I—Prospects for a Naturalistic Explanation of the Good

In this paper I explore the possibility of explaining why there is such a thing as the good in naturalistic terms. More specifically, I seek an explanation of the fact that some things are good-for human beings and the other animals in the final sense of good: worth aiming at. I trace the existence of the final good to the existence of conscious agents. I propose that the final good for an animal is her own well-functioning as the kind of creature she is, taken as an end of action, and that having this as her final good makes her better at the activity she is necessarily engaged in, namely living. I. The Problem Lately I have been working on a theory of the good which aspires to be, in a certain sense, naturalistic (Korsgaard, 2013; 2014/2015; 2018, chapter 2). The sense of ‘naturalistic’ that I have in mind is explanatory rather than reductive. What I mean is that I am looking for a way to explain why there is such a thing as the good — why some things are good and some are bad, some things are better and some are worse. I seek an explanation that does not appeal to any irreducibly normative facts, and is consistent with a scientific conception of the world, but does not aspire to reduce the good to something else like pleasure or the satisfaction of desire. I accept the sort of argument, associated with G. E. Moore Prospects for a Naturalistic Explanation of the Good Christine M. Korsgaard p. 2 2 (1903) but originally advanced by Richard Price (1758) that says that although such things could turn out in fact to be good, or could even turn out to be ‘The Good,’ we cannot simply identify the concept of the good with any natural property or condition. The concept of the good might apply to pleasure or satisfaction, but it is not the concept of pleasure or satisfaction. For reasons I will explain, the sense of ‘good’ that I take to be most fundamental is what I call the ‘final’ sense of good, in contrast with what I call the ‘evaluative’ or ‘functional’ sense of the good. Speaking roughly, something is evaluatively or functionally good when it has the properties that enable it to serve its function or to serve it well. Something is finally good when it is the sort of thing that is worth having, or aiming at, for its own sake. In this paper, what I have to say will be limited in one important way. Elsewhere I have argued that the notion of something’s being good for someone — that is for some person, animal, or group — is prior to the notion of something’s being good simply or absolutely (Korsgaard, 2013, 2014/2015, section 2). It is prior in the sense that you can construct a conception of what is good absolutely out of a conception of what is good for someone, but not the reverse. If you start with a conception of what is good absolutely, it is impossible to arrive at an intelligible conception of something’s being good for someone, a notion that identifies the ‘forness’ relation in the right way. For purposes of this paper I take that as a given, so 1 In fact I believe that simply identifying the good with some natural property tends to block any effort to explain why it exists. Prospects for a Naturalistic Explanation of the Good Christine M. Korsgaard p. 3 3 the idea I am seeking to explain is that of something’s being good-for someone. So in this paper I will examine the prospects for producing a naturalistic explanation of why there is such a thing as the good, in the sense of what is good-for someone in the final sense of good. In particular, I will explore the prospects of tracing the fact that there is such a thing as the good to the existence of conscious agents, since that is what seems to me to the most hopeful line to explore. II. A Naturalistic Explanation of why there is Functional or Evaluative Good I’m going to start by saying a little about the naturalistic credentials of good in the evaluative or functional sense. Something is good in the evaluative or functional sense when it has the properties that enable it to perform its function well. The notion of ‘function’ I am using here is the notion that I take Aristotle to be using when he speaks of a thing’s ‘ergon.’ In ‘Aristotle’s Function Argument,’ I argued that while for some things it makes sense to identify the ‘ergon’ with the thing’s purpose, for more complex entities what Aristotle has in mind is better captured by thinking about ‘how a thing does what it does,’ its way of doing whatever it characteristically does (Korsgaard 2008, pp. 134-140; especially 138139). One implication of this is that only someone who understands how a thing works really knows what its function is. We all know that a computer serves many purposes: word processing, document storage, providing access to the internet and so on. But it’s the computer scientist who knows how the computer works, and Prospects for a Naturalistic Explanation of the Good Christine M. Korsgaard p. 4 4 therefore how it goes about doing those things, who knows its function. To take another example, anyone might say that the purpose of a heart is to pump blood, but it is the cardiologist, who knows how the heart does that, who knows the function of the heart. This concept of function is what makes it plausible for Aristotle to identify the form of a substance with its function (Metaphysics VII.1