So in our ordinary English use of good...

So in our ordinary English use of good, “good, but not kingly, courageous, or cunning” makes perfectly good sense; but in Homer, “ἀγαθός, but not kingly, courageous, or clever” would not even be a morally eccentric form of judgment, but as it stands simply an unintelligible contradiction. How do adjectives of appraisal, such as ἀγαθός and others, function in Homer?

First of all, to ascribe the qualities for which they stand to someone is to make a factual statement, in the sense that whether what you have said is true or false is settled by the man’s performances and settled simply and solely by his performances. The question, Is he ἀγαθός? is the same as the question, Is he courageous, clever, and kingly? And this is answered by answering the question, Does he, and has he, fought, plotted, and ruled with success?

The point of such ascriptions is in part predictive. To call a man ἀγαθός is to tell your hearers what sort of conduct they can expect from him. We ascribe dispositions to the agent in the light of his behavior in past episodes. From this alone it is strikingly plain that the Homeric use of ἀγαθός does not square at all with what many recent philosophers have thought to be the characteristic properties of moral, and indeed of evaluative, predicates.

For it has often been held3 to be an essential feature of such predicates that any judgments in which one is ascribed to a subject cannot follow logically as a conclusion from premises which are merely factual. No matter what factual conditions are satisfied, these by themselves can never provide sufficient conditions for asserting that an evaluative predicate holds of a subject. But in the Homeric poems, that a man has behaved in certain ways is sufficient to entitle him to be called ἀγαθός.

Now, assertions as to how a man has behaved are certainly in the ordinary sense factual; and the Homeric use of ἀγαθός is certainly in the ordinary sense evaluative. The alleged logical gulf between fact and appraisal is not so much one that has been bridged in Homer. It has never been dug. Nor is it clear that there is any ground in which to dig.

Moreover, I fail to be ἀγαθός if and only if I fail to bring off the requisite performances; and the function of expressions of praise and blame is to invoke and to justify the rewards of success and the penalties of failure. You cannot avoid blame and penalty by pointing out that you could not help doing what you did, that failure was unavoidable.