But assuming that torture is bad, then an instrument of torture isn't good. It gets the job done, yes. But the job it gets done is the wrong job. So it's better not to call it good. In short then, while the instrumental sense of good might be the most obvious sense, it's not the most basic sense. The most basic sense is the constitutive sense, and without it, the instrumental sense loses its force. All of this is a way of talking about teleology. This word comes from the Greek word telos, which means an N or a goal. The telos of a process is what the process is for. Eating, for example, has nutrition as its primary telos. Sexual relations have reproduction as their primary telos, and so forth. We can also speak of the telos of an organism in a sort of adapted way. The telos of a squirrel, the goal of its life, is to live in a squirrel kind of way. Scampering, scurrying, burying nuts, robbing bird feeders, making baby squirrels, all that stuff. If Aquinas is right, then nature is teleological, generally speaking. It's goal-oriented. Not perhaps in the sense that someone has a plan for it. We'll talk about that later. But just in the sense that there are better and worse ways for it to turn out. If you come upon a dead bird and you think, oh, that's sad, well, you're right. It would have been better for the bird to flourish. Moving now to, well, sort of I've already been on the fourth point, but... In another way, I'm going to come at it at a different angle. It doesn't matter.

Something

more about goodness and natures. If all this is correct, then there is a close connection between the goodness of a thing and the category or kind that it belongs to. Think about that squirrel again. Is it part of its nature to have a tail? Be careful how you answer. Saying no just seems wrong, doesn't it? Obviously having a tail is part of being a squirrel. It's a part of squirrel nature. It might even be the most glorious part. But if you say yes, then that seems like a problem too. It sounds like you're saying that if a particular squirrel doesn't have a tail, then it lacks part of its nature, part of its essence. And that would seem to imply that it's not really a squirrel, which is obviously wrong.