What Defines Good and Bad Vs. Right and Wrong

David Dougherty

Final Paper Rough Draft

Prof. Fosner

4-21-15

What defines good and bad vs. right and wrong?

        I will argue the ethical dilemma of what is good and bad along the lines of right and wrong and meta-ethics.  Ethics must be understood that things are not simply true or false, but like the laws of nature such as gravity, they are more than then suggestions, but rather laws we cannot control that we live by without realizing it, our nature.  As Hospers says, ethics are more ones feelings or attitude towards something or someone, so then I question, whose feeling are we to go by to determine what is right and wrong, or even a general agreement? With this all in mind, this bring me to the capstone of the argument, what role do meta-ethics play in the argument?

        Starting with meta-ethics to set the perspective of the argument into place, I say that meta-ethics are required to understand the ethical properties, statements, attitudes and judgments.  For the purpose of the argument of ethical properties, I will group humans in the same category as all animals in the animal kingdom for the reasons that everything I will evaluate on this level are the meta-ethics that we really possess, and everything past this are just learned habits of becoming civilized and what we think is actually right and wrong and good and bad.  No more than gravity, the animal kingdom has laws in itself, also things proposed by Darwin, evolution and survival, which are really the roots of what we are and have become in the world.  If you observe a lion pride, you notice they all function together in a way that asserts their dominance as a pride, but not for gloating, but their survival.  They kill without hesitation, not for fun, anger, or revenge, but for survival, and they have respect for their pride, they go back to it and it really is their family in that they treat it as such, protecting and providing, they all have a function and these are their ethics, what they naturally live by.  Humans all the same have these natural set of ethics encoded in them, they just been so clouded by a systematic hand-me-down world that it’s now become so hard they’re there because the argument of right and wrong and good and bad is the predominant question.  Going back to the nomadic days of man, we were not too different from the lions, we hunted, we gathered, and did what was necessary to survive for our people.  Moving forward, civilization happens and people no longer need to worry about survival because as a society got bigger and bigger, more functions were created and less people had to do everything and things became systematic, and you had a function, not just survive but live and as more people shared these functions good and bad was derived.  One person may do a function better than another and competition came around.  The Greeks defined good simply as something or someone that fulfilled a function.  Today we define good as how well that person or object can fulfill that function. With more and more functions being created, some of them may have been questionable to whether they were even good themselves.  Good to a Viking may be brave and fearless, whereas to a pacifist, good would be better defined by being meek and humble and never lifting a finger against another so everyone of course has their own opinions on what is good and bad. As well in the case of a vegetarian compared to a carnivore, a vegetarian would say it’s wrong to eat meat because with the support that we’ve become so advanced in civilization that we can survive without eating meat but a carnivore might argue, that’s the way we’ve always done it, so all the same both perspectives are right and would argue the other one wrong.