Christine Korsgaard (Harvard University): On Being Good and Being Good-for-Someone

Christine Korsgaard is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Harvard University, and will be presenting the second paper of this Michaelmas Term: "On Being Good and Being Good-for-Someone".

This seminar will take place in Gillis Lecture Theatre, at Balliol College, University of Oxford (Broad St, Oxford OX1 3BJ) at 12:30pm on Thursday 23 October. Please note that the JDG is trialling a new meeting time for its seminars. 

This event is open to anyone. No registration needed, unless you would like to partake in the lunch. Please register so that we can have a good idea of how much food to order.

Pre-reading is desirable and strongly suggested, but not a requirement to attend.

Abstract:

In this paper I reconstruct a debate about the nature of the good that has taken place since the beginning of the twentieth century.  The debate concerns the relationship between three ideas: being good simpliciter (or, as I like to call it, “just plain good”), being good of a kind, and being good for someone.  Each of these ideas has been championed as our most fundamental conception of the good, ontologically speaking: Good-simpliciter by G. E. Moore, Good-of-its-Kind by Peter Geach and Philippa Foot, and Good-for-Someone by John Rawls. I argue that Rawls was right, although for slightly different reasons than he thought. Good-for is ontologically fundamental, and it follows that everything that is good must be good-for-someone.  That implies that goodness is a relation, not a property.  It is possible to add things with a certain property to get more things with that same property, but it is not possible to add relations in that way. Consequentialism, which depends on the idea that goods can be aggregated across the boundaries between individuals, is therefore based on a false conception of the good. 

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