Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Arena Magazine

Representing 'goodness': Valerie Krips on the trouble with virtue.

Article Excerpt
It is more or less generally agreed that, in the largely secular West, we are disenchanted with ideas that imply order and continuity in the universe, or with frameworks held in common. So we cannot, like Plato, define goodness in terms we assume would be accepted by any reasonable person. Instead we negotiate within a series of contradictory understandings of what goodness is and what it means to lead a good life.

The question of what makes a life good is confronted directly in Michael Apted's Amazing Grace(2006). There seems little doubt that Apted's intention was to represent a good man setting out to do a good deed. And who can doubt that William Wilberforce's efforts in persuading the British parliament to abolish the slave trade was anything but good? All the same, even as Apted's film deals diligently, if not reverently, with the eighteen years it took for the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade to pass, it reveals certain difficulties about representing goodness, such as what we mean by it, how we know it, and how it might be shown.

Our current notions are, generally speaking, human-based and circulate around ideas of freedoms and rights, and their implicit responsibilities. These are largely attached to a broader notion of the person as being part of a greater whole--an idea currently under renewed attack. However that may be, it is from a base of humanness that we get our particularly modern sense that it is within the everyday, and the ordinary life, that we locate our moral stances and try to live by them. This puts us a long way from Plato, whose ideas about the good were all to do with ideals, with a life lived with an eye to the extraordinary, and the struggle between...