The Nature of The Good

The Good is according to nature. Nature is good.

Could nature be bad? Impossible. Why?

Because the nature of a thing is whatever makes it work well.

This may seem like circular argumentation, and in a way it is, but it serves to demonstrate that what we mean by “nature” and what we call “good” is actually the same thing.

If you say “My computer is good” you probably mean to say that it works well compared to how it was made to work, that is its nature. Or you mean to compare it to computers in general; how computers are supposed to work; the nature of a computer.

Computers are man-made, so it’s easy to determine its nature: whatever the maker intended it to be, is its nature. But it seems that whether we include a God or not we cannot know the intention of the maker of nature. Or can we? We don’t really know what the computer maker intended either, we just infer it from his product, and whether he really exists or not makes no difference.

A body works well when it is healthy. Do we need to explain what “healthy” means? Of course not. Is health good? Obviously.

For any organism in nature we could say the same. It works or not; it’s healthy or not; it’s in accordance with its nature or not; it’s good or not.

A good is a well-working thing.

The Good is the general idea of well-working.

Natural – well-working – healthy – good – natural… It moves in circles and so it must, for the Good is not something outside, hanging unsupported in the air. It is not delivered to earth as an unexplained revelation. It is not an independently existing prototype to be found in a mysterious world of ideas.

The Good is in nature. It is here.