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I've never gone much for classic beach holidays myself; in fact I've usually not gone on them. You know the kind of thing: stay in a hotel full of well-meaning people trying to get you to eat yoghurt blindfolded then sing ``Agadoo'', wander around what was once probably a rather nice fishing village being harrassed by tradesfolk, lie on the beach getting sunburnt and, out of sheer boredom, reading some trashy novel you would normally set aside in favour of a good telephone directory - the list of indignities goes on. However, this time I did the unthinkable, paid a substantial amount of money to stay in a hotel on Turkey's Mediterranean coast (thank God I volunteered to teach summer school this year!) and actually enjoyed myself.
Actually, a lot of the enjoyment came from what we didn't do rather than what we did (a sort of Taoist ``non-action'' idea). No soaking up every carcinogenic ray of sun possible, no sight-seeing, no discos and, apart from one evening when my wife was feeling anthropological, no joining in activities by the pool (this latter exception being a truly excrutiating trilingual comedy show by the ``animation'' team, and even then we left before they could haul us into the ``club dance'')1. But the main thing I liked was just lying on the beach (in the shade) reading a monster compilation of writings on ethics. Yes, really.
OK, I admit it's not everyone's cup of tea, but for me it was heaven, burning brain cells trying to follow obscure philosophical arguments while in a state of complete physical relaxation and aesthetic satisfaction: before me the sea, above me the sky, beside me a beautiful woman (my wife) and around me, I have to admit, quite a few other good-looking women. It was even enough to inspire me to finally get around to reading Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morality, which is exactly as dull as the title suggests. Wondering if I was being unfair, I turned to my wife and asked (loose translation from Turkish):
``You ever read Kant?''
``Who?''
``You know, Kant. German philosopher.''
``Oh Immanuel Kant'' (is there some other, better-known Mustafa Kant, I wonder?2) ``Yeah, read him ages ago. Boring sod.''
So there you go. Actually, I was only reading Kant so that I could understand Philippa Foot's devastating critique of Kantian ethics, which goes by the deceptively uninspiring name of Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives - not the kind of title that's going to get you on any best-seller list, but a surprisingly good read if you like that kind of thing. However, what really got me thinking was a hoary old piece by G.E.Moore,who argues that ``good'' is a simple concept like ``yellow''. You know yellow when you see it, you can say what kinds of things are yellow, and you can even give a scientific description of why some things appear yellow, but you can't actually define ``yellow'' because it has no components. It's just, well, yellow.
This is completely opposed to the way I understand ``good''; in fact I bore my friends about this and have written a whole essay on the subject elsewhere on this site (Yet More Thoughts on ``The Good''). IMNSHO, if we say that something is good, we mean that it is good for some person (or for people in general) in terms of realising some desire. A good knife is good for cutting things, a good comedy makes you laugh, and a good deed helps someone to do something (like helping an old lady cross the road, to use the classic Boy Scout example). In other words, nothing is just good - a good corkscrew would be a bad knife, for example.
It was at this point that I looked up and saw a truly awe-inspiring breast (I forgot to mention that this was a topless beach). ``Surely,'' I thought ``this breast is good in and of itself. It requires no other purpose, no utility. It simply is, and its very existence is good. It is fundamentally good in the way that a rose, a sunset or an elegant mathematical formula is good.''
OK, so far, so, er, good. What released me from my mystical reverie was the sight of another pair of breasts, this time rather ugly. Now, if I am to say that the first breasts were inherently good, would I describe the second pair as inherently bad? I imagine that in terms of providing babies with milk, the second pair would do as well as the first; all I was doing, as it happened, was elevating my aesthetic tastes to a pseudo-metaphysical law (and after all, the owner of the breasts may have thought that they were positively beautiful). We might say that, on the whole, breasts are good things: they provide nourishment for babies and, on the whole, they look rather nice, but that's as far as it goes, unfortunately. A breast can be a practical good or an aesthetic good, but I can't see any way it can be a moral good, except in terms of the former. A pity, really.
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