Does An Act or Endeavor Count As Being Good Because It Brings Pleasure to a Person?

Question

1) An act is good if it brings about pleasure to S.
2) Killing human beings and consuming their fleshy parts brings about pleasure to S.
3) Therefore, killing human beings and consuming their fleshy parts is a good act.

You are mistaken when you argue that just any act can qualify as a good act. I am sure that you do not really believe what you are saying, when all is said and done. Please tell me how raping or murdering a six year old child can be "good" in any sense of the term. If you insist that this act can be "good" (not just considered good), then might I suggest you take a good dose of Plato's Republic and call me in the morning. No act that brings about harm to an innocent human being can ever be just or good. Including "every act" in your scope might just come back and bite you where it hurts. There are some acts that are just wrong or not good. Raping and murdering six year olds is one such act.

Ronin,

I wanted to see what others would say about this question, so I did present it in a simplified form. David Hume inspired this question since he is an emotivist who emphasizes the primacy of sentiments, passions and subjective experience. But Hume obviously thinks that murdering our fellow existents is wrong.

Answer 1

Yes, if you are a hedonist and a moral relativist.

But common sense says that there's more to life than seeking pleasure; otherwise, we'd be fine existing as disembodied brains floating in a vat of nutrients and plugged into a virtual reality world.

Answer 2

Consider "1" and leaning to play baseball well, say, or learning to mountain climb well. Both those pursuits require hard work, and at some point working through the pain that practice brings in trying to play well or climb well. If you avoided the pain and sought only the pleasure then you would avoid practicing or working out in ways that a painfully challenging, and in the end you would fail to play well or climb well.

This is why one cannot use pleasure or pain as a straightforward guide to what is either good or bad. That means that "1" is false, so the conclusion does not follow.

HTH

Charles

[Late Edit]
Hume is an emotivist, true, but what he uses to avoid the obvious selfishness that he might otherwise have to explain is a notion of sympathy. We become sympatheitc to the plights of others so that their wounds wound us, their pangs pang us. It is an altogether interesting position, and fairly descriptive IMHO of the morality actually held by most westerners.

HTH

Charles

Answer 3

John Stuart Mill would say yes. But he would be wrong.

Happiness is certainly a good goal to aim at in any case, but the moral rightness of an act that brings about happiness requires that it also meet certain other criteria, including that it not violate anyone's rights. In your example, the killing of human beings violates the rights of those people, so the fact that this act brings someone happiness is not sufficient to make it morally right. (This would be emphasized by Kant's moral theory, though Kant would give no consideration whatsoever to happiness, and would only be concerned with the part about not violating people's rights.)

Aristotle would say that this is immoral because a virtuous person would not kill others for his own pleasure. He would probably allow that killing is right in some cases or for some reasons, but the pleasure of it would not be one of them. To kill for pleasure is an act that betrays a lack of the virtue "compassion", and is wrong on those grounds.

A relativist would say, of course, that if "S" believes that killing for pleasure is right, then it is right for him/her, even if it is wrong for others (because the same moral rules do not apply to everyone). The relativist theory, however, is self defeating on grounds of contradiction, so I will discount this option:
1. If A believes that murder is right, then A should commit murder.
2. If B believes that murder should be punished by death, then B should punish murderers by death.
3. Therefore, the right actions of B make it impossible for A to go about doing A's right actions (because A would be RIGHTLY killed by B as a consequence of A's right action).

Morality is such a complex issue that it's no surprise that nobody seems to have come up with a moral theory that comprehends all of the related issues in a single theory- each theory highlights one important part of the larger, much more complex picture of what ethics entails. However, I believe that Utilitarianism fails here, not only because I believe that people have natural rights, but because in my example for Relativism, the word "right" could be replaced with "happiness making" and yield the same contradiction.

Answer 4

Obviously there is no universal definition of 'good'. You can whine all you want about 'moral relativism' but the simple fact remains that every act can have multiple interpretations based on the outlook of the specific viewer. What qualifies as 'good'? Is it our intentions? If we INTEND to do good, is the act we peform neccessarily good regardless of what it is? 'Common sense' only covers our own localized culture and community. It does NOT apply to those outside of our own specific worldview.

Thus, there is no 'good', objectively, there is only what seems good to us at the moment.

Answer 5

President Clinton gave a recent speech "The Common Good". In short is the quest of providing for the well-being of humanity. "Good" is extends beyond self. "Good" is an extension of ourselves.

Answer 6

Heh, I was about to refute your "question", but you jumped the gun on me.

Obviously, we can see that the question is too simplistic from your expansion on it.