I’m new to philosophy. Could someone define and compare/contrast “end,” “good,” and “highest good” in a philosophical context and explain how they each relate to the Catholic understanding of human life and God’s desire for it?
Thanks for any help. God bless!
“End” and “good” roughly refer to the same thing. “End” in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics refers to final causality, ie. what an agent acts for. An agent is directed toward its ends (here, agent does not necessarily mean something conscious); an agent having a particular end explains why it acts in certain ways rather than others.
Aquinas defines the good as “the aspect being as desirable.” In other words, “good” is really
another way of looking at being. This is why good is thought of as one of the transcendentals. This does not mean, however, that a thing is good because it exists or has being. What Aquinas means is that the good has to do with being
in a certain way. In particular, the good is being
as desirable, meaning being as what it is supposed to be (which is determined by its form). In that sense, the good is basically given by ends or final causes, since actualizing one’s ends is what makes a being what it is supposed to be.
I imagine
highest good would just have to do with human’s achieving their highest ends - by worshiping God and by loving.
