What's good, man?

Without a doubt, taking a stand on “what is good” cannot be encapsulated by any one of the six categories we discussed in class.  Because they all have their merits, choosing just one necessarily excludes major factors of good, so we can only choose what is most important.  The well-being of people is the most important in my opinion because it can mean a society full of happy people.  I believe that the largest contributor to the well-being of the citizenry is the narrative perspective, because people are much more sensitive to changes in conditions than they are to the conditions themselves.  If an average person is dropped into a randomly chosen situation somewhere on Earth, regardless of how shocking the difference might be at first, the person will eventually grow to think of that situation as “normal,” and will achieve a sort of mental homeostasis.  People’s happiness is influenced infinitely more by the changes they experience than their objective circumstances.

This perspective has limitations, however, in that it does not provide a limit for how bad conditions can be, whatever improvement someone makes in their life, if they are living as a slave, it will still not be good.  This also allows for unlimited unfairness, and so is not a perfect representation of good, but is the most influential factor.

Within well-being, the objective list theory is the best of the three.  It allows for many diverse factors to influence the good in a person’s life.  Mental state theory is good, but falls apart if we think of people who enjoy the misery of others being happy, or someone plugged into the matrix who thinks they have great well-being.  Desire satisfaction theory falls apart for the same reason that the narrative theory has so much merit.  People don’t always desire what is actually good for them, and having attained those desires does not make them as happy as making the progress itself.