the guise of the goods
A philosophical thesis about human psychology is that we are motivated by what we take to be good, that our actions and desires are under the "guise of the good." On this view, it would be incoherent to want something that we think is bad or to do something that we think is bad. But of course we want things that are bad and do things that we think are bad. What kind of ignorant Pollyanna could propose this thesis?
The thesis might be wrong, but it's not that obviously wrong: the thesis is that we think there's something good about what we're doing or what we want, and that goodness has something to do with the motivation that we have towards doing it. We might still do things that aren't overall for the best for us--it would take a much larger leap to claim that we always do what we think is best--but we do things because we think there's at least something good about them: the goodness is somehow necessary to the motivation. (Or the goodness is somehow "connected" to what's motivating: "connected" how? There are a lot of spatial and mechanical metaphors in explaining psychology, both in philosophical explanations and in psychologists' explanations, which probably shows something shaky about the entire enterprise--another metaphor).
A counterexample to the guise-of-the-good thesis wouldn't therefore be a case where we did something that we thought was bad. The counterexample would be a case where we did something that we thought was entirely bad. (Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost is the classic illustration of this when he says, "Evil, be thou my good.") Or a counterexample would be a case where we did something that we were completely neutral about, if that's possible. The best example I have is the smoker mindlessly pulling out another cigarette without any thought one way or the other about whether they wanted it.
I find the thesis as plausible as I find any broad philosophical thesis about our psychology. It's right as a generalization, but there's no reason to think psychological theses at this level of abstraction should hold in borderline cases anyway, cases like psychopaths, caricatures of evil villains, addition or compulsion, or anything else like that. The only way to ensure a broad, abstract psychological thesis holds in every case is to turn it from interesting to boring, even tautological: "what we do is what we see as good because, by definition, being motivated to do something is seeing it as good"--something like that.
What I don't find plausible is that we don't have much use for the category "good" in our everyday psychology. What we have instead are many thick evaluative terms, which entail or even include some positive aspect, but that aren't simply variants of "good." Kind, for example, or tasty are psychological categories that we use in our reasoning. Even if we don't think of these terms explicitly when we act (we don't think of "good" when we act either), we have them accessible when we're thinking of what we're doing. I hand the book to the person who dropped it because I see something kind or polite or neighborly about it. If I see something good about it, it's probably because I first saw it in one of these other ways. If I try this new food, it's because I see it as tasty or I see eating it as adventurous or I see taking a bite of what you offered me in your own home as polite. I might not think these words to myself, but these are the ways I understand my action.
The evidence that I understand my action in one of these ways isn't that I think these words to myself. I might, but I might not. The evidence comes from how I would defend my actions if challenged. If someone tells me that it tastes bad, I won't eat it if I was eating because it was tasty but will eat it if I was being polite. If someone tells me simply that it's "not good," I'd need to know more.
There are conflicting norms or values when we decide what to do, except in those simple cases where something is so clear or urgent that all the competing norms are ignored or irrelevant or overridden. Death and emergency cases are the most obvious examples: someone will die otherwise, so there's so obviously one right thing to do, and we can ignore the competing issues. (That's why these cases are so clean for ethical examples, but so terrible for understanding ethics.) But most ethical cases are similar, but so obvious that we don't even bother thinking about them: I could take the peanut butter out of your shopping cart or walk to the aisle to get my own, and it's so obvious that I should get my own that we don't think of these cases as being ethical at all.
In most ethical cases worth thinking about, though, we ask ourselves what we ought to do (or just "what to do,"), and the way we answer the question assumes a classification of our actions into relevant evaluative categories, like polite and tasty and scary, which we then assess in their interactions with each other. This is ordinary ethical reasoning: it's impolite, but it's the kind thing to do; or it's profitable but mean. When we settle on something to do, it is plausibly under the guise of one of these goods, even if not of the good.
