watchamadoodle Wrote:What if one human's desires are in conflict with the desires of others (humans, animals, plants)? For example, most people would agree that fulfilling Hitler's desires were not good. I suppose a Christian might argue that Hitler did not understand his true desire to know God and was pursuing the wrong desires.
According to your example, Hitler was simply wrong about what he thought was good. Therefore, any of us can simply be wrong about what we think is good. Welcome to the struggle to live a truly happy and fulfilled human life according to reason.
Quote:I guess I'm a moral relativist. (I'm not sure what emotivist means - even after skimming the definition in Wikipedia.) Good is subjective, but processes like democracy can turn that subjective definition of good into a more objective definition for use in government.
Goodness is certainly subjective, i.e. every human being must judge for themselves between things that are more, or less, good. Does that mean that nothing is actually good? It certainly wouldn't follow logically from those premises. Human experience shows that some things truly ARE good (e.g. a healthy diet actually DOES satisfy hunger and promotes health and growth), while other things truly ARE NOT good (e.g. murdering millions of people for the sake of eugenic idealogy). As many people here have illustrated, you don't really need a supernatural book to enlighten you about the goodness of many things. Also as many people have illustrated here, you don't need PhD to discover that humans frequently get goodness wrong. So that is where we should be left, in a discussion about what is ACTUALLY good for a human being, and how do human beings go about obtaining it?
Quote:Good is a metric we use for choosing our actions (good for me, good for society, good for God, etc.) Sorry that's the best I can do.
That is fine. Do you think it is good for a person to enter into public discussion about what is good for humanity when that person doesn't really know what they mean by "good for humanity"? If yes, then modern political society was made for you. If no, then hopefully you would admit that our society is in a severe crisis without criteria to judge the best ways to improve.