Quote from Don

Quote from Todd

it just has the special property of not referring to any other good?

Yes, I think that's my position.

This is a little surprising to me, because you seemed adamant earlier that prudence was the highest good most cardinal, chief, greatest good thing. (Sorry, it was Nate who said it was highest.)

But now I understand that you mean "[first?] in a category that also includes pleasure"! How do you reconcile these things?

Are you doing this in an effort to maintain the consistency of everything Epicurus ever said?

Quote from Don

From your perspective, what would that category be?

I'm not sure it matters to me right now, as long as it is different from goods. It's just a label, until you want to start putting other things in the category.

But I can identify wrong categories! For example, a category that included the senses, feelings & anticipations would be wrong. I'm only dealing with ethics here.

My best guess at this moment would be to call it The End. But I don't want to prematurely name something and regret it later.

In fact, I will resist labeling anything on principle until it becomes necessary.

Quote from Don

Within the context of Epicureanism, "goods" are instrumental to producing pleasure. Agreed. In other philosophies, the goods are ends in and out themselves. In Stoicism, virtue is "the highest good." That's what leads me to insisting that pleasure is not only "a good" but "the good" among "goods."

I'm trying to only work within the context of Epicureanism.

What I want for myself is just the concepts needed to understand Epicurean philosophy. I don't need the ability to engage with every error of the last 2500 years right now. Once I have a firm grasp of the truth, I feel like can handle the rest as-needed.

So, I would like to keep the concepts to a minimum, and the definitions simple. But I anticipate that will be a challenge, because people will want to retain the more general Greek meanings.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Quote from Don

Is our hangup then seeing "the good" (ταγαθον < το "the" + αγατθον "good") as being one of these "goods" but being special in that it is the only "good thing" that does not point to any other "good thing"?

I'm still not certain if we agree or disagree, but yes, that would be the issue.

I'm saying that pleasure, as The Good, does not belong in the category of goods. It is different category.

Is that your view, or does pleasure belong in the category of goods, it just has the special property of not referring to any other good?

Quote from Todd

I started wading through that thread, but so much of it is just arguments about words. It seems like we all agree on the basic concepts.

There are 2 relevant concepts:

• Pleasure (aka The Good, The End, Telos)
• goods

I have not seen anyone arguing that there is overlap between those 2 categories - that pleasure is also a type of good. Is that correct?

Some people (including Epicurus) want to say there is also a highest good among the goods. There is disagreement about whether that is legtimate, and also whether that is useful.

There are some other meanings often attached to good that I don't think are of the same level of importance to this discussion.

Does that seem like an accurate summation of where we stand?

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If we can get general agreement on the above, or at least for whatever lonely subset does agree, I would then suggest the following 2 items for further agreement/disagreement:

1. goods (as referenced above) are things that produce pleasure. That is our definition of a good in this context.
2. We agree to stop referring to pleasure as a good. The Good, if you really must. Never a good. Please?

If it seemed like I was making a distinction there, that was not my intent.

"lower-case goods" == "goods"

I was being too clever for my own good.

Wait! Maybe I just don't understand.

Quote from Todd

Quote from Don

Unfortunately, I don't think I'm onboard with that.

There are no "lower case" goods. From what I read, there are "goods" (αγαθός) as a category and there is "the good" (ταγαθον < το "the" + αγατθον "good")

When I say "lower-case goods", I mean "goods" as a category. What distinction are you making there?

Quote from Don

Unfortunately, I don't think I'm onboard with that.

There are no "lower case" goods. From what I read, there are "goods" (αγαθός) as a category and there is "the good" (ταγαθον < το "the" + αγατθον "good").

Dammit, Don !

I could have sworn I saw you say that in the other thread. But that's fine. Can't force agreement.

Quote from Cassius

Your current division concerns me in that "feeling" strikes me as a faculty, as a result of which I gather that it was included in the standard of truth along with the five senses and anticipations.

I'm thinking about ethics right now. And just the very basic ethical concepts. I have 2 more suggestions that I want to propose next, but I'd like to make sure there is some agreement on the these first, and that I'm not misstating or overlooking any viewpoints.

Not trying to list all the concepts involved in ethics, much less the entire philosophy!

Quote from Cassius

"The Good / End/ Telos" appears to me to designate a destination or a concept describing an overall assessment.

Don't care (right now) how these terms were used in ancient Greece generally. I care how we would understand them as Epicureans. And I think to us they are just other words that describe pleasure.

Quote from Cassius

Quote from Todd

There are 2 relevant concepts:

Pleasure (aka The Good, The End, Telos)
goods

If at all, where do you include the term "guide" in that division? Because I think Dia voluptas, dux vitae is sound basis for considering guide/leader as a key concept that may not clearly be included in either of those two, and meaning something more than lower-case good as one among many instrumentalities.

I'm not entirely clear what you mean by "guide". If you mean "pleasure is the guide", I can add that under the akas for pleasure.

If you mean something else, I don't think I would add it at all.

But where would you add it?

I want to keep concepts to a minimum. In general, but especially until we have agreement on these.

I started wading through that thread, but so much of it is just arguments about words. It seems like we all agree on the basic concepts.

There are 2 relevant concepts:

• Pleasure (aka The Good, The End, Telos)
• goods

I have not seen anyone arguing that there is overlap between those 2 categories - that pleasure is also a type of good. Is that correct?

