Hello Logan,
You pose an interesting question. IMO, good and right are extremely subjective terms based on the individual's interpretations and definitions. What is good and right, I think we are still, as a group, looking for. It is my belief what is good and right should be good and right for all. When those definitions among individuals differ we run into problems. Ideally, IMO, good and right actions "would" be innate if it weren't for external inertia that force us to make decisions that have nothing to do with "good" or "right" but what is necessary to survive from one day to the next. I think good and right would be second nature to us if we had such freedom. It would not only be good and right for us, but would also be compatible those others we share this planet with as they enjoy that same freedom. We are a long way from that, but hopefully one day we will come to our senses.
William

In German and French the word for right is the word for law...But I think your question is really this: can good be discovered, and so, taught... I'd say good is easy to see in retrospect....But essentially, No!!! What is good and right is never abstract, and is real in terms of one own community, however conceived...Good is good not because it is good for self, but demands sacrifice from self for the good of the community...Let me give you an example: An early national socialist slogan was that: common good was better than individual good...I read that last night, and the book I read it in pointed out how those who benefited from it threw the German population of the country into the fire in the closing days of the war to buy a few more moments of individual survival...In other words, the people accepted the slogan because they recognized the good; but it was only offered by way of achieving an absolute of evil...

YO!

Good is beneficial relative to some subject, a group judgement of what is good would then be what is good relative to the group, it is a subjective evaluation is it not? Good is always right subjectively, again it is a biological determination, as is its counterpart bad, meaning not benificial/harmful. That which has no effect, is indifferent to us, neither good nor bad----ineffective.

I would say...

Goodness is the thought, rightness is the action. What is right is not necessarily good (suppose you were in a position to kill Hitler. Knowing what you know about the Holocaust, you would be in a position to save some 6 million lives. Thus, to save the 6 million, the sacrifice of the one is what must be right, yet the act of killing is in itself ethically repugnant, that is, not good). This is a biconditional, so it also works in the obverse (what is good is to profess love to all and spare all judgment--for what if your judgment is wrong?--yet you know for a fact that he will eliminate 6 million souls, and so by saving his one, as you would be wont to do, you effectively condemn some 6 million more--hardly right).

I'm not quite sure how to reply to 'philosophy' threads since it my first time doing so through a forum. (Should I reply to each post individually, give a general response, or maybe a response isn't what I should be aiming for at all--perhaps simply illuminating lines of thought is most helpful?) So here we go!

As hammersklavier related, a very similar thought to "all good actions are the right actions" [1] is "all right actions are the good actions." [2] However, they are not the same claim nor do they imply the same things. A statement that contains two variables that are not the same (in this case "good" and "right") cannot necessarily have the positions of the variables switched and still contain the same ontology or supervenience. This could also be supported if one believed that moral actions could be derived from statements of fact, and thus use the fact that biconditionals are inferential by definition to conclude that there is no necessary connection between the two variables. However, irregardless of this line of thinking, one can still easily imagine examples where the two statements are not biconditional in all circumstances. For instance:

• If all true statements are true, then all Johnnys who tell true statements are telling the truth
  
• If all Johnnys who tell true statements are telling the truth, then all true statements are true.
  

Two immediate problems should be apparent. The first is that 'If' part of the second statement gives no evidence to support the 'Then' part of the same statement. The Johnnys' possible act of truth telling seems to have no relevance to the statement of fact. The second is that we have no insight into the type of person Johnnys are. So if Johnnys are actually liars, then there are some obvious large problems on the loom with the biconditionality/interchangeability of the two variables. We can see, with a little bit of work, that if as hammersklavier says "Goodness is the thought, rightness is the action," then there are some immediate troubles with necessarily tying the two together.

The notion that these two statements seem so similar, yet imply completely different things is one of the reasons why I initially found the two statements interesting. When I was analyzing [2] I found that it was much easier to finding reasons as to why a person may not be inclined to believe that our goal should not be to make all right actions into all good actions. However, I found [1] to be much more difficult in deciding why our goal should not be to make all good actions into the right actions. Much of the objections I could think of (For example, a situation where I could eliminate a variable entirely to increase the amount of goodness.) did not seem compelling enough to ever have me throwing the idea out of the window. The thought of simply working through with a negative variable rather than attempting to eliminate it entirely seemed to be quite attainable and actually supporting of other ethical theories, such as virtue ethics; because it is my belief that if personality/social traits [virtues] are to be present, then they must be cultivated in nearly all instances. In every other instance, they are initially innate in the agent.

As Fido pointed out, how people act to achieve goodness is just as important as choosing what is good to begin with. However, it is an example of a good goal, not a good action. The people in Fido's example had a slogan which represented a good goal, yet were unable to acquire that goal using good actions. This is one of the reasons I specified good actions, and not simply good in general. This narrows the scope of this [1] idea. (In truth, in my opening post I was considering also asking about how this idea could be expanded to good in general--but decided that this was enough for now )

Regarding what William has said about the importance of external inertias: there are surely some very difficult decisions to be made in life (and in our wonderful thought experiments), however I do not see why--through tough work--we are unable to be and act good while being under the influence of them. I think a serious question to consider under these circumstances is whether good is the highest value we can attain and live our life by?

There were a few attempts in this thread to do some metaethics, something which I am not wanting to do here. Such an undertaking deserves a much larger thread that would do it the appropriate justice anyways.

Lastly, I hope this first reply of mine on the forum was an adequate and appropriate one

Your post was certainly adequate--more adequate than most of mine, I can assure you.

The reason I came to my conclusion is simple: there is a clear distinction between the physical world and the mental one (which philosophers as far back as Plato have recognized). What this distinction is, or what the underlying unity that ties it all together is, I do not know, but one of the results of this distinction is the way ethical systems have evolved.

Some evolve objective systems of ethics and morality, that is, "goodness" and "rightness" are precipitated as the result of one's actions; and others subjective systems, that is, "goodness" and "rightness" are precipitated as the result of one's thoughts. Our common society tends to be a subjective one; this subjective morality was best summed by Kant in his Critique of Judgement. OTOH, the society of the ancient Israelites (from which we get many of our ideas about morality BTW), was clearly an objective one: if you lived in a manner according to God's laws, what you did was, by necessity, the good and the right. Since, right now, there is little-to-no way of recombining these systems of morality into a fully integrated subjective-objective system (which I believe would be a sort of inherent Ur-system underlining all ethics), and the meanings of "goodness" and "rightness", while similar, clearly have fine but crucial distinguishments, I simply suggested that "goodness" (since that seems to have the more mental component) be used to identify subjective exemplars while "rightness" (with its more physical component) be used to identify objective exemplars. Thus, the paradox I presented was an attempt to show how the two are distinguishable, and why their two meanings can't (yet) be fully unified.