The Individual Good

Abstract

In the first section of this chapter I will introduce the good in connection with organic human needs, and in the second section I will argue that there is an autonomous level of the human individual, whereby his needs require no justification beyond his efforts at their reduction. In a third section I shall try to show that what is peculiarly human is the continuance of the drives to reduce the needs long after they have in fact been effectively reduced, the source of human achievements but also of bad behavior. Then in a fourth section I will try to show that the attempts to reduce the needs involve the individual together with his fellows and their tools in a society. In a fifth section I will argue that the content of the individual conscience is a product of the disapproval by society of the excesses of individual need-reduction.