Oh Sailor, why'd you do it? What'd you do that for?

[i_llbedammned]

I have been feeling rather contemplative lately. I would say philosophical, but I don't really know anyone off the top of my head to back me up. Heh. Today's question has been: Does intention or motivation really matter or is it only the acts which we do that tell whether or not we are judged to be good

Comments

[lusimeles]

i think it depends on the sense in which you use the word "good." to attach goodness onto an action implies that the action yielded some useful/pleasant/whatever consequence, and so *this* type of goodness arrives irrespective of intention.

but there is no speaking of moral goodness without character. that, imo, is all intention.

a man intends to kill a child and saves her instead. the saving of the child was a good action, but this does not mean the man is a good man. a man aims to help save a town from a monster and, say, through his arrogance/negligence/whatever, only ends up exacerbating the damages. he is not necessarily a good man because his heart was in the right place, but it would be unfair to deem him a bad one in the moral sense because he made mistakes. what was deficient was (probably) his overestimation of his strength/cleverness. but to me these are all separate issues, albeit ones also easily conflated.

[i_llbedammned]

So mistakes are separate from the idea of good and evil? Is it because you can't predict the mistakes and so they just end up being chance things rather than anything that can be planned or intended? Or am I missing some point?

[lusimeles]

it would depend on the nature of the mistake, but generally a mistake is characterized by the lack of intention to do the specific act in question. i wouldn't say they're wholly separate (and the good/evil dichotomy isn't one that sits true to me personally), but inasmuch as evil is defined by presence of malice, it would be hard to put mistake in that category.

[i_llbedammned]

To be honest I don't really believe in good and evil so much as different perspectives. But if I read enough Faust I start to think of good and evil more so because of the way that people's minds will be drawn to it. And I get what you're saying now.

[faery_lights]

Your question is actually very philosophical- it was a key concern of Immanuel Kant. He maintained that a good deed is only good if the intention and the action were good. If one or the other is bad, the whole deed is bad.

[fireez]

Oooh I love pondering this question. It's a very complex one, and imho, you can't give a generalized answer to it. The question of if a deed is good or evil depends on many things - the deed, the doer, the intent and the outcome.

One of my all time favorite characters is Adrian Veidt, precisely because he is so morally ambiguous, and because we don't have all the information that we need to come to a moral judgement over what he did. He certainly has the best intentions, and from what we learn about him during the story, he is a good person. Strange, yes, but still good. His actions might or might not have prevented nuclear war. And yet he killed millions of innocent people. And I think the part that makes the question of good or evil so hard to answer is the might. We don't know for sure if what he did really saved the world from nuclear war. And even if it did, does that make his actions morally defensible? Where exactly does the notion of "necessary evil" fall on the moral scale