Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The word "good" is sometimes contrasted with "evil" and at other times with "bad." I might ask you, as I watch you sip a glass of wine, whether the wine is good. The negative answer would be, "no, quite bad, vinegary even!" Or I might ask you whether you think Donald Trump a good President. There the negative answer could well be that you think him, and/or his presidency, and/or its existing or likely consequences, "evil." Some writers have made heavy water out of this. They have said that the “good” in the phrase “good versus evil” is a moral good whereas the “good” in the phrase “good or bad” is a non-moral good. Thus, morality only deals with one particular sort of good out of the vast realm of possible goods, it only deals with the contrast-to-evil sort of good. I don’t propose to go down that route. Insofar as neurologically normal, full function adults are concerned, my own view is that all good is moral good...

Below I'll provide a link to a well-written blast at the expense of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book, Anti-Fragile. The thesis of the book is that there are three different states-of-being for institutions, individuals, even academic theories: fragility, robustness, and anti-fragility. These are also, in order: really bad, not so bad, good. [I've written about one aspect of this book in this blog quite recently -- Taleb figures in my series of posts about  Krugman and Gould. ] A brief illustration of the thesis might run this way: a nation that has built its whole economy around the production and sale of wine would be fragile. It would depend for its livelihood on the international market for wine, and, (even if demand for wine holds up forever) it could be devastated by climate changes that make its own terrain less hospitable to grapes. A nation that was less dependent on any single market or product would be robust. But better than robustness...