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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Dr. Mortimer J. Adler's 

Six Great Ideas

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The Range and Scale of Goods

All the goods that fulfill our needs or satisfy our wants
belong in the category of human goods, real or apparent. These
are things that are good for man.

When we use the word "good" substantively to call them
"goods," we are using the word in its primary connotation to
signify objects of desire. The goods thus named are diverse
embodiments of goodness, the idea of which identifies the
good with the desirable.

Not all the things we call good fall into this category; not all
are in one way or another objects of human desire. The adjec-
tive "good" has a much wider range of meanings than the no-
tion of goodness that we express when we use the word "good"
as a noun to designate this or that particular good to be desired.

"Good," like many other adj ectives, enables us to express three degrees of evaluation—the positive, the comparative, and the
superlative ("good," "better," "best"). But we use "good" more
than any other adjective for the purpose of ranking or grading
things.

The judges who award bronze, silver, and gold medals at
athletic contests are engaged in ranking the performances of the
athletes, and are, in effect, saying of these performances
"good," "better," "best." The same thing is true of the judges
who hand out ribbons of various colors at flower shows, dog
shows, or cattle shows.

It is true also of the professional experts who grade coffee
beans, wines, and other products bought and sold in the mar-
ketplace. In these cases, as in the international ranking of chess
and tennis players, the gradations exceed the three expressed
by "good," "better," and "best," but there will always be one
that is ranked as supremely good, and, with regard to the rest,
one will be ranked as superior to another until one comes to the
very bottom of the scale.

We have by no means exhausted the extraordinary diversity
of things to which we apply the adjective "good" or its higher
degrees of "better" and "best." We speak of a good time and of
one occasion as being a better time than another, of good
weather and of one climate as better than another. We speak of
something as good-looking and of something else as better-
looking. There are good and bad reasons, better and worse
reasons; good and bad intentions, better and worse intentions.
One individual, we may say, has a good memory or a good
appetite, and another a better memory or appetite.

The things we rank or grade in this way may be judged for
their usefulness or for the pleasure they afford us; or they may
simply be judged for their intrinsic worth as having the excel-
lence appropriate to that kind of thing. Thus "good," "better,"
and "best" may mean more or less useful, more or less pleasant,
more or less excellent.

Another set of adjectives is available to us for the purpose of
grading or ranking things. We can substitute "fine," "finer,"
and "finest" for "good," "better," and "best." Making this sub-
stitution would help us to avoid a use of the word "good" that
does not express the judgment that the thing in question has a
goodness that is good for us, either because we do in fact desire
it or because it is something that we ought to desire.

All the things we have enumerated as things that can be
graded or ranked with regard to their usefulness, their pleasant-
ness, or their intrinsic worth or excellence may of course also
be judged by someone to be desirable. Then, of course, it be-
comes a good for him or her. The ranking or grading that was
done by someone else, without any explicit reference to desire
on his or her part, does by implication at least involve a refer-
ence to desirability.

One object ranked as better than another is preferable or
more desirable than another. The object ranked as best is most
desirable—preferable to all others. Yet a given individual may
not in fact desire the better or the best, and so it is not even a
good for him, real or apparent.

It is interesting to observe that the adjective "true" does not
work in the same way as "good." There are no degrees of ob-
jective truth. A statement is either true or false; one statement
is not "truer" than another. We may have more or less assur-
ance in claiming that a certain statement is true, but the degree
of our assurance does not make the statement more or less true.

An elaborate scientific theory or a complex philosophical doc-
trine may be said to have more truth in it than some other
which it is offered to replace. But whatever amount of truth it
has consists in the number of elements it contains that are true;
the truth of these is not subject to degree.

Now let us return to the primary connotation of the word
"good" as the name for the desirable thing itself—goods that
one wants or needs, all of them goods for man. Confining our-
selves for the moment to real goods, we use the word in its
primary meaning when we speak of each of the following as a
particular kind of good: wealth, health, pleasure, friends or loved ones, liberty or freedom of action, and knowledge and
skill in all their forms.

The division of the goods for man into real and apparent
goods is far from being the only subdivision within that cate-
gory. We can see this at once if we turn to goods that are sub-
jects of daily conversation—the goods of the marketplace, the
so-called economic goods in the production and exchange of
which all our commerce and industry is engaged and toward
the acquirement of which we work in our effort to earn a living
or secure a livelihood.

We are all aware that there is a vast plurality and a striking
diversity of such goods. When, in the economic sphere, we
speak of goods and services, we use the word "goods" in a
restricted sense to designate only purchasable commodities that
have been produced for sale. Hirable services are also purchas-
able. Since we seek to obtain by purchase the things we need
or want, services no less than commodities are economic goods.

Among such goods, economists tell us, some have value in
use, some have value in exchange; some are consumable goods,
some are instruments or means of production; and one, money,
in the form of coin or paper, is solely a medium of exchange—
a means of purchasing commodities and services, or instru-
ments of production.

This whole set of goods constitutes the category of goods we
call wealth. Within that category, we can distinguish the goods
that are merely or solely means and the goods that are ends as
well as means. Money is obviously nothing but a means. Except
for the pathological deviant who is a miser or the equally mis-
guided figure of King Midas with his lust for gold, no one
desires money for its own sake. It fulfills no natural need. To
want it for its own sake, as Midas did, is to end up starving,
deprived of the real goods that money can and should buy.

Capital goods—instruments of production—are also mere
means, desired for the sake of the consumable goods they can
produce. The individual who sought to accumulate only capital
goods would be as misguided as Midas or the miser and end
up as deprived—bereft of friends, naked, unsheltered, and
starving to death.

Money, used not as a medium of exchange but as financial
capital to be invested or loaned, and physical capital used as
instruments of production provide sources of income that con-
fer purchasing power for buying consumable commodities and
for hiring useful services. Thus used, they still remain means,
and mere means at that.

Among economic goods, the only form of wealth that is not
a mere means consists in consumable goods, including here
services as well as commodities. Some of these fulfill certain of
our biological needs (our needs for food, drink, clothing, shel¬
ter, and so on), and some satisfy our individual wants.

While consumable goods are not mere means, neither are
they goods that we desire for their own sake and that alone. We
need them for the sake of our bodily health, or we want them
as conditions prerequisite to activities in which we wish to
engage. Like those consumable goods that fulfill our biological
needs, physical health (together with bodily vigor and vitality)
is also a real good, but a real good that is desired for its own
sake as well as for the sake of other goods, to the achievement
of which it is a prerequisite condition.