The Question of Liberalism

The conceptual framework of liberalism is significant (if not predominant) in moral philosophy and is an idea I have previously defended (in “A Preliminary Philosophy of Morals”).  Within this article, I will attempt to analyze the theory of liberalism, giving a clear reason for its internal claims about the differences between different people’s values as well as its assumptions of what constitutes goodness.  In doing so, I find liberalism’s analysis of the subjectivity of value judgments to be accurate, while finding its conclusion about the meaning of goodness to be unreasonable, and I then suggest an alternative viewpoint regarding the meaning of goodness.  I will, for the sake of this article, assume that achieving goodness and being a good person is desirable and that this is desirable for the sake of upholding concepts of the self (as understood in my “Clarifying Desirability in Ethics”).  The positions put forth in this article will be quite different from – and indeed in some respects contrary to – some positions previously taken in “A Preliminary Philosophy of Morals,” particularly when it comes to that article’s analysis of how actions ought to be appraised as right or wrong.  In that article, I set forth a liberal perspective in which I asserted that the concept of a good action was one which upheld others’ personal moral judgments.  This article completely rejects that position, instead arguing that goodness is that action which upholds one’s personal value judgments extended to the world around them.

Within this article, we will start with a quick definition of liberalism, as well as the skepticism which underpins it.  Next, we will try to prove that liberalism’s observations about the world and the way in which people create values is accurate to the creation of values in the real world.  We will then examine how that belief system, which seems to imply liberalism, applies to the creation of the idea of goodness, finding that the value system which is actually asserted by our arguments about values is quite different from the value system which liberalism puts forth.  Next, we will suggest our own concept of goodness, which categorizes actions as good or bad based on how well they uphold the world of our value judgments, which we will define as action which thrusts a similar value system as our own upon others.  With this new definition of goodness, we will explain why they are preferable to the liberal definitions of the same concepts.  We will then explain the practical application of these theories.  Finally, we will recapitulate our arguments, particularly focusing on their non-theoretic meaning and implications.

Liberalism can be simply understood as an ethical viewpoint in which there is no single universalizable concept of the good life.  This viewpoint can take many different forms.  To some (as with utilitarians such as J.S. Mill), it may mean that there is a particular desirable end which involves different means from the perspective of each individual.  To others (Ronald Dworkin, for example), it may mean that there is a lack of clear superiority of some ideals over others due to the inherent equality of different people as deciders of their own worldviews and actions.  Other liberal ethicists may take the perspective that different paradigms can be applied to different people due to those individual people having fundamentally different ideas about what can be good or desirable (this is the position of most moral anti-realists, as well as the position I propounded in “A Preliminary Philosophy of Morals”).  The similarity between all these positions, however, is that they argue that the moral value of an action is decided by how accommodating it is to different people’s interests and personal values, which we attempt to work towards with the aid of others.  This categorization of good and bad applies equally to people, according to the liberal, as the morality of a person is decided by how accommodating they are to others, since it is that accommodation which characterizes moral action.

The liberal viewpoint therefore precludes a moral person from upholding certain viewpoints about how the world or how others ought to be.  For example, it might be moral for an individual not just to coexist with actions quite contrary to their personal concept of goodness but indeed to promote and support such actions, as this would make them more accommodating to personal moralities quite different from the actor’s own.  Liberalism thereby evaluates an action as moral or immoral in a manner completely unrelated to the individual’s personal conception of the good life; only in this way can it promote the “good,” which is quite different for the people acted upon than for the actor.  This separation of the individual’s and the general concept of goodness inherently (and, as in Dworkin, formally) separates the concept of “moral action,” that is, how one should treat others, from “ethical action,” that is, how one ought to live themselves.

Liberalism’s actual argument about the manner in which people create different value systems and the value of individual people’s value systems is not just internally coherent and consistent, but it is, indeed, correct.  We will assert that the viewpoint of the subjectivist liberal – that is, that the concept of the good life is not universalizable due to its subjectivity – is accurate.  Furthermore, the liberal’s idea – that actions which would best uphold individual people’s values are those actions which are most accommodating to individual people’s separate value systems – is also correct.  We will argue that both of these assertions are true as a result of the different concepts which different people have of different abstract terms, which are themselves based on the specific situations in which they learned such terms.  We have previously argued a position similar to this in several articles (“Clarifying Desirability in Ethics” and “Solving the Incoherence of Ethical Calculation”), and indeed, in some ways, this discussion will be a re-tread of themes present in those articles; however, the argument in this article is going to be of a slightly different character than that of the other two.

