Abstract

One part of ethics is concerned with good. This chapter talks generally about the idea of the structure of good. According to some ethical theories, the concern for good amounts to the whole of ethics, not just a part. Most nonteleological theories give some role to good. Since side‐constraint theory is an important example of nonteleological ethics, the popular belief that it is necessarily agent relative helps to sustain the popular association between nonteleological ethics and agent‐relative ethics. But what makes side‐constraint theory nonteleological is not agent relativity. It is the way it takes ethical considerations to work: side constraints determine what ought or ought not to be done directly, and not by determining goodness. The chapter describes some ways of making the distinction between teleological and nonteleological ethics, and explains why they are unsatisfactory. It then discusses what type of priority the concept of good has in ethics.