Good and Bad, aka Theory of Contextual Good

What is good and what is bad? A question as old as humanity, something we always have problems trying to have an agreement on. What is the essence of good and bad?

If somebody asks you what is a fruit, you don’t give an exhaustive list of all fruits, you give a framework for it. As Oxford dictionary defines, “The part of a plant that consists of one or more seeds and flesh, can be eaten as food and usually tastes sweet”. Does it help to identify everything though? When we get into edge cases, we start having trouble. There are fruits that people are not able to come to an agreement on. Is it a fruit? Is it a vegetable?

In this article, since our object is philosophy, we will try to come up with a framework to define what is good and bad, and leave how to identify the instances to the reader.

Let’s try something new, instead of seeking the reality only by trying to construct things from scratch, let’s also use the language constructs to see what actually we mean day by day. Maybe everybody is a philosopher thanks to the languages that we developed, but nobody realizes?

Just a side note, we should not try to redefine known fundamentals of human knowledge with the framework. If we are getting out of commonly known rules, either we are using the framework in the wrong way, or the framework has flaws. We need to use the common known and accepted rules as a sanity check. As an example, killing somebody is bad. If you end up with Social Darwinism, we have a problem.

First let’s think why we would need such a thing as good and bad.

As we are intelligent beings, and we are processing incredible amount of information daily, we need to summarize what is going on by compressing the data we are getting using our senses. We say “I had a good day”, “I had a bad day”, then get into details if needed. We don’t tell name of everybody that we have seen that day, we just say “I took care of lots of customers”, or just say “It was a busy day”.

The level of summarization depends on how much information needs to be kept in our memory, or needs to be communicated to another person. Sometimes we keep the summary and all details, sometimes we keep only the summary.

The allegory of cave of Plato, despite designed for talking about something else, is a good start for us to discuss to dive into the manner. In allegory of cave of Plato, some men are tied up in a cave. There is a light source behind them and they are only allowed to see the shadows of themselves on the wall. They live all their lives, just staring at the wall and shadows. They know nothing about colors, their bodies, the life outside. After some time, one of them is released. He gets to know the cave, then outside, sees trees, and the life outside. When he returns back to the cave he can’t convince the others.

Let’s forget about the rest and just focus on the part of the shadows, and think the prisoner is never released. Our ability of perceiving what is happening around is limited with the shadows that we see on the wall. Seeing the shadows, we classify events.

• There are 3 people around me
• We talk time to time
• I hear a voice, most probably somebody is approaching us to bring food

Seeing only the shadows, you could even end up thinking, your body is a shadow on the wall.

All the information that we could have is a very small subset of the information that we would normally have if we were not imprisoned in the cave, having eyes fixed on the wall. And that would be all our reality.

Wittgenstein uses this on the language itself with his “picture theory of language”, claiming language is a shadow of the real world, and validity of a statement is measured by its correspondence to the real world.

In this sense, everything we say is a shadow of the reality, and every sentence is a good enough correlating subset of what actually happens around us.

This is why we will try to use the language constructs to see what actually we mean day by day.

So if we are talking about taking a picture of everything and summarizing them, wouldn’t it make sense to have a powerful construct that just categorizes everything into two?

We categorize everything around us with different adjectives. High-low, big-small, cheap-expensive etc. All of these adjectives are dividing certain objects into two groups. You can divide people into two regarding their height, you can divide companies into two regarding their size, you can divide clothes into two depending on their price. But you wouldn’t be able to divide ideas into two depending on their height, because they don’t have such a property. Could we have two categories that can divide every kind of object types into two groups?

That’s where good and bad comes into the play.

But first, we need to understand a lower construct of the life.

As any intelligent being, in life, we make choices and take actions. All these choices and actions are towards lots of different expectations. We can group intelligent behaviors as “Decisions that make us be capable of having more various and sustainable ways of interaction with our surroundings, in each sequential step”.

We learn, get a job, have a family, have friends, everything is done towards having what we mentioned in previous paragraph.

In every step that we need to make a choice, we need to group the objects into two to make decisions, and communicate them easier. The ones that are letting us have our objectives (good), the ones that are preventing us from having our objectives (bad).

• Graduating from the college is good for me in the long run
• Having friends are good for me in the long run

Interesting, we have that “for” part. It looks like a context. What kind of parameters does it get?

• Being respected is good for me
• Respecting other members is good for our community
• Respecting everyone is good for humanity

Looks like we have a scale for goodness, as in the meaning of amount of people. But well, we could also include animals?

• Low carbon emission is good for the ecosystem

You got the idea, go as far as you can.

Let’s talk about respect. In the first line we said “Being respected is good for me”. We could go utilitarian in a positive way and say that if we don’t respect the other people we won’t be respected, therefore we also need to root for good of the society for selfish reasons also right? Well, there could be people that would silently disagree with this.

The real “good” as we defined, is the good that is in the larger scale. As the universal goodness would be the largest one that it can be, in reality for every community it is as large as the people that form the community can go, given the trust levels. It might only cover a small friendship group, it can cover the humanity. As Plato discusses, if we call a good man the person that looks for benefits of his friends, how do we call a man that harms the enemies for the benefit of his friends?

You might be punished by the society, but at the same time promoted by the inner circle. What if the tradeoff is not that bad?

To have selfish reasons for seeking the good in a larger scale, one needs to have the ability to calculate and build trust. If a person doesn’t have the capacity to foresee what the other people will do in different cases and can’t perceive norms, he won’t be able to do good in a larger scale. We identify these as selfish behavior, nepotism, discrimination, et cetera. These are object of ostracism in societies that actually work, and these constructs are so strong that these labels force people to evade them to keep their place in the society, even if they are not able to see the reason.

So generally there is a tension between group of interests and the society as a whole. As the trust between different groups grow, people will seek the good on bigger scale. When there is no trust, things turn into a winner-gets-all game. When there is trust, people will seek how to grow the total wealth instead. Vice versa is also possible. If the “all” is perceived as a fixed amount, then everybody will try to get more of it instead of playing nicely, which will actually shrink it. Stupid, but well, this is what happens.

Therefore, the societies aim should be providing the means of building the trust so that cheating should become a lesser charming option, which is a subject for another article.

Are we finished with the contexts? Well, we are still missing something. As an example, using steroids for body building might be good for you in the short run right?

So, we actually have two context variables for good.

• Using steroids is good for me in the short run
• Not using steroids is good for me in the long run

Our new context variable is the time lapse. We can mark things as good or bad according to the run. This is the reason countries go nuts in the case of conflicts with other countries. Long run and bigger scale is not relevant anymore, because there is no trust.

The long run is very important, to see it needs a good education of foreseeing the future. If voters are interested in a good future, the elected people will put more money into education, infrastructure and good diplomacy, if not, they will pump the money into the hands of people to get more votes in the short run, and run into conflicts.

I will cut it short without investigating it too deeply, given this framework lots of things could be discussed.

So what is the message?

Universal good, defines the things that will supply what a large scale of people expect from life on the long run.

Contextual good, is the good that is bound to the period and the people scale. The better tools of trust the society has, contextual goods will get closer to each other and form universal goods.

To make “the good” a charming thing, we need to build the tools of trust in the human society.