The form of good

Some philosophers hold that sentences with the word <i>good</i> have a uniform form. On this view, many of the apparent syntactic and semantic differences between (say) <i>That is a good knife</i>, <i>Xavier is good with children</i> and <i>It is good to have pets</i> are illusory. A difficulty in evaluating uniformity theses is that they are often not formulated in a linguistically precise way. I provide an interpretation where uniformity theses treat <i>good</i> as taking the same arguments at some syntactic or semantic level. I then defend the view that the motivation for uniformity theses is weak, and I develop a strategy for opposing them. One version of this strategy is deployed, drawing on under-appreciated data about <i>tough</i>-adjectives. I argue that there is better motivation for alternative analyses of <i>good</i>, namely 'non-uniformity contextualism' and 'relativism'. The resulting picture is one where the apparent syntactic and semantic differences between <i>good</i>-constructions are genuine.