On not being well-meaning

✍ Scribed by A. Mac C. Armstrong

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1970
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 421 KB
• Volume: 4
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5363
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00136887

✦ Synopsis

It is an ethical commonplace, a thesis which a philosopher reckons himself entitled to enunciate without labouring to establish, that a human action is morally good or bad, or neither, according to, i.e. simply and solely by reason of, the intention with which it is done. An action may indeed be accounted well done in the sense of being efficiently done, without such regard to its intention. Yet, as Immanuel Kant puts it at the outset of his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in assessing the whole worth of human actions, what is uppermost in our minds, and constitutes the presupposition of every other consideration, is the concept of a good will, which -not of course a mere wish, but as the adoption of all means at the agent's disposal -is good in itself irrespective of what it brings about and accomplishes.