The Importance of Goodness

There are two senses in which we might say that certain activities are good for a squirrel. The first is the most obvious, and we can call it the instrumental sense. It's good for squirrels to bury nuts because later they will have something to eat. This is a totally legitimate sense of goodness; many things are good in this sense. But there is another sense, less obvious perhaps, in which certain activities might be said to be good for a Squirrel. In short, some activity or operation on a squirrel's part might be good not merely because it's useful, but in what we can call a constitutive sense.