Booth- So Good yet So Bad

Overall, Wayne Booth’s discussion of literary criticism and ethics is thoughtful and interesting; however, his use of the words “good” and “bad” are troublesome.  For the most part, Booth is just verbalizing what actually happens every time we hear or read an object of discourse—be it a silly vignette or formal oratory— a story will always evoke a response, just as a literary theory will provoke thought.  He asks his audience if the consequences (I assume he means the resulting emotion or idea) of listening to a story are “good or bad” (99).  In using the terms “good” and “bad,” though, Booth severely generalizes his point because the quality of a piece of rhetoric cannot be deemed so.  To define something as good or bad is far too objective.  Using his illustration of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and the resulting increase of suicide, Booth alludes that the work was “bad” because it possibly influenced people to kill themselves (100).  But, doesn’t that mean that the work was also extremely “good”?  If Goethe’s intention was to have people die, that is ethically wrong, but the fact that he succeeded proves Werther to be incredibly good too.  Therein lies the problem- what is good cannot really be deemed good on all levels, just as what is bad cannot be considered completely bad.