Sources of the Good

• Reason
• Revelation; God
• Good motives; a good Will (Kant)
• Emulation of good people
• Habit (Aristotle, Franklin, Dewey)
• History: Turnbull (Liberal Education 371, via Franklin, Lemay 336n.): "That the useful Lessons…are much better taught and enforced from Characters, Actions, and Events, developing the inward Springs of human Conduct, and the different Consequences of Actions, whether with Respect to private or publick Good, than by abstract Philosophical Lectures."
• Tradition and authority, and thus parents and elders and teachers
• Education (Locke, via Franklin, Lemay 343n.; Hutchins)
• Experience (Franklin, Lemay 1161)
• The passions, imagination, emotions, and all kinds of other seemingly irrational things (e.g., Booth's list, p. 91: "intuition, will, action, choice, value, feeling, motive, drive, emotion, experience, wisdom, eloquence")
• The True
• The Beautiful
• Aristotle's list (Rhetoric 1362b10-28): happiness, individual and community virtues (e.g. justice, courage, temperance, magnanimity, magnificence, moderation), bodily excellences (e.g. health, beauty), pleasure, wealth, friends and friendship, honor and reputation, the faculties of speech and memory and action, the sciences and arts, and life. Also any other good means are sources of good ends.
• Right opinion
• Love of the good (Aristotle 1363b)
• Literature as philosophy (Nussbaum)
• Rhetoric/persuasion (Isocrates, Aristotle, McKeon)
• Creativity
• Peace and immortality and "the glory and honor appropriate to it," and "all things necessary for the preservation and recovery of peace": light, speech, air, water, food, clothing, shelter, adornment. Repeating Varro: "pleasure, rest, a combination of these, and the primary objects of nature" (Augustine, City of God).
• Now the things we want are good things. First, we want our private and individual good, our economic well-being. We want food, clothing, and shelter, and a chance for our children. Second, we want the common good: peace, order, and justice. But most of all we want a third order of good, our personal or human good. We want, that is, to achieve the limit of our moral, intellectual, and spiritual powers. This personal, human good is the highest of all the goods we seek. As the private good, which is our individual economic interest, is subordinate to the common good, which is the interest of the community, so the common good is subordinate to our personal and human good and must be ordered to it. Any state in which the common good is sacrificed to private interests, or in which the moral, intellectual, and spiritual good of the citizens is sacrificed to the political organization is not a state. It is a fraud subsisting by force.
            Robert Maynard Hutchins, Education for Freedom