Good is a quasi-religious concept. It is a form of Platonism and a throw-back to the history of widespread belief in other-worldly entities like embedded spirits. Like such spirits good doesn’t exist.

Take music. You could strip any piece down to every conceivable constituent part. You could look at the instruments, the arrangement, the words; you could break down the entire mechanics of the sound into its frequencies and its atomic structure; you could analyse how all that impacts on the ear and the emotions; you could investigate the music's context, aesthetically, socially, historically, commercially and any other way. After as exhaustive an analysis as possible you would never find any element identifiable as goodness.

Why? Because good is a metaphor, a figure of speech. This tends to be overlooked. There is nothing said to be good that could not be more accurately described using other words. A good machine is one that works satisfactorily. A good piece of music is one you like or many people like. A good thing generally is something approved of.

Pointing this out may seem a semantic detail. But it’s an important detail that affects values and psychology. People argue, sometimes passionately, for what they like not just because of their liking, but because they attribute some kind of superior essence to what they like. This is the quasi-religious aspect and it is problematic. It has conflict built into it because what is liked is just as often disliked by others who will therefore disagree that the good thing is superior. Music, which can happily provide for every kind of taste without a fight, becomes a source of antagonism quite unnecessarily.

If you make a case for realities which can’t be verified or falsified in any conceivable circumstance it invites speculation which no amount of argument will ever resolve. Music is the relatively harmless example I use here. Religious beliefs are a potentially much more serious battle-ground on which to misuse linguistic concepts.

Proper use of language with its consequent effect on psychological make-up would be a mark of a more evolved humanity.