CEPPA Talk – Thomas Hurka (University of Toronto)

Title: “Against ‘Good For,’ Against ‘Well-Being'”

Abstract: This paper challenges the widely held view that ‘good for’, ‘well- being’, and related terms express a distinctive evaluative concept of central importance for ethics and separate from ‘simply good’ as used by G.E. Moore and others. More specifically, it argues that there’s no philosophically useful good-for or well-being concept that’s neither merely descriptive in the sense of naturalistic nor reducible to ‘simply good’. The paper distinguishes two interpretations of the common claim that the value ‘good for’ expresses is distinctively ‘subject-relative’. Neither interpretation, the paper argues, yields a significantly distinct evaluative concept. The ethically fundamental such concept is just ‘simply good’.