Concepts, in general, are linguistic terms.  Such terms are nearly always defined in relation to something else.  This can entail training of the learner about which terms or types of language should be used in different empirical situations (externally sourced terms) as well as how a term can be defined as according to other terms (internally sourced terms).  An example of an externally sourced term would be the description of something as green.  That real experience of seeing green-ness comes prior to seeing that something looks like the term “green,” and the teaching that the former entails the latter is merely the teaching that the latter term applies to everything which falls under the former category.  The important part of this is that it is based on representing external reality as per certain terms.  The concept therefore necessarily relies on some kind of external basis for its meaning.  Such a definition is an inherently static one, as it is based on reacting to a certain sensation or situation with a term one has been trained to use to identify and categorize such a situation.  All internally sourced terms take their meaning from externally sourced terms, as they are defined according to those other sensation-based terms.  An internally sourced term is meaningful to a person, both when they learn it and when they use it, because of the meaning of some other term which that latter term is based on.

All of these terms are by nature subject to some level of privacy to the individual.  Any externally based term will always represent some kind of real sensations.  Someone can learn a particular name for those sensations through the continual application of that term to sensations of a certain kind.  For instance, continually naming a certain group of visual sensations under a color-term can eventually lead one to apply that term to things of a particular color themselves, and this thereby can lead one to understanding how to apply a given term.   As a result, the color-term holds a particular meaning for a particular person based on what was used to introduce the term to them.  This inherently means that, person by person, a given term may have a different real basis for definition, and it will therefore be slightly different from how it might be defined for another person.  At this point, internally based terms are defined based on how they are being applied to certain other categories in conjunction with externally based terms.  As the externally based terms differ depending on the person, so too would the internally based terms.  (For example, if someone were to describe something as “dark green,” for instance, there would have to be something it were “dark” in relation to, the base green.  This base green would have to be defined as per the objects which were used to introduce the concept of “green,” and therefore the definition of “’dark’ green” would be dependent upon the person defining it.) 

The privacy of language, however, faces a major challenge in the social aspect of language.  Were a language entirely defined in a theoretical fashion and never actually used, every definition would differ completely depending on the person, as there would exist many different objects which language is based on and therefore many different definitions of the same term.  This, however, is not how language actually works: two people can speak with one another and understand what the other person means without being forced to show the other the external objects which their understanding of a given term is based on.  This degree of communication requires the existence of some kind of objectivity when it comes to language which at least assures the common understanding of different words.  And there are ways to make sure that people are using a certain word “correctly,” whether that be through dictionaries or correction, that are sensible and often used to understand the world around us.  If we were not able to use such methods to understand each other, language would not be useful for very much of anything.  Clearly, language is not entirely private and is defined, at least partially, by its social element and by its ability to be understood by others.

However, this does not mean that language is completely overwhelmed or defined exclusively by its social meaning.  The only thing which is needed for a language to be socially understandable is for it to be pragmatically definable by the other person.  (For instance, if I refer to something as “green,” the listener has to be able to understand what I mean by that and be able to use that to further understand the sensation of, in this case, looking at the green object.)  This need for pragmatic definitions can indeed allow the meaning of terms to change within certain contexts.  If someone is using a term in a way that cannot be pragmatically understood or observed by another person (for instance, “green is the feeling I get when I look at grass”), or if they are using a term contrary to how another person pragmatically understands that term (for instance, “green is the color of fire”), then that usage of that term requires correction.  This activity then modifies the meaning of the term, according to the person corrected, to either include something which they previously did not define as part of a given definition or to exclude something which they previously defined as part of a given definition.  This interaction thereby changes the externally based term, in many cases, to an internally based term, as rather than being defined based on certain objects, the term’s definition will be refined with reference to concepts other than the term itself.  (For instance, someone can define “green” as “the color that grass is” before being informed that, in fact, “green” is defined as “the color created from blue and yellow,” which therefore includes more than simply the objects to which “green” was previously defined.  This thereby makes one’s concept of “green” rely on one’s concept of “blue” and “yellow” rather than solely certain real objects.)  Nevertheless, however important it may be in refining the definition of certain terms, the social aspect of language does not override definitions in two fundamental areas:  ideal concepts of terms and internally defined terms with no correspondence to real objects.

