Philosophical Ramblings #11: What is goodness?

January 11, 2026

Recently I wrote a short summary on What is Pragmatism? In it, I mentioned Peirce’s well-known definition of truth:

“Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief.” (CP 5.565)

I really like this definition, and I thought it would be interesting to attempt something similar for the question what is goodness? A possible definition would be:

Good is what a subject, through unbounded and honest investigation into their own possibilities, desires, and world, would stably come to endorse as worth making their own.

Why this definition? Humans are inherently limited by our perception. We cannot step outside of it. To ask what goodness is, and then try to locate it in a second metaphysical reality, like Plato did with the Forms, seems misguided. Goodness cannot be defined from a standpoint outside of lived human experience. This is similar, as far as I understand it, to Heidegger’s notion of disclosure.

One might instead try to define goodness more “objectively,” by abstracting away from a single person to something like an ideal, fully informed, impartial observer. But from a pragmatic standpoint this is already a mistake: human perception is inherently limited, and we never gain access to things as they are “in themselves.” Everything is filtered through our way of being in the world. Given this, the best we can do is honest inquiry.

A bit more on the proposed definition: why not simply say goodness is whatever we desire? The problem is that our desires can be shallow or short-sighted. I may desire fast food right now, but constantly indulging in it is not good for me. To avoid this problem, we specify that goodness is not merely what we happen to desire, but what we would desire under extended and careful investigation, what we would desire at the “ideal limit” of inquiry.

Here I take “desire” in a richer sense, closer to Plato’s Symposium, where love is described as the wish to make beauty one’s own, and beauty here comes close to goodness.