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My main purpose in this paper is to talk about the idea of absolute goodness, to try to show how different that idea is from that of wellbeing, and to do this by discussing R F Holland, in whose work the idea is prominent. I shall focus particularly on his essay "Is Goodness a Mystery?" My aim is to suggest that thinking about absolute goodness can transform our understanding of wellbeing, indeed of the phenomena of morality generally. Holland's exploration of this notion, deeply influenced by his reading of Plato (and of Wittgenstein), suggests that absolute goodness, and not wellbeing, is the pivotal concept of moral philosophy.Although at first sight it might seem to be vacuous, and is certainly difficult to characterize positively, coming to some understanding of this idea, to the extent that that is possible, has the consequence of relocating wellbeing, utility, virtue, happiness and cognate concepts in their rightful and subordinate place. Some thoughts about wellbeing, and some difficultiesThere are different conceptions of what counts as a good life ranging from having experiences of immediate pleasure to objective list theories -starting with the purely subjective and tending by degrees towards objectivity. These theories of the good life are more or less reductive, but all ground their conception of goodness on what is good for humans, i.e. on some idea of human nature, apart perhaps from the objective list theories which don't 119