What is good, anyway?

John Jacobson, who i’m connected to on Facebook, recently put up a public screed questioning the concept of good. The person he was responding to, named Brian, originally wrote:

‘If we want to say this is good, then we need a standard by which it can be measured. If you can’t measure it, if you can’t produce the definition … and not just a subjective definition … then “good” does not mean anything.’

Brian put up a response that I can appreciate; I thought it was worth a public response of my own.

The line of reasoning above (it’s worth reading the original post) assumes a bunch of things I don’t agree with, so I’m going to have to step back a bit. Bear with. Even if you don’t like it, I dare submit you’ll agree I did the work.

I’ve got a degree in math, the “hardest” of the “hard” STEM fields. By hard, I mean an answer is simply correct or incorrect. We can’t ponficate around it. If X minus seven is zero, then X is seven. That’s it. We can PROVE things in math.

Except we can’t. At least, we can’t prove things to the level of proof John is asking for here. The branches of math are all based on Axioms that are unprovable, unproven, and simply assumed correct. You probably remember the simplest and most basic axioms from Algebra: a=a (reflexive), if a=b and b=c then a=c (transitive), if a=b then b=a (symmetric), and so on.

Axioms usually seem obvious and intuitive.