The summum bonum is a concept in ethics. It refers to the greatest good or greatest pleasure. The term literally translates as "the highest good" from Latin; however, it has been used by other philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill.
The philosophical concept of summum bonum implies both that there exists some sort of objective measure for 'good' and that we can exert control over what makes an action more likely to occur.
Most people would pretty much agree that the summum bonum is to be happy and avoid suffering. This position is adopted by utilitarianism, which holds that actions are morally right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.
However, there are other types of ethical theories that do not necessarily equate the summum bonum with pleasure. For example, virtue ethics holds that moral worth is a function of two things: (1) character traits and (2) actions.
Aristotle, the father of virtue ethics, identified ten character virtues (wisdom, courage, temperance and so on) which he called the moral virtues because they governed a person's actions.
The philosopher David Hume identified three virtues: benevolence, justice and self-control. According to him, virtue is a quality of the mind that makes "the mind agreeable and useful".
In general terms, a virtue is defined as 'a good or valued attribute.' Thus it encompasses personal characteristics such as integrity, honesty and respect for others.
The virtue of benevolence refers to a feeling or disposition which inclines one to have goodwill for and concern about others, including the desire to help them. This is often used as part of the basis for justifying political systems.
Log in:
You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.
This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize Llama 3.1 405b, a neural network trained by Meta.
Llama is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.
Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.
Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.
