The Golden Mean and the Nature of the Good

What is it to say that a thing is good or valuable? To answer this question, The Golden Mean and the Nature of the Good engages in conversation with ancient and recent thinkers, including Aristotle, the Cynics, and Immanuel Kant. Glen Koehn rejects several widely held ideas about value, instead offering a thoroughly end-relative theory in the spirit of modern pragmatism. Koehn suggests that certain dilemmas such as whether value is “subjective” or “objective” and whether things are good “instrumentally” or “as ends in themselves” are defective and discusses some consequences for aesthetic criticism and the relativity of taste in the final chapters. An often-overlooked case of goal-oriented goodness is the virtuous Mean, understood along roughly Aristotelian lines. This ambitious and clearly written book explores Aristotle’s idea of an intermediate between deficiency and excess and argues that, suitably reinterpreted, it has an important place in contemporary moral and aesthetic debates.