Brandt's Definition of "Good"

Abstract

ichard Brandt has argued that the word "good" should be defined as meaning that a thing is rational to desire, in the sense that one would desire it after a process of "value-free ref lection" that Brandt calls "cognitive psychotherapy."2In cognitive psychotherapy, as prescribed by Brandt, the patient draws on "the propositions accepted by the science of [his] day, plus factual propositions justified by publicly accessible evidence . . .and the principles of logic" (p.13); and he represents to himself, repeatedly and vividly, every item of such information that stands to exert a specific effect on his desires-that is, an effect impinging only on particular desires and attributable to the content of the information represented (p.112).3The desires that one would have after such treatment are the ones that are rational for one to have, according to Brandt, and "good" should be defined as meaning "rational to desire" in this sense.Brandt's definition of "good" has a venerable history and, it appears, a promising future.It is closely akin to definitions offered by Henry Sidgwick4 and Johns Rawls.5 Its account of rational de-'This paper is descended from a somewhat longer paper entitled "Should 'Good' Be Defined as 'Rationally Desired'?" which was descended, in turn, from a much longer paper entitled "Can Rationality Be the Foundation of Ethics?"For helpful comments on one or more of these papers, I am indebted to

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 179 citations exist upstream.