Notgoodness

Notgoodness is a term used in ethical and semantic discussions to denote the lack of goodness or a failure to meet criteria of moral value. It functions primarily as a negation rather than a positive description; notgoodness is not automatically equivalent to badness or evil, but signals that an action, motive, or outcome fails to fulfill a standard of moral worth or virtue.

In practical terms, notgoodness can describe actions that are morally neutral, permissible, or under-specified with respect to their goodness; it can apply to motives that are indecisive or indifferently aligned with moral virtues. For example, a policy that avoids harm but offers no positive benefit might be labeled as notgoodness rather than good.

In philosophy, the notion raises questions about moral semantics and evaluative scales. It challenges simple good/bad dichotomies by introducing a middle category. Some critics argue that notgoodness is ill-defined or overstated, while others use it to refine analyses of partial virtue, moral luck, or moral indeterminacy.

Outside formal ethics, notgoodness appears in literary and cultural critique as a way to describe actions or systems that are ethically ambiguous or morally underwhelming, avoiding judgment as strictly good or evil.

See also: moral neutrality, nonmoral, amoral, virtue ethics.