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This book provides an ethical framework for understanding the good and how we can experience it in increasing measure. In Part 1, Kevin Kinghorn offers a formal analysis of the meaning of the term "good," the nature of goodness, and why we are motivated to pursue it. Setting this analysis within a larger ethical framework, Kinghorn proposes a way of understanding where noninstrumental value lies, the source of normativity, and the relationship between the good and the right. Kinghorn defends a welfarist conception of the good along with the view that mental states alone directly affect a person's well-being. He endorses a Humean account of motivation—in which desires alone motivate us, not moral beliefs—to explain the source of the normative pressure we feel to do the good and the right. Turning to the place of objectivity within ethics, he concludes that the concept of "objective wrongness" is a misguided one, although a robust account of "objective goodness" is still possible. In Part 2, Kinghorn shifts to a substantive, Christian account of what the good life consists in as well as how we can achieve it. Hume's emphasis of desire over reason is not challenged but rather endorsed as a way of understanding both the human capacity for choice and the means by which God prompts us to pursue relationships of benevolence, in which our ultimate flourishing consists.
"Kevin Kinghorn's A Framework for the Good sets out and defends in detail a formal meta-ethical position concerning the relationship between the good and the right. It also offers a substantive account of what behaviors will contribute to our good, hence how to discern right from wrong, and describes how Christian theism fills in this account." —Religious Studies Review
Kevin Kinghorn is professor of philosophy and religion at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is author of The Decision of Faith: Can Christian Beliefs Be Freely Chosen?
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1.Placing the Good within an Ethical Framework
1.The Meaning of Good
1.1 Our Pro-attitude toward the Good
1.2 Flourishing and the Good
1.3 Instrumental Goodness
1.4 Noninstrumental Goodness
1.5 The Morally Good
1.6 Closing Moore’s Open Question
1.7 The Place of Semantic Analysis
2.The Nature of the Good
2.1 Hedonism
2.2 The Inadequate Alternative of Desire Satisfaction
2.3 L. W. Sumner
2.4 Nozick’s Experience Machine
2.5 The Badness of Death
2.6 Is Schadenfreude a Special Problem?
3.Motivations, the Good, and the Right
3.1 Sticking to Humean Guns
3.2 The Source of Normative Force
3.3 The Concepts “Right” and “Wrong”
3.4 Moral Facts and the Place of Objectivity
Part 2. A Christian Framework for Choosing the Good Life four Others and the Good
4. Others and the Good
4.1 Perfectionism
4.2 The Mental Experience of “Connecting”
4.3 Are Relationships the Key to Our Well-Being?
4.4 Making Others’ Interests Our Own
4.5 Divine Coordination
4.6 Establishing Relationships
5. God, the Good, and Our Choices
5.1 The Place of Self-Interested Desires
5.2 Can We Desire Relationships?
5.3 Self-Directed Reasons for Benevolence
5.4 God’s Invitation to Pursue the Good
5.5 Freedom in Choosing the Good
5.6 The Final Dichotomy of Benevolent and Self-Interested Ends six Feeling Our Way toward the Good
6. Feeling Our Way toward the Good
6.1 The Positive Feeling Tones of Benevolence
6.2 “Morally Significant” Decisions
6.3 Feeling Tones as Our Indication of the Good
6.4 Some Theological Connections
Notes
Works Cited
Index