First, let us focus on the ideal concept of terms.  An ideal concept is a concept of a certain sensation which is used as the key for the categorization of similar sensations.  So, when someone thinks of certain kinds of sensations, they will think about those sensations in relation to a certain “ideal” sensation.  To use an example from before, if we are describing different shades of green, there will necessarily be some base green which “light” or “dark” greens will be based upon.  This definition of a “base” green, however, cannot be conceivably corrected.  There is no verification for one concept of an ideal concept of green versus another.  So long as an ideal concept is within the confines of the sensation’s definition, there is no basis to value one instance of a sensation as more representative than any other.  Any decision to view one shade of green as the “ideal” green can be taken only on a purely individual basis and applied to certain sensations for purely pragmatic reasons (so that one can better categorize different sensations of different kinds).  Further, such an ideal is based on what one has previously experienced, usually as one’s introduction to a certain concept.  That basis is then used to judge all future experiences of the same category.  (For instance, imagine there are two people:  one who had been first been told the definition of “green” through being shown a dark shade of green and another who had been told the definition of “green” through being shown a light shade of green.  If they were each then shown the other’s sample green, the person who had first been shown a light shade of green would think of the other’s sample green as dark and the one who had first been shown the dark shade of green would think of the other’s sample green as light.  If both tried to correct the other and say that, in fact, their shade of green was normal, there would be no clear basis for such an argument, and there would likely be no clear proof which either could use to show why their color is more “normal” than the other’s.)

The second thing that the social aspect of language does not harmonize is internally sourced terms.  This arises from our previous discussion about idealized terms.  An internally sourced term is a term which is necessarily based on idealized terms.  If, for instance, someone says, “A unicorn is a horse with a horn,” one’s concept of a “horse” is based on their idealized version or understanding of what a horse is.  Therefore, the concept of a horse can be any horse through which one has been introduced to the concept.  There is no basis for favoring one kind of ideal over another, and therefore no basis for favoring one precise definition of an internally sourced term over another.  If one person says that a unicorn is small and another says it is big, there is no way of verifying the one or the other unless a unicorn is actually a real and sensible concept.  This therefore means that different definitions of the same internally sourced term of an ideal object are possible, and in fact reasonable, so long as they are based on different idealized “first experiences” with certain sensations.  That being said, for certain internally defined concepts, some definitions will be favored over others.  This occurs as a result of the creation of several definitions for a single object that all strengthen the argument for viewing an object with one particular definition rather than another.  For instance, if someone were defining a cow to a person who had never seen a cow before, describing it as four-legged would open up a variety of definitions based on one’s view of what “four-legged” entails (it can walk on two legs but can choose some legs out of four, or it can only walk with four legs at once).  However, then defining other things about a cow would also grant greater credence to a particular definition of “four-legged” (walks on four legs) rather than others (can choose which legs to walk on).  This process of refining meaning can be utilized only in cases in which an object has multiple different traits that can help one define that object using multiple different words.

Judging from these arguments, the “good” is an example of a term which is quite difficult to universalize.  It is quite clear that the “good” is not purely an externally based term.  If it were, there would be no argument about whether a person or an action is “good,” for it would be something that could be easily corrected as according to a definition.  The question of “was that a good action” would be similar to “is that a green object,” and therefore, it would be a question for one’s ability to understand what happened accurately and to simply match their perception of the object with the commonly accepted definition of it.  And yet, it is clear that “the good” is not simply determined through the attribution of certain words to certain sensations, but rather that we must actually think about whether a particular action is good or bad.  In each case, one’s thought – rather than one’s senses – allows us to attribute the action with its positive or negative value.  It is also true that simply correcting people about what the “good” entails is not how our perception of goodness works.  If one person says an object is green and another disagrees, the purpose of a discussion is to reach a pragmatically usable concept of “greenness” for both sides – that is, to agree on what “green” entails.  However, when it comes to discussions surrounding “goodness,” this is not the purpose of disagreement.  If one side were to concede that their concept of “goodness” does not include actions that most other people consider good, that would not necessarily mean that they were wrong or would agree to start using the alternative definition of “goodness.”  However, if one were to concede that one’s concept of “horse” is not how most people use the term, that would necessarily mean they should change their definition.  For instance, imagine a discussion about whether killing horses was moral.  If one side argued that most people considered killing horses moral, that would not necessarily imply the other side must agree with them.  However, if the two sides were arguing over whether a given animal was a horse, then one side making the same argument (that most people consider the animal a horse) would be quite convincing.

