If you were to ask anyone (Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Pope Pius X, Myra Hindley, Mother Theresa - name anyone you like) whether they thought they were good people then, any false modesty aside, they would surely answer "Yes". Now ask a random person whether they agreed: no such uniformity of assent would be forthcoming. On some of the names on that list it is possible that no-one would say they were good.
What can we make of that? What if we ask about particular issues: is slavery bad, is homosexuality bad, is unfaithfulness to ones spouse bad, is eating battery-farmed chicken bad? (to name just a few moral positions) we would not find universal agreement either. It is possible that some answers might be of the kind "Well, it depends on the circumstances, the time era of the issue). Even those who give answers that are qualified in this way will likely still feel that, if the question could be made more precise, then they should be able to give a clear cut answer.
Why is this? We have got very used to the idea that these questions should have definite answers. Our society often legislates the answer, or the prevailing moral climate determines an answer. So we are loath to believe that such questions have no answer. Indeed you may very well suspect that, unless a society had an agreement on the worth of an answer to these complex questions, the society would collapse in significant way because we could all behave as we felt like at the time. You might even think that, on an issue such as homosexuality, where society had legislated an answer that you didn't agree with, you would feel duty-bound to go along with the consensus rather than disrupt your society by public disagreement.
The conclusion I want to draw from these examples is that the idea of absolute good or absolute evil is too nebulous to sustain. This conclusion is unpalatable to many of us because it contradicts the way we have been educated to behave. We want to feel that we are good people who act as we do because of some absolute imperative that tells us how to behave. We have been conditioned to think like this sometimes because our parents have had to instil into us a model of behaviour that allows to rub along with our fellow humans, or our church has had offered us divinely inspired moral guidance, or our law-makers have offered absolutist reasons for certain behaviours, or important role models in our lives have set a strong example.
Yet most, if not all, of our moral positions are unsustainable as absolute positions - we cannot agree on them and it is not always just crazy people, or hardened contrarians, who cannot agree. My conclusion is simple: "goodness" or "evil" are not concepts that exist in an absolute sense.
I must add immediately that this does not mean one can therefore act as one pleases because the concept of acting as a good individual is meaningless. More of that later.
I believe that one cannot build "good" societies by first identifying the "good" qualities that one would like the society to have because the idea of a "good" quality is too elusive as we saw in the examples above. My model of societal growth is more chaotic than that. Societies grow from very small collections of people into the complex societies that we see all around us today. This growth has some features in common with the development of species arising generation by generation by random events. Some developments will arise and quickly fade away because they have not been conducive to the survival of the society - and some developments will cause long term thriving. In other words societies are complex systems whose future is a product of fortunate accidents (and the more fortunate the accident the longer will its consequences be felt). As an example, early Greek democracies (to be accurate, very crude quasi-democracies) arose more by accident than design - yet it was a a fortunate societal accident producing a prototype organisation which has lasted a very long time. An example on the other side is the National Socialist experiment of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s - again arising by the conjunction of exceptional conditions - this was not a successful accident as it only lasted two decades.
To repeat: "good" societies do not arise because of "good" qualities. On the contrary, it is the other way round. When a society has arisen it is legitimate to ask what about the society is good. Consider the society of the Roman republic and early imperium and ask that question. The Patricians would claim they lived in a wonderful society, economically prosperous, and intellectually vibrant; the Plebs would answer very differently. Yet both of them enjoyed an urban existence that was the envy of neighbouring tribes. I would judge that society to be relatively good - it certainly lasted for centuries. When it did collapse it left an intellectual legacy that people looked back on as "good" times. As that society developed into a mighty empire one can perhaps guess at the reasons for its longevity: perhaps it was the way that early consuls were appointed or, later, the rigorous training undergone in the legions, or the mild climate of the era. Romans themselves might say "we have a good way of appointing our consuls, or we have a very good army, or the gods have given us many good harvests". In other words, the judgement of whether Roman society was "good" is a post-hoc judgement rather than a template for why their society flourished.
I think one should look at our current societies in this way.
Consider the example of the modern USA. The Americans promote the myth that their national society was the result of deliberate design by the founding fathers. But I think that is far too simplistic. The awful things in their society were obviously not deliberately planned. But the successful aspects of it were either lucky (great natural resources, guns which enabled them to steal their land from the native population, the entrepreneurial spirit that was enabled by the natural wealth in resources and human capital) was also not deliberately planned. What has grown up has been a mixture of successes and failures and, quite naturally, they celebrate their successes and forget their failures, while pretending that the "American dream and their manifest destiny" are designed either by god or by their national spirit.
British society is an older and longer lasting example. For nearly a millenium (since the Norman conquest) it has evolved in a way where accidents have been largely responsible for the way it has changed. Magna Carta for example was definitely not the result of planned good government. The Hundred Years war was a mish-mash of successes and reverses (successes="good", reverses="bad"). The foundation of the British Royal Society in 1660 which ushered in an era of brilliant scientists was "good" but who among its founders could have foreseen that? These and many other examples make it very implausible that an intial set of good design principles are responsible for modern British society. On the other hand we can look at contemporary British society and observe some things that work very well (examples: the National Trust organisation, the rich artistic and cultural life in the big centres, the ancient beautiful buildings (ruined or not) etc. none of which were planned to develop as they have).
Finally, I will return to a point I mentioned above. Just because there is no such thing as absolute good doesn't mean that we should behave as moral delinquents. We can look around our society, spot the things that work well, and then do our best to push the successful parts of our society. For example, those parts of our society where there are undesirable actions, such as outright crime or tax-dodging, are sections of society which do not contribute to the smooth functioning of the society: this suggests that we avoid crime and tax-dodging.
It's really not very difficult. Don't appeal to those unreliable authoritative concepts which assume that goodness is an absolute concept. Instead, think about which parts of your society are successful, those likely to grow into societal success, and do your best to support them.
