Volume 44, 1998
Theoretical Ethics
Mourad Wahba
Pages 269-271
The Illusion of the Good
The question of ethics relates to the good and its contrary, evil. What ethics does with its object is to seek to understand it, that is, not to produce either the concept of the good or the actions that fall under that concept. Thus, the question that follows is: What is the good?, or strictly speaking, what is the definition of the good? But the definition asked for, as any other definition, is necessarily related to the science of language. But language itself is a social phenomenon. Consequently, the definition of any concept implies the quest of the social roots of this concept. In this sense, the quest of the roots is prior to the quest of what is. Examples are taken from Plato’s Republic, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, and Schlick’s Problems of Ethics to show that the good is either in the state, in the super-Ego or in society. This means that the origin of the good lies outside the good itself, or, outside ethics. Hence, we cannot speak of the good per se, and if we do, we fall into an illusion.