"Good!" "Evil!"
Outmoded concepts for an antique age! Can't you see? There is no good, there is no evil in our new world!
Look at us! Are we not proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense?
I believe you're mistaken about their being genuinely outdated. Since the rise of philosophical emotivism, which has trickled into the rest of society from the ivory towers of academia, it has been "the fasion" to declare the bankruptcy of non-subjective values. The casting off of religion is narrowly viewed as an enlightening success by Western culture, because yes, there is a trivial, mechanical sense in which the universe has no preference for one type of human action over another, and it seems increasingly unlikely that there is literally a dude in the clouds telling everyone what to do. From Hume to Moore, the shrill denial has become ever more frantic in philosophical discourse. However, what the so-called enlightened scholars of modernity have completely missed is that Christianity's most important role for Westerners in the last two millenia has not been as an accurate set of truth-claims about the state of the universe (though hilariously, it actually came far closer than modern science in its account of astronomy), rather it has been as an unwitting transmission vessel for Aristotelian teleology, the elegant meta-ethical framework within which pretty much all Western moral terminology was designed to be understood. The ethical writings of Thomas Aquinas assured Christianity's status as a lifeline to Aristotle.
Aristotle advanced a theory of moral value which shaped moral and ethical discourse for thousands of years and which provides the framework in which ethics can cease to be the incomensurable slinging of incomparable ideals which it has become since social scientists and philosophers forgot teleology. It concentrates on the nature of the subject matter to which any moral evaluation is predicated. What is good for a horse is not good for a man. What is good for fuel is not good for food. What is good for a soldier is not good for a monk, &c. Aristotle's account offers a functional characterisation of ethical subject matters, such that in asking a question such as "what ought I to do with my life", one is invited to consider the specific values appropriate to one's function. There is a level of functional human biology, which reveals fairly obvious injunctions for how to keep the body healthy and
functioning as it should. Aristotle defined the end of a subject's function as a "final cause", a kind of potential to be reached. So since the lungs are designed to breathe clean air, they will function correctly if they don't breathe smoke, and since they're designed by evolution to supply enough oxygen for an active body, they'll function even better if their VO2-max is increased by rigorous exercise. Through adherence to their proper function, the lungs' owner brings them from potentiality into actuality and makes them the best lungs they could possibly be. There are super-biological levels of human function though. To consider a human as a moral agent can be performed by functional characterisation (and notional idealism) in much the same way as an appraisal of lungs. There are a number of functional roles which dictate the proper characteristics of a given individual. There are fulfillable potentials for sons, mothers, husbands, scholars, soldiers, citizens of a state, &c. Now instead of looking for some nebulous, general "good" floating around in metaphysics, finding what it is to be a good father, a good son, a good husband or a good scholar simply consists in examining the functional essence of that particular kind of thing. At last, the word "good" is reunited with its full implications. It was a given in the aftermath of Aristotle that good was suited to predication in this way. Lungs have a function just as mothers have a function. Since the function of a lung is to supply oxygen to the body, a
good lung is not impeded by tar, and not weakened by a sedentery lifestyle. Since the function of a mother is to raise well-adjusted, healthy children, a
good mother prevents her children from physical harm and danger, and at the appropriate stages in their lives offers the kind of interaction appropriate to proper development (picture books, the alphabet, simple fiction, etc).
Finally, some goods can be derived by considering in the same fashion what it is to be a
good person. It's not difficult, and there is more or less a concensus. People will differ on piddling specifics, but most sane-minded people will agree, for example, that a good person is brave, just, wise, healthy, strong, temperant, polite, sincere, etc. These virtues and others will be afforded greater or lesser importance depending on the functional teleology supplied by specific roles (we expect soldiers to be braver than scholars, though there is no harm in a brave scholar). It is not difficult to have an accurate conception of the potentiality of a human life when fully considered in the light of teleology - attention to final causes in all things. How ought I to live? What characteristics ought I to have? Well, what is the final cause of a human life, the totality of human excellence (
arete in Greek)? The best possible person? Imagine a superhero. And people did. The Sumerians imagined Gilgamesh. The Greeks imagined Hercules, Achilles, Odysseus. Hindus imagined Rama. Still others looked into history to find their flesh and blood heroes. Plato, Alexander, Rameses, Caesar, Shakespeare, Franklin, Lincoln, Ataturk. What is the potential of a human life? The Western world imagined Christ - what would Jesus do? Therein, often unbeknownst even to itself, lay the West's eternal debt to Aristotle, the connection with teleology, potentiality/actuality, and the notion which is required for the coherence of the ethical terminology now being banded ineptly around by clueless philosophasters from the cutting edge of research and the houses of parliament to the most retarded barside lay-debates - the simple fact which is ignored now by pretty much everybody - that ethics consists not in some hopeless quest for nebulous, ethereal, universal ideal like "Absolute Good" or "Human Rights" or anything else - that it is the straightforward examination of teleology with regard to particular subject matters, and that just as a doctor learns a lot about what it is to be a good lung by imagining or examining the best lungs, just as a rider learns a lot about what it is to be a good horse by imagining or examining the best horses, so ethicists learn a lot about what it is to be a good person by imagining or examining the best people.
I highly recommend that anyone in the throes of modernity's value-crisis (i.e., the mistaken conviction that good and evil are nonsensical superstions, and the correct conviction that "good" as it is used today seems to lack concerete meaning) accquire and read
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, which I consider to be the single most important ethics text of the twentieth century, and which offers fascinating insights into how ignoring the history of ethics has set the somewhat retarded tone of contemporary moral debate. MacIntyre offers compelling reasons why most of our current political, moral, ethical issues appear to be completely incomensurable, and compelling innuendos about how to fix the problem.