Good is the degree to which something increases pleasurable emotion in humans, especially happiness, over the long term. Time scale is important, because an event that elicits pleasure in the short term (e.g. eating sugary foods) may elicit pain in the long term (e.g. tooth decay, obesity, and disease). The reverse is also true: actions that provide no immediate pleasure (or that even create discomfort) may be necessary to produce pleasure at a later time. For example, physical exercise.
A distinction is sometimes made between good as an attribute of an object or event on the one hand (i.e. natural goods), and of a person on the other (i.e. moral goods). But these are really just different instances of the same idea of increasing happiness. The reason we think of certain character traits as good is that they tend to increase the happiness of the individual possessing them, or of society, or both. Such traits are commonly known as virtues.
Good is a completely relative term. What is good for one person or group may be bad for another. The same event may be good with regard to achieving one goal, but not for another. However, because humans are so similar to each other (in physiology, habitat, etc.) their goals are often the same, and thus they often consider the same objects and events to be good. However, because of significant differences in their belief systems, the same event may also be considered good by one group and evil by another, even though they may both share the same ultimate goal.
Excepted from Wikipedia
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_theory
Date: 7-Nov-2014
Value theory encompasses a range of approaches to understanding how, why and to what degree people value things; whether the thing is a person, idea, object, or anything else. This investigation began in ancient philosophy, where it is called axiology or ethics. Early philosophical investigations sought to understand good and evil and the concept of “the good”. Today much of value theory is scientifically empirical, recording what people do value and attempting to understand why they value it in the context of psychology, sociology, and economics.
At the general level, there is a difference between moral and natural goods. Moral goods are those that have to do with the conduct of persons, usually leading to praise or blame. Natural goods, on the other hand, have to do with objects, not persons. For example, the statement “Mary is a good person” represents a very different sense of the word ‘good’ than the statement “That was some good food”.
Ethics is mainly focused on moral goods rather than natural goods, while economics has a concern in what is economically good for the society but not an individual person and is also interested in natural goods. However, both moral and natural goods are equally relevant to goodness and value theory, which is more general in scope.