Red:
You just keep thinking that.....
Anyone who bothered to click on the link and scroll would see immediately there's neither need for nor value in my (or anyone's)summarizing "the central idea" of the book.
Blue:
Cars and bars have nothing to do with it; they're merely the items that particular image has on the axes. They are analogues for choices one might make. I chose that image instead of the
one I previously used because the "bars and cars" image explicitly presents production possibilities, whereas the other one I used doesn't. The elements on the elements on the axes are irrelevant. What's relevant for this discussion of "good vs. not good" are the curves, movements from one to the next, and the things that make movements possible and/or actually effect movements.
Looking at what I said, one sees that it's an applied transformation of the economics notion of social welfare to identifying good behaviors.
- The "production possibilities set" is the set of behaviors one can perform, thus also the thoughts one may have yielding/inspiring them. It's quite literally the body of things that can be thought of and done. In economics, yes, it's about what an economy can produce, but in applying the concept in a "good vs. not good" context, producing goods and services are but a subset of the body of behaviors/thoughts that can be performed or had.
- The various curves represent the various mixes of behaviors one has chosen to perform, aka total utility[SUP]1[/SUP] (functional and emotional satisfaction; sure, usefulness is part of it, but it's not all of it, which is why I used the word utility and have been alluding to economics). Each curve that is "northeast of"/"higher than" one or more others represents one's having achieved more overall utility.
That which is good is that which expands the area of the possibilities set and/or that enables one to move from a "lower" curve to a "higher" one.
From the above, it's obvious that while an individual can derive more total utility from a host of things. For example:
- Person A may endogenously construe s/he obtains more total utility from becoming enabled to help or actually help another person, or him-/herself.
- Person B may endogenously construe s/he obtains more total utility from becoming enabled to harm or actually harming another person, or him-/herself.
Accordingly, there needs to be a way to determine whether the behavior thus enabled/undertaken is indeed good. The way to do that is to apply the same ideas described above to society as a whole. Behaviors individual members of a society take that expand the possibilities set and/or move society to a "higher" aggregate utility curve, i.e., that increase aggregate utility, are good behaviors/ideas. In contrast, those that reduce aggregate utility and/or that shrink the area of the possibilities set, though not necessarily evil[SUP]2[/SUP], are not good behaviors/ideas.
Pink and off-topic:
I sometimes wonder whether Socrates was even a real person. He's something of an early "Jesus figure," though with perhaps not quite as grand an ego for, AFAIK, he didn't declare himself a god incarnate: he's talked about, appears as a character, in writings of Plato, wherein he appears as the protagonist, Xenophon and Aristophanes, his "gospellers," as it were, yet, as far as we know, he didn't write a damn thing of his own. He's yet a font philosophy and wisdom who walked among men, shared his thoughts about the human condition and morality/ethics, and later acquiesced to his own demise.
Note:
- Obviously, utility itself isn't precisely measurable, but we can infer that X provides one with more or less utility than Y by comparing both to an exogenous to X and Y "thing" that is measurable (qualitatively or quantitatively) at the time one chooses or is considering to choose X over Y....hence one of the reasons for post 40's hyperlink to value theory and the ones for Bentham et al.
- Evil is nothing more than an extreme form of "not good."