Some people (including Epicurus) want to say there is also a highest good among the goods. There is disagreement about whether that is legtimate, and also whether that is useful.

There are some other meanings often attached to good that I don't think are of the same level of importance to this discussion.

Does that seem like an accurate summation of where we stand?

Quote from Cassius

launching off in a Platonic-style dialog on "what is the highest good" before answering all sorts of other questions first.

Quote from Todd

From a historical perspective, I think the highest good idea was a relic of idealism

Quote from Todd

Epicurean philosophy should reject the entire concept of the highest good.

I won't presume you are endorsing my quotes, but that was one of my very first points! (this morning)

Don To try to put that into the terms you are using, I would say the following:

Pleasure is the highest good. (I disagree, but I'll set this aside this for the sake of getting to the other things.)

If I accept that pleasure is the highest good, then of course I can't say that producing the most pleasure is the only criteria for a thing to be the highest good. That would be nonsense.

Then there is the slope. My understanding is the goods are arranged in a sort of "telos" order, not "magnitude of pleasure produced" - that would also make no sense. How could pleasure be at the top then? By "telos" order, I mean the next highest good is the "motivation" for the good below, until you get to pleasure, and then you can't continue because it is The End. Is that more or less correct?

My disagreement on prudence is probably more straightforward, but I'd like to straighten out the other stuff first (by that I mean understand where we disagree).

@Don...can we back up a second.

According to Nate (and I), pleasure is NOT the highest good or a lower-case good at all.

It is in that context that I went on to say the things you are disagreeing with.

Perhaps that was not clear? I'm surprised by all the disagreement.

I understand that you don't even agree on the first point, so I would not address the things I said there to you.

I think there is one non-semantic disagreement between Nate and I.

That is use of the term "highest good". I'm not calling pleasure any sort of good. Nate is calling it The Good, but by that he means something in a different category than "goods". Fine by me, I just think his word choice is confusing.

But then he goes on to say that the highest good is prudence. It seems that Epicurus said this, so he's on solid ground there.

Nevertheless, I think it is useless and counter-productive to even discuss a "highest good" once you have established that pleasure is not it.

The problem I have is that whatever good would provide the most pleasure to one person is probably not the same for another person. If I'm already a very prudent person, being even more prudent would probably not provide me much additional pleasure. Going to a casino might, though. More prudence might even be a bad in that situation, rather than a good (you could argue that excessive prudence is something other than prudence. Fine, (Aristotle?) but I think the point is valid. I can come up with examples all day long.)

And providing the most pleasure is the only criteria we have to consider a good "highest", right?

And even if you could find one "highest good", so what? Are there some important goods that almost everyone will want to have? Sure. And Epicurean ethics should talk about those. But there is no need for a universal ranking to apply to everyone in all circumstances.

Quote from Nate

Pleasure is The End, and the virtues are means by which to acquire that end.

This is what I was moving toward (pun intended), but I wanted to focus on pleasure and goods/The Good before dragging the Telos in. (They're my rules, and I can break them if I choose.)

In the context of an action, pleasure is always the ultimate end. Never the immediate end, because there is no way to just go get some pleasure. But The End, if you like - the motivation. I think I'm fully on board with you there.

Also with your most recent post. As long as all those distinctions are kept in mind, that is exactly what I'm saying. It's just not the words I would use.

I guess there does have to be a balance though, because it would also be awkward to translate between the Epicurean texts and the "modern, plain English" meanings.

But don't you think all these different meanings of "good" is contributing to the problem?

Of course, we do need to untangle all that and understand what Epicurus was actually saying. Definitely.

But I think we need better terminology if we're planning to make any kind of outreach.

Quote from Don

I've found it instructive to always go back to the source texts and the words used

If your goal is to understand someone else, what choice do you have?

But I'm not trying to understand someone else right now (mostly), I'm trying to clarify my own ideas. Introducing foreign words with different shades meaning doesn't seem helpful.

To me, "good" is a simple word. Whether you say "some goods", "very good," "good job," "a good,", "the good," "the highest good." To me, those all have nearly identical meanings and connotations. (They are things that provide pleasure.) I'm happy to throw all those forms around without having to make fine distinctions and endless clarifications about what kind of "good" I'm talking about in a given context.

Edit: I feel like I'm taking the Epicurean approach here.

That why pleasure needs to be separate. Otherwise it would be a circular definition.

Now, if you are saying there is something in Aristotle that I need to understand that will help me, that is another thing. Is that what you are saying?

Quote from Todd

In other words, if they are held up as an IDEAL, then that is a problem

It's a problem for the same reason I don't want to think of pleasure as a good.

By what standard have you chosen to single out this one part of nature to use as a norm? Nature is everything.

See, you must have a standard when you're doing that. And you do have one. You're just not thinking about what it is. The standard you are using is that nature in its original state is superior to nature as it has been changed by humans. Now, you may well be right in the case of any particular change. But to elevate that to the level of a principle is a philosophy of poverty and death.

And sure, you can try to save the argument by saying you only look to babies as an ideal in this one particular respect, which maybe I will agree that you are right about. But we're relying on a lot of reasoning to get to this point. Is this really the best way to establish a foundational principle of Epicurean philosophy?

Last edit, I promise: when I keep saying "you" there, especially wrt not thinking, I don't mean you, Cassius, or anyone else here. In genenal, when people are making these kind of arguments.