In an interview with Bill Moyers, Martha Nussbaum, speaking of the tragic sense of life said she thought ethics was founded upon an inner sense or hope that others could be trusted to be ethical, good. I later read a comment in conjunction with her book The Fragility of Goodness that
[s]he eventually rejects the Platonic notion that human goodness can fully protect against peril, siding with the tragic playwrights and Aristotle in treating the acknowledgement of vulnerability as a key to realizing the human good. Wikipedia.
That is to say, it seems, that human goodness is not something which can be achieved in a material world of personal success and safety. Human good is a matter of the soul. A matter of the soul maintaining its truth, its unique, silent, forgiving beauty in sacrifice and suffering, as well as. in the humility to which it might attend worldly success and satisfaction.
Human good is found in suffering. It may be that suffering is the only soil in which human good can be cultivated and chosen.
Materialism would tie good to success. But what success? Of the souls of Nazi Germany, which would we find lasting, honest, worth loving? Not those who were on the side of those who were predators of their neighbors wittingly or unwittingly. No, those who disappeared in the ghettos, the camps, the gas chambers, the long marches. These are the souls for whom one is in sympathy. These are the souls for whom compassion and selflessness aspire to become one with. One must ask himself, where does my love reside? Where indeed? With butcher or the butchered?
Martha Nussbaum seems to be aware of the truth.