As a result, the concept of “goodness” seems a little more like an ideal concept than a real one.  Something can be good or bad to a certain degree, relative to a certain base point.  That base point can differ significantly, depending on the society.  For instance, in a society where infractions like murder or slavery are common, even if an observer considered them to be immoral actions, the observer might still view them as relatively minor due to their prevalence, and quite possibly as not something which would necessarily preclude the morality of the individual murderer or slaver.  However, in a society without either murder or slavery or one with a significantly more stringent morality, these actions seem significantly more worrying or evil, to the point where they can even override any other positive bases for believing in the fundamental goodness of a given person.  The barrier between a “good” and “bad” person and the moral infractions that can separate the two categories are thereby based on one’s personal experiences with people in general and what one can expect from others.  As the limits on what is classified as “good” and “bad” cannot be objectively defined, “goodness” must be more ideal than real, since the definition of real objects can be objectively verified (as in the question of whether an object is “green”), while which objects ideal concepts describe is mostly subjective (as in the question of whether an object is “dark” or “light” green).

So, then, this definition of “goodness” – individually determined based on one’s personal ideals and experiences – would make liberalism seem more reasonable and true.  According to liberalism, the good life, after all, is subjective.  And, as defined here, the good does depend, person to person, on what one’s experiences have been.  Further, accommodating these different conceptions of people’s personal “good lives” would seem to be promoted by accommodating everyone’s different interests.  If one person thinks one life is good, after all, then their personal experiences have led them to having that ideal life, and there is no real way to verify or disprove their definition.  Indeed, trying to do so would be quite like the example of one person telling another that their green was closer to the ideal green, a difference which was purely based on personal experience and which could not possibly be resolved.  However, if we look closer at the concept of “goodness” as per our method, we find that the liberal, while having a correct understanding of the world and of the personal good, is quite wrong when looking at the concept of what goodness, on a person-to-person basis, actually means, and how that advocates for certain actions or others.

The first step to understanding what goodness entails is finding what it directly corresponds to in the real world.  The real world, as per our earlier argument, is where all language comes from, either directly or indirectly, and therefore this is where we should start our inquiry.  It is clear that the concept of goodness does not arise intrinsically from the self.  If it were true that people learned what “goodness” is from entirely internal thoughts and perceptions, then the term would mean something very different from what it actually does.  The concept of “goodness” could come from one of two definitions, either what the self currently is or what the self ought to be.  In the first case, wherein goodness is based on resemblance to one’s current self, the concept of self-improvement would be impossible, and it would also be impossible for other people to be good.  In the second case, wherein the goodness of something is established by its resemblance to one’s idealized view of oneself, other people’s different views on everything, even aesthetics, would be bad, as our own aesthetic values are different.  However, this also is clearly not true.  If one were to describe someone else’s differences in aesthetic values as morally “evil” and one’s own aesthetic value as morally “good,” that person would not be using the term “good” as it is normally used, and it would not be self-evident to say that he was right.  (That is not to say he would necessarily be wrong, but simply that he would have to prove his argument rather than taking it to be self-evident.)  Even more importantly, for both of these definitions, the term “goodness” could not be applied to anything other than humans.  An event could not be described as “good,” and neither could an object, and nor could anything else.  Indeed, nothing could ever be judged by any metric other than the metric one judges oneself by.  This approach, therefore, is clearly wrong.  One can describe an event as “a good thing” or a hammer as a “good tool,” without any contradiction present.  Hence, any definition of goodness, if it originates solely from how we define ourselves, cannot be coherent.

