It may be that all pain
has its ultimate uses that nothing is "really" bad, if we take that
to mean that all evil has a necessary existence as a means to a good
otherwise unattainable and worth the cost. But however useful as a
means evil may be, it is nonetheless evil and regrettable. It is not
good qua pain. If the same amount of good could be obtained without
the preliminary evil, it were better to skip it. In short, the existence
of different values in immediate experience is indisputable; we may
call them for convenience intrinsic goodness and badness.
What is extrinsic goodness?
But there is a radically different sense of the words "good" and "bad";
namely, that in which we say that a thing is good FOR this or that.
This is the kind of goodness the THINGS about us have; they are good
for the production of intrinsic goodness (as we are using that phrase),
which is always (so far as we know) something produced in living
organisms. [Footnote: We also occasionally speak of things as being
"good for" something else when that something else is not a good or
a means to a good (see preceding footnote); as, "sunshine is good for
weeds." But as applied to evils, the phrase "good for" more often means
"good to abolish"; as, "hellebore is good for weeds." These usages
illustrate the ambiguity of all our common ethical terms. To consider
them here would be, however, needlessly confusing. The two senses of
the term "good" mentioned in the text are the only senses we need to
bear in mind for the purposes of ethics.
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