In order to develop my own theories of goodness and goods, I investigate ten modern analytic theories, which fall into five types. (1) The first type is represented by G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross, who characterise goodness as a simple, non-natural, indefinable property. This leaves them, I argue, with an apodictic and incomplete list of goods. (2) John Finnis and David Brink build on this non-naturalism, maintaining that goods are discovered properly by (practical) reason. But the mode of this discovery is too a prioristic or rationalistic. (3) Derek Parfit and Sophie Grace Chappell offer what I call ‘under-theorised’ theories of goods. Parfit’s ‘objective list’ theory is highly stipulative, while Chappell’s theory relies on claims about what happens to motivate people. (4) James Griffin and Richard Kraut propose welfarist theories. This reduction of goods to goods-for misconstrues human flourishing as a substantive, observable, phenomenon and fails to deal with what I call ‘refractory’ desires. (5) Last, I look at two ‘quasi-Aristotelian’ theories, those of Hurka and Nussbaum. These both go wrong by rejecting Aristotle’s teleological naturalism, and Nussbaum’s theory is too narrowly political.

In Chapter 4, I (a) explore three alternative perfectionist theories and show where they fall short. I then (b) move on to three critiques of perfectionism, arguing that they all fail. (a) Tom Hurka’s perfectionist theory jettisons teleological essentialism, yet tacitly relies on it. It advocates an ‘intuitive’ and ‘explanatory’ elucidation of the human essence, though these are not demonstratively superior to Aristotle’s rival method. George Sher’s ‘poor man’s Aristotelianism’ proves similarly unconvincing, yielding (by his own admission) an incomplete roster of perfections. Richard Boyd’s ‘homeostatic cluster’ theory, for its part, also falls short, relying on an intuitionistic and question-begging notion of ‘human need’. (b) Dale Dorsey’s critique of perfectionism fails to grasp the teleological nature of Aristotelian essentialism and relies on a defeasible set of counter-examples. Philip Kitcher’s critique centres on a ‘reductivist challenge’, which assumes (wrongly, I argue) that human nature must be characterisable in a wholly ‘value-free’ way. Last, I tackle the ‘analytic existentialist’ critique, which relies too heavily (I argue) on metaphor and normative abstraction.

Advocates of the binary theory believe that in every choice situation every act is either right or wrong (if it has any deontic property at all) but never a bit of both. This chapter reconstructs and responds to six arguments for the binary theory. According to the first, it is impossible to make sense of what it would mean to say that some acts are a bit right and a bit wrong. The second argument seeks to identify an analytic connection between, for instance, calling something right and implying that a person ought to be praised. The point of the third argument is that for gradualists it seems difficult to give a plausible account of how a rational and morally conscientious agent would choose. The fourth argument holds that the binary theory provides a more convincing account of moral conflicts than the gradualist account outlined in Chapter 2. The fifth argument is a generalization of Aristotle’s claim there is no margin of error in ethics. Finally, the sixth argument seeks to show that it is possible to articulate the intuition that RIGHT and WRONG permit of degrees in a manner that is compatible with the binary theory.