Consequently, the concept of “goodness” clearly does not come solely from observations of our internal lives but rather must involve our observations of the external world.  So, then, the question we must ask ourselves is:  How do we go about describing the external world as “good” or “bad”?  This depends on the object.  A hammer is described as “good” if it is good at hammering nails and “bad” if it fails to do so.  A bed is described as “good” if it is amenable to sleeping and “bad” if it is not.  This can lead us to a fallacious belief of what is good and bad, that each object has a “goodness” determined by the degree to which it fulfills its intended purpose.  Under this viewpoint, each object has some kind of intentional purpose which it ought to bring about.  For instance, a hammer is made to hammer in nails, and therefore goodness for that hammer can be determined by how good it is at hammering in nails.  Similarly, another object like a bed might be good for sleeping in, and so we would describe that bed as good if we can easily sleep in it.  This approach can then be applied to all other objects, each of which can be linked to some kind of purpose, and whose ability to fulfill their given purpose decides its goodness.

However, this is quite contrary to how goodness is actually used in practice to describe the world around us.  First of all, an object fulfilling its intended purpose is not the highest good which it can bring about.  If we were to, say, have a meal which was exactly as good as we thought it would be, that would achieve its purpose.  However, if the meal were particularly good, then it would achieve more than its purpose, perhaps even something separate from what its intended purpose was.  And yet we would not consider the two meals as equally good, even though they both equally sate the purpose which we set out for them.  Secondly, we can enjoy events and describe those events as positive (for instance, in the sentence “That was a good experience”).  However, while in all these different events, our idea of what makes a particular event good or bad is not universalizable to all other experiences, they are nevertheless all described the same way.  A good experience can be good because it makes us happy, but it can also be good for purely aesthetic reasons that do not make us happy.  There is no one end which we desire in “good experiences” (indeed, the ends which we achieve often conflict in each experience), yet we can say that all of them are “good.”  A final example would be a murderer.  If we were to describe a murderer, calling him “a good murderer” would not be how the term “good” is used.  Indeed, this is one of the few cases in which the usage of the term would probably be corrected and viewed as a mistaken way of using the term.  And yet, a murderer, desiring murder, would be achieving his intention by murdering. 

This last example of the murderer does not just prove the prior viewpoint of goodness – that goodness of an action depends on its ability to fulfill its intended function – wrong; it also explains exactly why that viewpoint is wrong.  Instead of describing a murderer as “a good murderer,” one would more conventionally describe their ability to murder in a manner something akin to “that person is good at murdering.”  The perspective in which goodness is determined simply by the achievement of an intended purpose more accurately describes the concept of being “good at” something, rather than being a “good” person, object, or event.  So, a hammer that adequately hammers is “good at hammering,” but that does not necessarily mean that the hammer is in a broader sense “good.”  Note that this distinction does not help us reach the question of what human “goodness” is.  For, saying that a person is “good at being a person” is quite different from describing them as a “good person,” and the former does not necessarily mean the latter.  As demonstrated by the murder example, competence does not necessarily translate to goodness.  On the other hand, competence is not necessarily divorced from the concept of “goodness” either.  Indeed, being effective is a required part of being “good.”  A hammer which is too dull to hammer any nails into anything is quite “bad,” no matter whether hammering nails is itself good or not.

The second part of understanding “goodness” involves understanding that goodness arises out of its relationship with the person who is doing the describing of something as good or bad.  For example, if a person does not care about the way in which other galaxies develop over time, then hearing that a star exploded in another galaxy would not matter much to them at all.  In fact, if that event had minor positive effects on their life, then it would be considered “good.”  However, if someone were deeply involved in that other galaxy and followed it closely (even if they never technically saw it themselves but merely knew of its existence), that destruction of the star could be viewed as quite “bad.”  And yet, the event has not changed in quality, nor have its consequences changed.  The only difference is the perspective of the observer.  As a result, we can clearly see that the concept of “goodness” depends upon the person who is examining whether something is “good” and the factors they consider to be desirable for the world.  Further, it would not be unreasonable for someone to think the destruction of that star was bad because it was the destruction of something they considered beautiful, even if no one could ever have seen or appreciated that star when it existed.  In this case, the person’s emotional involvement in the destruction of the star does not depend on human eyes having seen that star, and yet their unhappiness with the star’s destruction is still reasonable.  From this example, we can conclude that the idea of goodness does not necessarily depend on whether the desired world of the subject aids any other people.

