Value theory in the context of "Good"

Humans, scientifically known as Homo sapiens, are primates that belong to the biological family of great apes and are characterized by hairlessness, bipedality, and high intelligence. Humans have large brains compared to body size, enabling more advanced cognitive skills that facilitate successful adaptation to varied environments, development of sophisticated tools, and formation of complex social structures and civilizations.

Humans are highly social, with individual humans tending to belong to a multi-layered network of distinct social groups – from families and peer groups to corporations and political states. As such, social interactions between humans have established a wide variety of values, social norms, languages, and traditions (collectively termed institutions), each of which bolsters human society. Humans are also highly curious: the desire to understand and influence phenomena has motivated humanity's development of science, technology, philosophy, mythology, religion, and other frameworks of knowledge; humans also study themselves through such domains as anthropology, social science, history, psychology, and medicine. As of 2025, there are estimated to be more than 8 billion living humans.

An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the nature of reality, especially the nature of society and proposed solutions for its normative problems. Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by either rejecting, producing or extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values.

Normativity concerns the standards of what people ought to do, believe, or value. It is a quality of rules, judgments, or concepts that prescribe how things should be or what individuals may, must, or must not do. Normative claims express what ought to be the case, such as "you should not smoke". They contrast with descriptive claims about what is the case, such as "you smoked yesterday". Normativity shapes many everyday activities, such as decision-making, evaluating outcomes, criticizing others, and justifying actions.

Researchers discuss many types of normativity. Practical normativity is about what to do, while theoretical normativity concerns what to believe. Deontic normativity deals with what is allowed, required, or forbidden, whereas evaluative normativity addresses the values underlying normative assessments. Objective normativity encompasses requirements that do not depend on personal views, in contrast to subjective normativity, which is about standards relative to subjective perspectives. A normative assessment is pro tanto if it is partial by only taking certain aspects into account, unlike all-things-considered judgments, which factor in all relevant aspects. Other distinctions are based on the domain of assessment, such as moral, social, legal, and linguistic norms. Some categories may overlap, and there are academic disagreements about whether all these types are genuine forms of normativity.

In moral philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for judgement about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act (including omission from acting) is one that will produce a good outcome. Consequentialism, along with eudaimonism, falls under the broader category of teleological ethics, a group of views which claim that the moral value of any act consists in its tendency to produce things of intrinsic value. Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act (or in some views, the rule under which it falls) will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative. Different consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods, with chief candidates including pleasure, the absence of pain, the satisfaction of one's preferences, and broader notions of the "general good".

Consequentialism is usually contrasted with deontological ethics (or deontology): deontology, in which rules and moral duty are central, derives the rightness or wrongness of one's conduct from the character of the behaviour itself, rather than the outcomes of the conduct. It is also contrasted with both virtue ethics, which is concerned with the character of the agent rather than on the nature or consequences of the act (or omission) itself, and pragmatic ethics, which treats morality like science: advancing collectively as a society over the course of many lifetimes, such that any moral criterion is subject to revision.

In ethics and value theory, perfectionism is the persistence of will in obtaining the optimal quality of spiritual, mental, physical, and material being. Thomas Hurka describes perfectionism as follows:

Roderick Milton Chisholm (/ˈtʃɪzəm/ CHIZ-əm; November 27, 1916 – January 19, 1999) was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, deontology, deontic logic and the philosophy of perception.

Richard and Fred Feldman, writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, remark that he "is widely regarded as one of the most creative, productive, and influential American philosophers of the 20th Century."