More Relative Goodness

Abstract The signature claim of Aristotelian Naturalism is that goodness is species-relative. Being good is a matter of being a good human, a good dog, a good F— where F is the kind of thing one is. And it boasts a kind of adequacy to the phenomena of our ordinary evaluative language and practices. But our goodness attributions vary semantically not only based on differences between species but also based on differences within species. This chapter argues that Aristotelians have just as much reason to believe that standards of goodness are relative to characteristic capacities an individual has not only based on her species membership but also on her bodily, social, and environmental context. This thesis is called More Relative Goodness.