At this point, we can reach our definition of goodness:  Something is good if it effectively helps bring about the situation desired by the person doing the defining.  (This desire can be brought about through the upholding of one’s ability to think as well as get rid of contradictions within one’s thoughts, which we have previously described as well as justified in “Clarifying Desirability in Ethics.”)  This is not, however, purely egoistic, for reasons we will later explain, and it includes the desire for things such as the goodness of the self, which has altruistic implications.  At first, this approach to defining goodness seems to be similar to the liberal definition.  However, there is one major differences between this definition and the liberal definition:  it defines goodness based on the viewpoint of the specific subject – not the person taking the action but rather the person judging the moral value of that action.

The first difference between our view and the liberal view is that our view defines goodness not by how good something is for bringing about the desired world of people in general, but rather by how good something is at bringing about the desired world of the observer in specific.  The reason for this is that accommodation to people in general is not necessarily considered a positive.  Take, for instance, a murderer who takes pleasure from killing.  From the victim’s perspective, the murderer is doing something wrong by killing the victim, and from the murderer’s perspective, he is doing something good by bringing about his own pleasure.  If we were also to say the pleasure that the person killing gets from killing is a good (even if we were to say that the death of the victim is a more important bad than the pleasure the killer gets is good), we would be saying something quite contrary to how the term “good” is actually used.  Indeed, gaining pleasure from things which we consider evil or bad is usually something which generally makes us view a crime as even worse and even more evil.  For example, compare our example of someone who kills to rob to someone who kills for pleasure.  According to the liberal definition, the former should be more disconcerting than the latter, yet the opposite is clearly true.  Our concept of goodness remedies this contradiction between the liberal view and reality.

From here, we can now apply our concept of goodness quite easily to people in general.  A good person can be defined as someone who upholds the observer’s concept of goodness.  Therefore, someone who creates a situation more similar to the observer’s desired situation for the world is considered a “good” person, whereas someone who does the opposite is considered a “bad” person.  At this point, it would seem that our definition does not quite explain how we define goodness in people, certainly, and even goodness in events or objects.  Thus far, our definition has been quite egoistic and does not explain why, for example, we view altruistic actions taken towards people other than ourselves as positive.  For instance, if someone negotiates peace to end a war far from ourselves with very limited positive consequences for ourselves, we view that as an extremely good thing and the person who did it as an extremely good person.  According to our definition so far, this does not make sense.  This is where the desire for goodness must itself affect our definition of goodness.

Our “desire for goodness” can be better understood not as desire for “goodness” in general but as desire to become a “good person.”  Desire for “goodness” in general is achieved, according to our previous approach, by taking actions which help to create our desired world:   basically, by acting completely egoistically.  However, goodness is not the only thing related to the good which we desire.  We also desire to be a “good person.”  (We will assume this is a desired trait for the sake of this article, although the basis for this desire is explained in detail in “Clarifying Desirability in Ethics.”)  Being a “good person” means that we desire to be similar in character to those other people whom we have defined as good.  While this would seem to mean that we desire to be yet more egoistic, this is not in fact true.  Those other people whom we have defined as good were necessarily not egoistic themselves, as they brought about a situation that improved not their own desire for how the world ought to be operated but rather our desire for how the world ought to operate.  Therefore, insofar as action aided us, we believe that we ought to take that same action for others.  By applying the criteria for identifying other good people onto ourselves, we can hope to be a good person like those we emulate.  This definition of altruism goes as follows:  The altruistic person helps to create a world desirable for oneself for others.  (This belief seems initially to be more extreme than it actually is.  What is being said here is not necessarily that the exact same specific experiences must be imposed on others as we wish to be created for ourselves but rather that the same values and ends must be upheld for others.  For instance, if someone is a hedonist, this would not require them to force whatever brings them pleasure onto other people, but rather it requires them to promote the greatest amount of pleasure possible for others.)

