Good Robber

            About five months ago I put two Royal Copenhagen “Christmas at Niagara Falls” plates up for sale on Kijiji on behalf of my upstairs neighbour, David. I started them out at $40 each, after two months took $10 off and two months later I knocked the price down to $20. On Monday I finally got a call from a collector in Niagara that wanted to come into town on Tuesday and buy them. It turns out he graduated from OCA in 1980, three years before I started working there. He’s also one of the last people in the world that only has a land-line and he can’t call me when he arrives, so I’ll have to meet him in the donut shop.

            I spent most of the day working on my Philosophy essay. Here’s a bit of what I have so far:

            Anselm’s Monologian attempts to prove the existence of god by presenting qualities that human beings value, such as goodness and greatness. He then elevates each of these qualities to their comparative adjectives, “better” and “greater” in order to show that every quality we recognize can have a purer manifestation. He concludes that each value must have a superlative, as in “best” and “greatest” at a plateau that he considers not only to be the utmost manifestation of these qualities, but also their source, or god, which he insists is the meeting place of all superlatives and the source of all existence, and which must necessarily be the source of its own existence.

He presents these qualities as what we have in common with each other, the rest of creation and ultimately with god. Of one quality, he says that we all share a common goodness. Goodness for Anselm is not thought in terms of behaviour, as in children being good boys and girls. He relates the assessment of comparative goodness with the degree to which something is useful, as in his example of a horse being good through its strength or its speed. He asserts that a human being better than a horse and does not venture to prove this point, but certainly if goodness is equated with degree of utility it would not be difficult to conclude that in general a human has more utility and therefore goodness than a horse or any other creature that is known to humanity.

Continuing with Anselm’s equating of usefulness with goodness, since god, according to Anselm is the superlative manifestation of goodness, although he does not specifically refer to god as useful, it would be by Anselm’s definition the ultimate utility. He does not in this text delineate the utilitarian relationship that he thinks god has with humanity other than to be the source of all existence, including the existence of the quality of goodness. The only way that he presents the utility of goodness specifically in the Monologian is through his example of a horse being good through either strength or speed. He does however indicate by an inverted example how he understands usefulness in human beings. He states that a fast and strong robber is not good because they are harmful, which is the opposite of useful, but also the opposite of helpful and so from this it can be concluded that a good human is also useful or helpful and that the best human being would be the most useful or helpful. Anselm does not speak of usefulness or harmfulness except in relation to human beings being helped or harmed and this suggests that the goodness of things is valued according to how useful they are to human beings. This would include human beings being seen as good according to how useful or helpful they are to each other.

But if usefulness and goodness are synonymous in Anselm’s reckoning then how can human beings be perceived as good by a self-existent superior being that is supposed to be the source of all goodness? Of what use are human beings to an entity that is fully self-supporting?  If human beings are not useful to god, then from god’s perspective human beings would have no goodness.

Regarding Anselm’s example of the horse, from the animal’s perspective, what is useful and therefore good would not necessarily be the same as the utilitarian expectations that humans have of horses. Speed and strength in a horse might very well be useful both for humans as users of horses and for the well-being and survival of horses in a herd. But other qualities that would be useful and therefore good for horses may be detrimental to a horse’s utilitarian function and therefore goodness for a human being. For example, a stallion that is not intended for breeding is usually more useful to a user of horses if he is gelded, because otherwise he will often be hard to control. But the qualities that would make a horse difficult for a human to control would be useful and therefore good for a horse in the wild.

Regarding Anselm’s example of the fast and strong robber representing the opposite of goodness because of harmfulness, the legend of Robin Hood, who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, comes to mind. There are also many cases in historical conflicts in which stealing from the enemy is considered useful and therefore good. But what is useful and good for one side in a war is almost always harmful for the other side.

The fact that there are conflicting goodnesses contradicts Anselm’s claim that there is a common goodness in nature with only differences of degree and level that has its source in the goodness of god.  If there truly is a commonality of goodness in all things, it could not be discerned by utility.

            It is not clear why Anselm accepts the concept of a supreme being going on forever as more plausible than an infinite procession of succeeding superior manifestations of these qualities.