What to Do with What is Good?

Adams's discussion of naturalistically motivated views of virtues led me to wonder how the naturalist who say biology determines the good for humans can say we ought to cultivate virtues. Adams says naturalism motivates the view that virtues are beneficial for humans and their fellows. Where these benefits are found exists flourishing, which is based on biological facts. Adams says value should not be defined by the biological, but by transcendent standards. He appeals to our intuitions about intrinsic value in virtues by offering cases where any other explanation seems deficient. But I think what the naturalists Adams discusses are proposing not only is inconsistent with our intuitions, but also fails to provide a reason why anyone should be concerned with being virtuous, which is what I think the theory is supposed to explain. It is plausible to think we can determine what is good for a type of being by examining the kind of being it is. But just because we know what is good for a type of being does not mean we now know what anyone should do about it. This type of "good for" with no further explanation need not be different than the "good for" a tree. It is not clear what should be done about the good of a tree, even if we know what it is. But the types of things that come to mind as plausible ways of separating the two appeal to more than biological facts. If the naturalists Adams mentions really do not go further than biology in their explanations, I do not see how their account of virtue can be anything more than descriptive. It's not just that "value..is not to be defined by the demands of the merely biological (as if they really were demands in any normative sense), but by approximation to an objective ideal or transcendent standard," but also that the naturalists Adams discusses need to explain what we should do with the good once we identify it, and appeals to biology do not seem to be of much potential use here.