The judgment that something is good or bad- or that it is better or worse than something else- is one we make every day, often many times a day. It is implicit in every choice we make. It is expressed every time we appraise anything or estimate its value for us. That is why judgments that attribute good or some degree of goodness to things have come to be called ‘value judgments’.
We see at once a fundamental difference between truth and goodness. We do not usually speak of things as being true or false. In exceptional cases, such as that of counterfeit money, we may think of the counterfeit as false and of the genuine article as true but when we do so, we are using the words “true” and “ false” in a metaphorical sense, borrowing the words from their proper application to the verbal statements we make or the judgments of our mind.
“Good” and “bad,” on the other hand, are the terms we normally apply to the things of this world, not to our thoughts or statements about them. Included among the items we appraise as good or bad are human beings themselves, as well as their intentions and actions, their institutions and productions, and the lives they lead. In every case, it is the object we are considering, not our thought about it that we call good or bad.
Traditional wisdom places the
difference between truth and goodness in the different relationships they
involve. Truth resides in the relation
between the thinking mind and the objects it thinks about. Goodness resides in the relation between
objects of every sort and the state of our desires. Objects are good when they satisfy our
desires.
When we talk about the pursuit of truth, we are regarding truth as an object of desire and, in doing so, we are in effect attributing goodness to truth. Having possession of the truth in some measure is a good of the mind, a good we seek when we pursue the truth. If we seek to overcome ignorance and to avoid error, we regard them as evils to be avoided; and in their place, we desire knowledge, which consists in having some hold the truth about the way things are.
Now let us turn in the opposite direction and ask whether there is any truth in our value judgments- our judgments about things as good or bad. When such judgments are challenged, most people find it difficult to defend them by giving reasons, calculated to persuade other to agree with them. Since individuals obviously differ from one another in their desires, what one person regards as good may not be so regarded by another.
Unless I am lying, my statement that I regard something as good (which is tantamount to saying that I desire it) is a true statement about me, but that would seem to be as far as it goes.
In the skeptics view, the identification of the good with the desirable makes it impossible to avoid the subjectivity of judgments about what is good and bad, relative as they must be to the differing desires of different individuals.
That the good is the desirable and
the desirable is the good cannot be denied.
But we can note a certain duplicity in the
meaning of “desirable.” When we speak of
something as desirable, we may mean, on the other hand, that it is in fact desired and, on the other
hand, that it ought to be desired,
whether or not it is. Certainly, when we
say that something is admirable, we can either be reporting the fact that it is admired or be laying down the
injunction that it ought to be
admired, whether or not it is. The same
duplicity would seem to be present in the meaning of desirable.
How, it is asked, can prescriptive
injunctions be true or false? Have we not
adopted the view that the truth of statements or judgments consists in their
conformity with the ways things are- with the facts that they try to
describe? If a statement is true when it
asserts that that which is, and false when it asserts that which is, is not,
how then can there be truth or falsity in a statement that asserts what ought
or ought not to be?
Even if we possessed all the descriptive truth that is attainable, how could our knowledge of reality, our knowledge of the way things are, lead us to any valid conclusion about what ought to be done or about what ought to be desired?
It was long ago quite correctly pointed out by the skeptical philosopher David Hume that no prescriptive conclusion (in the form of an “ought” statement) can be validly inferred from a set of premises, no matter how complete, that consists solely of descriptive statements about the way things are. Even if we had perfect knowledge of all the properties that enter into the description of an object, we could not infer the goodness of the object or that it ought to be desired.
We are thus confronted with two obstacles, not one. The first is the difficulty raised by the question, How can prescriptive statements be either true or false, if truth consists in the correspondence between what is asserted and the way things are? The second is the objection raised by David Hume, to the effect that truths about matters of fact so not enable us to reach by reasoning a single valid prescriptive conclusion- a true judgment about what ought or ought not to be done or desired.
Unless we can surmount theses difficulties, no prescriptive statement or judgment can be true or false. If we cannot truly say what ought to be desired, then the good is the desirable only in the sense that it appears good to the individual who in fact desires it. Acquiescing in the rejection of the alternative sense of the desirable as that which ought to be desired, we also must give up the notion that some objects only appear to be good and may not be really so.
To refute the skeptical view, which
makes all value judgments subjective and relative to individual desires, we
must be able to show how prescriptive statements can be objectively true. An understanding of truth as including more
that the kind of truth that can be found in descriptive statements thus becomes
the turning point in our attempt to establish a certain measure of objectivity
in our judgments about what is good and bad.
Only through such understanding will we be able to show that some value judgment belong to the sphere of truth, instead of all being relegated to the sphere of taste and thus reduced to matters about which reasonable men should not argue with one another or expect to reach an agreement.