ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for a non-subjectivist reading of Spinoza’s account of good and evil, For Spinoza, the evaluative qualities of good and evil are objective and (in a sense) mind-independent, albeit non-intrinsic and relational, features of things. What makes something good in the most basic sense is not that it is the object of someone’s desire but rather that it causes an increase in that individual’s power of acting. Correlatively, something is evil if it is the cause of a negative affect in an individual, that is, of a decrease in that individual’s power. And what makes something good in the truest and fullest sense of the term is that it so improves the power of an individual as to bring it closer to the ideal condition of its nature. Moreover, given Spinoza’s psychology of the affects, whatever causes joy in a person is necessarily the object of that person’s desire. Desire is thus both a necessary component of the objective state of affairs in which a thing’s goodness consists for some person and the ground for that person’s judgment about the thing’s goodness. Yet what makes a thing good is that it causes an increase in one’s power, even though it also causes in that individual a desire for it.
