Most philosophers this century have insisted that "good" is simply a matter of personal preference and when I tell you that, say, "stealing" is wrong, I am merely expressing a personal point of view which cannot be backed up with any rational argument. They insist that there is no empirical test for the "goodness" or "badness" of an act. I, on the other hand, insist that there is and it is this: whatever satisfies our appetites and thereby reduces conscious mental activity (making us happier) is "good" for us. Conversely, whatever obstructs that satisfaction is "bad" for us.
The words "Good" and "Bad" are value judgements applied to actions which satisfy or do not satisfy our appetites and thus make us feel either "happy" or "sad". (Remember that we have appetites for highly sophisticated drives, ambitions and goals as well as for justice, compassion, security, love etc.) The ultimate test of efficient satisfaction of appetite is that we feel happier. After the performance of a "good" act, conscious mental activity has diminished - leaving awareness undiminished of course. That is why we categorise the act as "good". This is an empirical test which each of us can apply to anything that we do. A good act is one that feels good. It is one that, by reason of having satisfied our appetites, makes us feel happier; because we become aware of a reduction in the conscious mental activity going on in our heads which in turn expresses itself as happiness.
Even those philosophers who were most determined not to admit that good could be logically grounded relented a little and developed arguments for actions being declared "good". G E Moore said that statements can have "intrinsic value" while A J Ayer introduced the concept of "ethical force". Without realising it, and even though they both believed that something could only be real if it were empirically observable through the medium of the senses, they both reluctantly took into account what we could experience outside the realm of sensory perception. They considered what we could feel as grounds for "good" intuitively without overtly accepting that such feelings could be empirically grounded.
The key concept is this: feelings (like happiness) can be empirically grounded.
We are aware of more than just what our senses perceive. We are directly aware, to varying degrees, of what is going on in our body and what conditions prevail in our brain. Such data is real. Specific acts produce specific data - repeatably and reproducibly. If I accidentally hit my thumb with a hammer, I feel pain. If my boss promotes me, I feel happy. Who can deny that the mood of happiness/sadness exists in all its degrees from bliss through to absolute misery? We all have no trouble in accepting that pain, fear, misery and all the other moods and emotions directly accessible to the awareness really do exist, so why balk at the fact that happiness is a real mood and one that should figure in our calculations of what is good and what is bad. Happiness may well prove to be directly measurable; after all, when I am happy, fewer neurons are firing.
Basic, life-sustaining appetites yield to analysis of their "goodness" or "badness" with little difficulty. To take one of the simplest examples: hunger spurs us to act in order to find, prepare and eat a meal. Once we have filled our stomachs we will feel replete, satisfied and content. There is no longer any reason to continue with efforts to find food or with the conscious mental activity which that effort entails. A basic, life-sustaining act like that is easy to classify as "good" because, if we fail to find food to eat, we will suffer pangs of hunger, acute psychological trauma and (in the long term) we will die.
To summarise: Whatever reduces the amount of conscious mental activity in the normally alert and aware human brain amplifies the happiness in that brain because that is what happiness is. Such an event is described conventionally as "good". The only proviso is that calculations of a reduction in conscious mental activity must take into account all subsequent effects of the action.(For a reasonable period of time.) This means that although a rapist may claim that the act of rape satisfies an appetite in him and so, by reducing conscious mental activity, must therefore be deemed "good" for him, the total effect of such a despicable act - one that society as a whole abhors and rightly punishes vindictively - must be to increase conscious mental activity (i.e. misery) by a phenomenal amount in those affected by the act. In addition, imagine the guilt the criminal must feet once the urge has waned and the enormity of the act dawns on him; or, failing that, the permanent fear of being caught which such a debased individual must be forced to live with.
However, the question now arises whether or not a "good" act is always a "moral" one. "Good" relates to the individual while "moral" relates to the group in which that individual is located. (That group is ultimately the human race.) This question will be looked at in the section on Morality. We have been used to thinking about moral concepts as edicts handed down from a superpower when in fact they will turn out to have always been derived pragmatically. I will attempt to prove that if we obey general moral rules (like the ten commandments) we will feel happier because such rules have been derived with that outcome in mind.