This is the academic website for the Principle of Goodness. Our goal here is to collect all reasoned discussion about the Principle, including materials submitted by others, even if critical. Only if all aspects of this important ethical theory can be examined, will readers be able to form a reasoned opinion.

It is very hard to explain a really revolutionary idea, especially in the field of ethics, where human beings have had, it might be argued, only a handful of such ideas in all history. It is harder still when the revolutionary idea corresponds to the intuitive understanding of a large proportion of humanity, including its best and wisest thinkers and teachers, because, on the one hand, people will say "I know that - tell me something new" and yet, on the other, the fact of our present time is simply that what is usually advocated is a quite different ethic (the greatest happiness of the greatest number), which does not match that understanding and which typically leads to moral confusion and incapacity to come to reasonable moral agreements.

By putting the understanding of the greatest human souls into the simplest words, the Principle of Goodness has started a new age of moral understanding: an age in which reasoned thought about ethics leading to agreement and empowerment for positive action is at last possible. This has consequences. Many terrible ideas have been strangely attractive to many people, including many of great intellect, and they have accordingly been enshrined as leading ideas in philosophy. This Principle exposes the lot of them for what they are. The destructive and, yes, silly, philosophies of the Nietzsches and Marxes and Derridas and Foucaults of this world have had their day, and simple, clear analyses can now show how and why they have caused so much misery for so many. Likewise, the failure is demonstrated of the beguiling, yet false, theory that our moral goal should be to maximise happiness as if it were a bulk quantity, ignoring the real tragedies of real individuals on account of some 'greater good' that the poor, minorities, the powerless, and the unheard (including animals) somehow are judged to owe to others merely by virtue of numbers or importance. And what is right, and what is inadequate, in the moral philosophy of that genius Kant can be laid out clearly and the reasons for his failure to formulate a sound and comprehensive moral framework for the world can be easily understood.

These are big claims. Perhaps you already think they are bombastic claims, doomed to disappointment. Well, the proof of the pudding, as they say... If I am wrong, then, with careful and close reasoning, show me why. If I am not, then please incorporate the Principle of Goodness into your own life, understand it, practise it, and teach it to others.