Our ideas of what is 'good' or 'bad' may be thought of as an ensemble of preferences more or less equivalent to (and often even described as) 'good taste'.
Just as we find certain foods 'good to eat', we find certain congeries of ideas 'good to think'. One example is competition. American culture in particular
encourages us to think of competition as 'good'. After all, a market economy is based upon the idea of competition: without it there would be little incentive
to create or improve or succeed; or so we are expected to believe. Or consider the expression, 'may the best man win'. The idea here is that victory will
'naturally' come to those who are best, that competition will separate 'winners' from 'losers'. What we routinely ignore in all this is that to have a
legitimate competition, it must be a 'fair' competition, there must be 'a level playing field'. And in reality (i.e., the actual world we inhabit, enmeshed as
we are in a multiplicity of cross cutting demands and expectations and constraints - as opposed to the cartoon fantasy world of ideals and values, concepts to
which we like to think of ourselves as being loyal, when in fact we rarely if ever truly are) the 'playing field' is almost never 'level'. The only conditions
under which the so-called playing field is even close to 'level' are when we all cooperate and agree to abide by rules, regulations which are designed to keep
the competition fair. In short, we like to think of competition as good and proper without ever acknowledging that in order to have legitimate competition we
must first cooperate. So cooperation is the precondition for any fair contest. But somehow cooperation is not good to think. What examples of good to think
ideas can you think of? What makes them good to think? Why?