad, right? Like, really bad.
What about the birth of a child—a baby crying in the arms of a doctor carrying them to their mother. New life.
This is good, right? Really good.
I don’t fully agree with either of those statements—that the meteor striking is bad and the birth of a child is good. My problem with them isn’t that good and bad don’t exist, or that those situations are neither good nor bad, but that I believe the statements themselves to be incomplete.
Bad for what? Good for what?
I see questions akin to “Is ___ good or bad?” everywhere, but recently I’ve been wondering what it means for a thing to be good or bad. Here are my (still very much developing) thoughts so far.
THE BASE
The problem of “good” and “bad” is part of a much larger personal philosophy I’m developing, and though I don’t have space to go over it all here, I’ll give you the relevant snippets.
I believe that non-physical qualities do not exist outside our own heads—that a clump of dirt or the sun or my house don’t have some innate, measurable goodness or beauty or truth. That “good” is something we apply onto things like butter over waffles. How I got to this belief is a long and complicated story that I’m still trying to piece together.
But as you can see, it’s extremely relevant to our current discussion.
I specify that they don’t exist outside our own heads because I want to make it clear that I do still think these things exist. I believe in levels of reality, with ideas existing on a level separate from the physical world I sense around me.
Which… to be fair, is a much more complex belief than what I betray here, but I share this because I don’t want this essay to devalue goodness or truth. They may not be tangible, but they are real. They are very important, especially in today’s world. They are things to be clutched to the chest and allowed to burrow in with the heart.
TOOLS
A couple months ago, I found myself considering how tools work.
Consider a task that needs to be done, like hitting a nail into a plank of wood. A tool, paired with how you use it, is either useful or harmful to this process, right? A hammer is very useful for, well, hammering in a nail, while a magnet strong enough to pull nails out of wood is actively harmful.
I think there’s more to this equation. If I take a screw and hit the nail with it, nothing will happen. Despite being a tool, the screw is neither helpful nor harmful—it’s useless. A hammer lying on the floor is unused, and I would argue that truth, by virtue of being intangible, is unusable.
Let me codify this system:
My conception of tools uses a five-way (or pentary) quality system:
Useful: Helps this process.
Harmful: Harms this process.
Useless: It being used neither harms nor helps this process.
Unused: Despite being able to be used on this process, this tool is not being used.
Unusable: There is no possible way you could try to use this thing for this process
ie, you can’t attempt to hammer a nail with the color green
Because I’m a sucker for math, I like to analogize these qualities to numbers:
Useful is 1, Harmful is -1, Useless is 0, Unused is a variable, and Unusable isn’t a number at all.
Yeah, there are more categories I could think of if I tried hard enough, but these are the five most obvious and expansive to me. I believe that many other things follow this sort of script. Some of them stretch the formula a little, but they’re still pentary. Here are a few examples:
Logic and Proofs: True, False, Unproveable, Unproven, and Atruthlike (for things that are not statements, like hammers and the color green)
Aesthetic: Beautiful, Ugly, Flat, Yetcreated (for techniques that either haven’t been tried yet, or for aesthetic things you haven’t seen yet), and Unaesthetic (for things that aren’t on this aesthetic scale, like the concept of a conjunction).
And more—one day I should compose a page on my website for the categories I’ve thought of (so far I’ve also formulated a ternary (three-way) system).
Oh, and of course, there’s good and bad.
SO WHAT IS IT?
I conceive of good and bad as being the 1 and -1 of a pentary set: the set of morality. Here’s the whole set:
Morality (the “process“ being a moral problem/situation, and the “tool” being a solution to this problem). The solution can be:
Good (analogous to Useful / 1)
Bad (analogous to Harmful / -1)
Neutral (analogous to Useless / 0)
Yetmoralled (analogous to Unused / a variable) (something whose moral value is yet to be determined)
Amoral (analogous to Unusable / not a number) (something that simply is not a solution to a moral problem, like the color green)
I would describe “good” as “the effect of a moral tool analogous to ‘useful‘“. This is… not a clean or clear definition. I don’t know if “good” is something I can define, like a “prime word” that other words are made of, but that itself cannot be divided. Aaaaand that’s another essay I’m tiptoeing around.
Since no definition is perfect anyways, allow me to list a few examples.
I believe mutual understanding is good for maintaining the functioning of society.
I believe art is good for enriching life.
I believe love is good for connecting lives.
I believe failure is good for growing as a person.
I believe my sufferings are good for helping me better appreciate the joys.
Of course, these are generalizations. I’ve found that everything is more complicated than it looks, no matter how long you’ve looked at it.
Mars vaporizing all life can be good or bad. Or both. Or neither. Such an event would be bad for the life living on Earth, but if a chunk of Earth-rock hosting extremophiles lands in the sub-surface oceans of Enceladus and seeds life there, then I would consider that good for Enceladus (granted there’s no existing life there being displaced).
Any situation can be framed as good or bad or neither, depending on your point of reference—though I want to be clear that I don’t believe morality is a hopeless mess where goodness is not worth fighting for because anything good can be framed as bad.
COMPLEXITY
I believe there’s an axis of intensity at play here. Much like a hammer is more useful at hammering a nail than a lumpy rock, I would say that the net good that arises from the birth of a child is greater than the net bad (with net neutral not being relevant since there isn’t intensity to neutral (analogous to 0, remember?)).
Do I have a way of going through, well, every single possible scenario and attaching a quantifiable “good” or “bad” value to each? No. It’s all vibes for me when it comes to morality. What feels right. Hormones and brain chemistry and the magic of the soul. I suspect that’s what distinguishes morality from science—that it doesn’t seem there exist clean definitions for anything moral.
Which I suppose is why I tend to buck against those vague statements declaring that “___ is good,“ or “___ is bad.“ They feel too straightforward, too much like saying “1 + 1 = 2“ when multifaceted things like happiness and suffering are far more than numbers to be computed. Even those examples of good I listed not too long ago can be overturned given the right situation.
Art can be bad for enriching my life if it takes the form of empty corporate designs. And don’t get me started on all the ways that suffering can be bad, actually, lol.
The real world is complicated, and there are no rulers with little markers showing how good a thing is.
BUT, just because I may not be comfortable with sweeping statements doesn’t mean I don’t find them useful in many situations. Generality is generally successful at getting one’s broad feelings out into the world. It’s important to get down and hang out with the weeds at times, and most other times, simplicity works much better.
If everyone had to write a whole essay every time they wanted to clarify what they mean when they use the term “good”, the world would churn a whole lot slower.
So, ok. I’ve come back around to (sort of) agreeing with the statement, “The birth of a child is good.“ Funny how that works. In a way, this whole essay serves as a rant explaining why my agreement with that statement is complex—that when I say a phrase like that, I’m leaving a lot out.
“The birth of a child is net good when considering all the situations I can reasonably imagine,“ may sit nicer in my head, but it doesn’t come off the tongue very nicely.
Do with this system as you will. Laugh at the pentaries and the fake (but real) non-physical qualities or use it all for yourself.
I don’t much care as long as whatever you do is overall good when considering all situations :p.
So well written once again Uluscri... I wanted to write something about the supposed "Good" and "Bad" as well, but you summed it up so well I felt as if you took my words before I even spoke it!