What is Goodness?

People barely can use one certain sentence to answer the question, “What is goodness?” because of the versatility of the question itself. For me, the question is undefined. Goodness can be fostered based on different qualities one owns, either obvious or subtle, and all of them equally contribute to shape the word “goodness”. 

“Good” is not merely a subjective, which determined by a sudden human consciousness or an ephemeral willingness to be good, but also a verb which inspires people to do something they actually value as goodness and to live their lives with such motivation in a longer term. Rosa Parks, for example, help define goodness by siting down at the first row of the bus and ending the racial separation on bus system in Montgomery. Steve Jobs, the great creator of our modern world, invent numerous Apple products to broaden our experiences with technology and rapidly stimulates tech developments in the whole society. Andrew Carnegie, one of the wealthiest industrialists who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century, founded Carnegie Mellon University and provided education opportunities to countless students. Throughout the history, people in our society are always using their own specialties to  help integrate the word “goodness”. 

However, goodness always has two sides which cannot be compatible with each other. For instance, Animal testing has been an issue that caused so many debates and arguments between people holding different perspectives. People who agree to ban such activity consider the whole issue in animals’ direction believed that animals, like human beings, have the right to live and to choose. Those people are pursuing goodness—for the sake of animals. On the contrary, people who disagree to ban animal testing point out that animal testing has also given us huge medical advances that we would have never came upon without animal testing. Those people are also pursuing goodness—for the sake of human beings. Although all arguments about animal testing are all derived from the same purpose: creating goodness, but the ways to value such idea here are opposite, which separates the idea of goodness into two reciprocal parts. Therefore, the perfect goodness does not possibly exist.