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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Short History of Ethics: a History of Moral Philosophy From the Homeric Age To the Twentieth Century CHAPTER 2: THE PREPHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY OF “GOOD” AND THE TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY THE SUGGESTION that asking and answering moral questions is one thing, and asking and answering philosophical questions about morality quite another thing, may conceal from us the fact that in asking moral questions of a certain kind with sufficient persistence we may discover that we cannot answer them until we have asked and answered certain philosophical questions.

A discovery of this kind provided the initial impulse for philosophical ethics in Greek society. For at a certain period, when moral questions were asked, it became clear that the meaning of some of the key words involved in the framing of those questions was no longer clear and unambiguous. Social changes had not only made certain types of conduct, once socially accepted, problematic, but had also rendered problematic the concepts which had defined the moral framework of an earlier world.

The social changes in question are those reflected in Greek literature in the transition from the Homeric writers through the Theognid corpus to the sophists. The society reflected in the Homeric poems is one in which the most important judgments that can be passed upon a man concern the way in which he discharges his allotted social function.

It is because certain qualities are necessary to discharge the function of a king or a warrior, a judge or a shepherd, that there is a use for such expressions as authoritative and courageous and just. The word ἀγαθός, ancestor of our good, is originally a predicate specifically attached to the role of a Homeric nobleman. “To be agathos,” says W. H.

Adkins, “one must be brave, skilful and successful in war and in peace; and one must possess the wealth and (in peace) the leisure which are at once the necessary conditions for the development of these skills and the natural reward of their successful employment.”2 Ἀγαθός is not like our word good in many of its Homeric contexts, for it is not used to say that it is “good” to be kingly, courageous, and clever-that is, it is not used to commend these qualities in a man, as our word good might be used by a contemporary admirer of the Homeric ideal.

It is rather that ἀγαθός is a commendatory word because it is interchangeable with the words which characterize the qualities of the Homeric ideal.