This creates the second and larger contradiction between our viewpoint and the viewpoint present in liberalism – a capacity for moral judgment and proportion which arises out of this moral system but is impossible for liberalism.  According to liberalism, accommodating the desires of a given actor is always the highest achievement; however, in our own position here, accommodating those desires is not necessarily the most critical component of altruistic action.  Indeed, accommodation can be reasonable in some cases (for instance, if it is believed that different perspectives can lead to different actions bringing about the same good result for multiple different people).  However, this accommodation is not valued highly, for example, in cases in which someone else acts to uphold ends completely separate from one’s own (for instance, an individual pursuing pleasure at the expense of knowledge if one believes that knowledge should be more highly valued than pleasure).  This lower valuation of accommodation is much more accurate to the concept of altruism than the liberal conception.  Under the liberal approach, moral condemnation is never justified.  Indeed, it would be absurd to condemn any value held by anyone else, for there is no knowledge about whether another person’s values are simply distinct from one’s own and therefore no less valid.  This moral agnosticism is not only very different from how altruism is actually viewed (condemning actions one believes will damage the actor is considered altruistic), but liberalism also creates a situation in which one is completely incapable of taking any action whatsoever.   If one sees, for instance, a person killing someone else, there is no possible way to calculate whether stopping the murder would be good or bad, since the murderer (and others) could very well be getting more from killing than the victim is losing from dying (and vice versa).  Thus, we cannot possibly take any action, nor can we truly understand how our action might affect others.  Indeed, the liberal concept of altruism completely eliminates empathy from the equation, making ethical action completely un-empathetic (or even anti-empathetic), as well as making “altruistic action” impossible beyond simply avoiding others, since one cannot possibly know what is effectively altruistic and what is not.  Only by illiberally imposing our moral values onto others can we ever act in an altruistic fashion, even if our altruism may be somewhat inaccurate to the actual desires of those whom we act upon.

This analysis does not just help us understand how our own goodness is defined.  It also helps us understand how others’ goodness is defined.  If we define our own values and our own intentions as bringing about a better situation for others (according to our values), then we also must impose that value system upon other people and events in general.  So, if we see another person helping a third party, then we view that person as helping us, since he is upholding our values in the world in general, something which we desire due to our own desire to be a good person.  This desire of ours to be a good person helps us to address our earlier questions regarding how we can describe remote events or people as “good” or “bad.”  With this new understanding of our desire to be a good person, it is not confusing at all why we would say that something which aids people far from us is a good thing even though it does not directly help us – it is good because it is altruistic, and altruism is good because it is what we desire for the world.  This moral framework also helps us to explain why we do not necessarily support things more in others just by virtue of their popularity in those societies.  For instance, if a vast majority of people from a remote country support genocide, under the liberal definition, it becomes problematic to criticize or oppose that genocide as immoral.  However, under our value system, the belief of the majority of the population regarding genocide does not factor at all into our determination about whether the genocide is good; popular support will only give us more reason to oppose a genocide, as it means that yet more people will bear the (according to our values) guilt of committing genocide.

Practically speaking, what this argument asserts is a shift towards a certainty about our ethics.  Rather than acting as if all other people are correct and trying to perfectly accommodate them all, our value system puts forth the idea that we should act as if our value system applied equally to all other people.  Further, we should uphold not the society or actions which best accommodate many different kinds of value systems but rather the value system which upholds our own personal values.  This means that we should act as if the particular values we uphold for ourselves are equally important to uphold for others, both in which variables are important as well as their magnitude of importance.

In conclusion, where does this leave us?  While we all are required to have a single definition of most words, neither terms which are used to compare different objects nor theoretical terms are decided by our interaction with their real counterparts.  Goodness, which is both comparative and theoretical, is therefore not defined by society at large, but rather by our own personal experiences.  Our understanding of goodness starts as the idea of that which helps produce our own future desired situation.  However, part of that future desired situation is to be a good person.  This therefore requires us to apply our concept of goodness onto ourselves, which then requires us to try to give other people a better situation according to our own personal values – to give them what we want ourselves.  By incorporating altruism, this approach is quite contrary to the concept of liberalism, for rather than trying to accommodate other people’s values, we instead completely disregard them in favor of our beliefs.  With this altruistic approach, we can go about trying to create a good world, rather than a merely accommodating one.

Our viewpoint here is one which values – and, indeed, is willing to forcefully impose – our own pre-suppositions of morality, rather than merely trying to obtain a non-judgmental understanding of the different value systems of others.  This viewpoint is one which values the internal belief system of our own ethics, without excessive regard for the actual truth of their impact on the separate views of others.  Our viewpoint here is one of ethical dogmatics.