Different Goods

Different Goods

There are several quite distinct types of good and bad. There’s good in terms of utility, well suited or well made, then good as in enjoyable or beautiful, the aesthetic kind of good. And of course there’s the moral meaning of good, good and bad behaviour, right and wrong, the ethical good. Of course they’re not mutually exclusive. You could judge, say, the writing of Dickens to be good on all three counts. You might find it beautiful, well made and moral. And there’s even some potential for cross-over. You might see beauty in its morality, or beauty in the way it has been crafted. Nevertheless, such judgement must be rooted in something. Things can’t just be good per se. They must be good in one or more senses of good.

For a variety of reasons humans often like to muddle up these different ‘goods’. We like to tell ourselves we like something for one reason when in fact it’s for another. Some teachers praise the skills or virtues of certain students when in fact they just have a crush on them. Some drinkers refer to some of their drinks as ‘medicinal’ suggesting both moral and practical good, when in fact it’s just good old aesthetic good being pursued, as usual. Some pundits tell us that they support Bush’s ‘War on terror’ because it is a virtuous crusade, when in fact they are just worried that the current system of inequality is under threat. The protection of material luxury, aesthetic good, masquerading as saving the world, virtuous good.

There’s certainly money to be made through this kind of misunderstanding. When I first heard Samantha Fox’s Touch me I told one of my Romford mates how awful it was. “What? So you wouldn’t then?” he replied. It’s a great trick. What are you supposed to say? It’s a completely different subject. But then he hadn’t meant to be facetious. It was the record company’s express intention to blur the two. Never mind the noise, look at the chest.

Stranger still, some people like to paint their favourite forms of entertainment as virtuous. They might tell themselves that travelling in Asia, or smoking dope, or listening to The Clash are active political behaviours, rather than simple pleasures. Usually it’s quite transparent. When people say that a football match was good it’s clear they can only mean good in an entertaining sense, not good in a moral sense. Exasperating as some fanatics might find it, it is only a game. For all the overblown oratory it remains at best entertaining, never righteous. The England world cup win in ‘66 was no moral victory. Regardless of how important this event remains to many Englanders, it really was just some blokes kicking a ball around for a couple of hours.

However, some forms of entertainment do garner astonishing success in managing to pass themselves off as virtuous. Novels and dramas are considered by many to be highly cerebral, highly self-bettering. Radio Four and a multitude of film clubs and book circles push this line, and I used to too. I used to think watching Boy’s from the Black Stuff was a political act, rather than a passive pleasure. I used to tell my self that Scum was an important social document when, like the rest of my peers, I was just titillated by the brutality.

Whatever the moral worth of Brecht or Pinter, the fact remains that most of the material the wittering classes witter about is either morally worthless or downright degenerate. All soap operas and the vast majority of films and novels are pure entertainments, made by people who care not one jot as to the moral impact of their work. It’s just bums on seats. But to listen to the critics you wouldn’t know it. Ms Greer and Mr Parsons seem to see a profound importance in their outpourings, as they deftly probe the minds and lives of non-existent people, all churned out by other great sages to keep their own pots boiling.

Just the same, being a snob, I do think that Radio Three listeners are engaging in a culturally more worthwhile pursuit than those who listen to Radio One, daytime at any rate. But at the end of the day we’re all only in it for the aesthetics. Like football, music’s essentially about pleasure. It’s always a stretch to call it virtuous. We listen because it pleases us, not because it helps others.

Once we clear-up these differences and admit to our real motives an important question arises: What priority should we place on each of these kind of good? Shouldn’t aesthetic good always take second place to ethical good? A morally scrupulous type might say so. They might argue that as long as there is a single hungry child in the world we should forgo all other material pleasures. No beer until everyone has water. No filet mignon until everyone has a bowl of rice. It’s an horrific thought, at least to hedonists, not least because it sounds like the only decent thing to do. Then, thankfully, the other arguments roll in.

For one, practicality. A life without some luxury looks boring, so few people would actually participate. You could even read moral worth into this. Without some pleasure we lose our humanity, become automata. In consequence we may become even less likely to want to assist others. I once heard Terence Conran (I think) use an argument of this kind to defend arts funding. Yes, if we sold all our national treasures then perhaps we could eliminate all NHS waiting lists. But what’s the point in being healthy when there’s no art to enjoy?

But of course that’s an extreme example. At the moment the scales are tipped firmly, and dangerously, in favour of aesthetics. We in the west seem intent on pleasuring ourselves to death. Through a heinous mix of advertising and decades of right wing governance we’ve been trained to think of our pleasures as necessities, rights. We’ve been trained to treat morality with suspicion, a deviation from the true path of greed. For the sake of profit we’ve been encouraged to forsake duty.

Worse still, many of the ‘rights’ we declare for ourselves are the very things that lead to both ethical problems and to unhappiness for the supposed beneficiaries: Our right to drink all day, our right to cheap petrol, cheap food, cheap clothes, cheap air travel. Our right to twenty-four hour television, 4x4s, gambling, hard-core pornography. The very things that are killing us and creating misery for others have become things we’d be honoured to die for. One way or another the scales do need re-calibrating .