Private goodness renounces cure for alleviation, betraying the moral principle it embodies

Evidence

Goodness is itself a deformation of good. By severing the moral principle from the social and displacing it into the realm of private conscience, goodness limits it in two senses. It dispenses with the realization of a condition worthy of men that is implicit in the principle of morality. Each of its actions has inscribed in it a certain resignation and solace: it aims at alleviation, not cure, and consciousness of incurability finally sides with the latter. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 109

Categorization

• DEFINE: The core distinction between good (social, future-directed) and goodness (privative, resigned) that organizes the entire aphorism.
• XREF: Directly extends the dialectic of enlightenment’s account of how bourgeois morality becomes its own negation.