ABSTRACT
WHAT DOES IT mean to say of anything that it is good? It is hard to say at first glance whether this question is absurdly easy or absurdly difficult. Perhaps, in different ways, it is both. For most people would probably reply that they know perfectly well what they mean, but that they find it hard or impossible to express their meaning precisely. In a way there is nothing odd about this. It is notoriously one thing to do something that one knows how to do well, and very much another to explain exactly what it is that one is doing so that somebody else will be able to do it too; this is as true of using words correctly as it is of swimming or walking a tight rope. Indeed people hardly ever find it easy to explain exactly what any given word means. All the same, the word ‘good’ seems to present more of a puzzle than perhaps most of the others that we use. This is the more surprising in that so far from it being a technical term, it is on the contrary one of the commonest and most naturally used in the language.
