Everyone wants to be thought good. By the people that they consider good. But “good” is a divisive concept. And it always will be.

Can goodness be defined empirically? No. Goodness is subjective. No two people can ever completely agree on what “good” means. Goodness is what people prefer. What people prefer is good. People prefer different things, both innately, and culturally. So, good is arbitrary.

Virtually nobody likes that assessment. People are animals: organisms produced by, and subject to, the whims and influence of biological evolution. We are products of a strange and accidental system. Part of what it means to be human is to be arrogant and self-assured, and to believe that what we like is not merely what we like, is not merely our preference, but is objectively better than the alternative.

However, we can—at least, some of us can—see this quality in ourselves. We can see it as an impulse, without having to let it overpower us.

This, too me, is the real good. I recognize that it also submits to the same relativism of all assertions of goodness. And this irritates me in the same way that anyone is irritated when their preferences are demoted from truth to simple opinion. But that’s the way it is.

But there is more to the story. While no two people agree about everything, usually lots of people will agree about some things, or at least one thing.

There are also different classifications of subjective good. Some of them are shared by almost everyone.

As living beings, we innately believe that—or act as if—living is good. With qualifications. If too few are met, life becomes miserable and bad. Liking life means liking a certain life, in a certain environment: the one to which we were adapted by evolution. We like what lets us live. We love what lets us live well.

It is thus safe to say that most people think that an environment well suited to good living is a good thing. And it would be fair to say, within that context, that many things count as objectively good for people. Similarly, certain things qualify as objectively good for living things. Different organisms have different needs and expectations, and thus different goods, but they have many in common. In general, they come down to a good environment.

People are weird, however, because we live in two different environments: physical—including ecological—and social. It is much more difficult to find objective goods in the social environment. Society is incredibly arbitrary. Sociologists and psychologists have done tried to work out what is universally good for people.

Unfortunately, there is a key problem with people. We are competitive. So what is good for one person (or society) is indirectly bad for another person (or society).

I do think that there are people who want to transcend the inherent contradictions of social competition. But I think they are few in number, and not widely understood or respected. Competition, of one sort or another, is taken as a given by most, and relished by more than a few, up to and including the existence of violent conflict as a means of resolving disagreements. Some people are born to fight, and even to kill.

I feel like many people who don’t really dig violence do not recognize just how much some people like it. Or they think that only their really bad enemies like it. Whereas, the propensity for violence, and other extreme forms of competition, are pretty evenly spread out.

Maybe not perfectly. Maybe so-called “conservatives” are more comfortable with violence. The conservative worldview is essentially based on a belief that certain disagreements cannot be resolved through cooperation and compromise, and that everyone who is not expressly in agreement is an enemy who deserves destruction.

But extremism is hardly absent from other political attitudes. Even pluralists accept that reactionaries and authoritarians are probably a lost cause, and need to be dealt with harshly, if not terminally. Yet there is no love lost for dead Nazis. (I myself am conflicted.)

How do we live in a violent world, when we prefer non-violence, but others are not only fine with it, but jump at the chance to deploy it? Well, it seems that no one can afford to be a purist in this regard. And so we can never have a perfectly good world, or be perfectly good people, unless everyone becomes perfectly good, and we all agree on everything, and accept whatever the fates decree, like good like Buddhas.

If we did that, we would surely go extinct, the moment we encountered a new and dangerous situation, if survival required experimenting with different approaches. Not that Buddha would mind. Buddhism is a philosphy of passive suicide: withdrawal from the world. Clearly, Buddhism is not a philosophy meant for survivors.

So we must accept some badness—conflict, disagreement, struggle, fighting, violence, war—in the world, in order to also enjoy goodness over long periods and through many generations.

The harder question is, how much of conflict is enough? How can we reduce it to the minimum amount?

Maybe this is a pointless question. Many things in life are uncertain. Actually, all things are uncertain, except in highly constrained and contrived situations, where causal rules apply. Outside of these experimental situations, anything goes, nothing can be reliably predicted. There is no way to even measure the amount of conflict in the world, let alone prescribe an acceptable level. Everything is an ongoing experiment in an environment of constant flux.

Too much flux, in my opinion. But my opinion is worth little. I can withdraw from the chaos of the world. I can build walls and buffers, to try to keep it out. But it is an illusion to think that there is an outside to which chaos can be banished. We are made of chaos. So trying to exclude it from our lives is not good. Seeking the impossible cannot be good.

What about the opposite: accepting the limits of the possible? Well, maybe that’s not good, either. I am not decided here. We know that some things are impossible, but only within very narrowly defined physical constraints. For example, I cannot personally fly. But I can fly on a plane, or other machine. If you allow for machines, many things that were once impossible became possible.

Is this a form of cheating? It is a rhetorical exploit, frequently abused. Anything is possible, if you remove all the constraints that reality imposes, including especially limits on time, energy, and understanding. Enough time and energy can overcome any obstacle. But this is disingenuous. Individual humans, even entire societies, are constrained.

The primary goal of life is to seek out new sources of energy and material resources, to use them to grow and survive, in order to make more time to seek out more resources. Ad infinitum. Immortality is the goal of life, and human societies. But it is not an option for individuals. Not literally. Well, that’s only my opinion. A person's definition of immortality, and the degree to which they believe it is possible, determines a lot about what they think is good. At least, what they think is instrumentally good for society.

In short, what is good is contentious. If it is not contentious, we don’t talk about it. Or go to war over it. We disagree about what is good for us in the social environment. There is no empirically proven way to overcome these disagreements. We must find compromise, or fight, or go to war, or alternate. Somehow, we must navigate through these perilous waters. It feels terrible, but it is necessary, if humankind is to survive in an unpredictable and aloof universe.

Then again, if we don’t survive, does it really matter? To whom?