A morality experiment: Actions versus motivations

[Dominus Atheos]

I voted "Other". He's a bad person, but doing good things. What defines people the most is what feel and think. If some guy sincerely thinks that black people aren't really people and deserve to be enslaved, or that the Nazis had the right idea with the Final Solution...then that guy is quite certainly a complete asshole (by the standards of most civilized people). So he's a bad person. But if he does things that are out of character for him and result in nothing but benefits for society as a whole, that's a good thing...but it doesn't change who he is on the inside.

So in a nutshell, he's an asshole who does good deeds. But he's still an asshole.

So thought crimes then? He does good things, but commits thought crimes inside his own head where no one can see them or know about them, so he's an asshole?

[Simon_Jester]

It's not about thought-crimes, it's that motivation impacts the moral quality of your actions.

There's a difference between doing a good deed because you desire good outcomes, doing a good deed because you have an ulterior motive, and doing a good deed by accident when you intended to cause harm.

[Borgholio]

So thought crimes then? He does good things, but commits thought crimes inside his own head where no one can see them or know about them, so he's an asshole?

It's not about thought crime, but yes he's still an asshole. Think about a politician who kisses babies and works for his community so they will vote for him in the next election. Not so bad, right? But what if he's really doing these good deeds to get votes so he can get into office because deep down inside he's a power hungry control freak and just wants to be on top of the totem pole? He's using people in his quest for power, and that makes him an asshole even if he's doing good deeds to do it.

[Elaro]

I would rather have someone who does good deeds with an evil heart than someone doing evil deeds with good intentions. I mean, the poor receiving money from him are still going to survive better than if he had done nothing. The only important thing about motivation is how it will affect your actions. If selfish motivations don't affect the selfless deed-doing, then fine.

Of course, it'd be preferable to have a good person doing good deeds, but only because the evil person might stop caring about doing good, but you said he does good for the entirety of his life, so it doesn't matter.

Of course, if it's a question of deserving heaven, then no. But no one lives after death, so the point is moot.

[Simon_Jester]

Thing is, it is highly unrealistic to have a malevolent person who is consistently bribed into doing good throughout their life.

So when we talk about whether a person with malevolence (literally a 'bad will') is going to do good, realistically we should at least consider the possibility that they won't. Whereas a person with a good will is going to do good fairly reliably, insofar as their will remains good.

[Purple]

Thing is, it is highly unrealistic to have a malevolent person who is consistently bribed into doing good throughout their life.

That depends on how you view human nature. Especially once you consider that what you call bribery also include not being punished by society for acting in ways it does not want you to act.

[LaCroix]

Thing is, it is highly unrealistic to have a malevolent person who is consistently bribed into doing good throughout their life.

That depends on how you view human nature. Especially once you consider that what you call bribery also include not being punished by society for acting in ways it does not want you to act.

"Bribing" is to offer a positive for complying.
Offering sanctions for non-compliance is called "forcing".

[Purple]

Thing is, it is highly unrealistic to have a malevolent person who is consistently bribed into doing good throughout their life.

That depends on how you view human nature. Especially once you consider that what you call bribery also include not being punished by society for acting in ways it does not want you to act.

"Bribing" is to offer a positive for complying.
Offering sanctions for non-compliance is called "forcing".

My point was that once we abandon trivial semantics the greatest and most valuable motivator for a huge amount of individuals. So much so that there is no need to bribe them with rewards.

[Simon_Jester]

That doesn't actually work. When you try to control people entirely through fear, they either go crazy or start subverting your intentions in an attempt to strike back.

I really wish you'd stop making assertions about human nature, Purple, I don't blame you for not understanding it but it's tiring dealing with you not realizing you don't.

[Elheru Aran]

Put it another way. Say a Nazi in WWII for whatever reason decided to give a wad of money to a Jewish charity. The money came from Jewish loot, and he wants them all killed, but for some mysterious reason gave the charity some funding. The money may be a net benefit for that charity, but if they know who gave it and where it came from, it'd definitely leave a bad taste in their mouths if they accepted it.

So the deed itself-- without reference to its context-- may be a positive gesture, but it doesn't really change anything about the mentality or attitude of the person who gave it, unless it becomes a repeated pattern for whatever reason, which could suggest a legitimate change of heart (or maybe he's just trying to get rid of the evidence). The action is positive; the motivations are not. It more or less cancels out the goodness of the deed.

[Zeropoint]

You need the carrot AND the stick, because the carrot doesn't work for everyone. However, when it does work, the carrot gets you much better results.

[LaCroix]

"Bribing" is to offer a positive for complying.
Offering sanctions for non-compliance is called "forcing".

My point was that once we abandon trivial semantics the greatest and most valuable motivator for a huge amount of individuals. So much so that there is no need to bribe them with rewards.

The semantics are not trivial in this regard.

It's hard to properly explain in a foreign language, but I'll try.

If you bribe someone, you get a result, and also create a favorable feeling in the target person. You rewarded them for doing stuff. If you don't reward them, they might still do it or act indifferently. Because the desired action is not mentally connected with a negative thing, it can form a habit and a moral backing of being the right thing.

If you force them to do it, you will also cause resentment. That means people might actively try to work against your goals, just out of spite, if they think they won't be caught. Even if they comply, they will try to make the least effort necessary to comply with your rule.
So you need to police them to check for compliance and to prevent them from doing more harm out of spite. This makes it a lot more expensive than simply rewarding compliance, and less practical, as you need constant surveillance over people to actually enforce something. That's why we usually only use this approach for crimes and blatant misbehaviors. You don't need to bribe everybody for not murdering someone. Most will comply naturally, and it would be too expensive. And simply not getting a reward when you still do it is unacceptable to society. Thus, it's more efficient to punish violation of that rule. But when you look at, e.g. seatbelt laws, if you'd like to really enforce them, you'd need to invest a lot of money in inspectors, surveillance equipment, and maybe systems that only let you start the car if the belt is in. And I'll bet you some people would actually override these systems just out of spite, or wear "seatbelt tshirts". Apart from the quick buckle up if they are stopped and checked for something. So you'd need a lot of boots on the ground for relatively little gain. Thus, it's hardly ever checked, and mostly ignored by people, and strongly resented if they actually catch you and make you pay that fine, even though it's small. It's only slowly gaining traction because people are hardly ever pestered about it (no "seatbelt checkpoints" everyhere ), and slowly realize that there is a real benefit (not dying) for them to do it even though they'd probably never get caught if they don't. Asking people why they buckle up, they usually cite the benefit as a reason, and only rarely the "I don't want to get caught and pay a fine" portion, because they know that negative outcome is vastly less statistically relevant than the risk of having an accident.

Thus, bribing/rewarding is almost always superior to forcing compliance. And that's why the semantics are significant in this regard.

[libertyjim]

Well if this situation was inverted, i.e. we have a person with entirely good motivations who just ends up doing entirely bad things then would you really propose that that person is bad or evil? I think that would be unfair to that theoretical person because they must have just been mislead by somebody else or misinterpreted their environment or perhaps they are mentally disabled (or a combination of those).

Therefore the given example is a bad person who just does good things. They're not a problem for society or any person but that doesn't mean they aren't bad. If their situation was just a little different they almost certainly would be a scourge upon humanity.

[Borgholio]

Well if this situation was inverted, i.e. we have a person with entirely good motivations who just ends up doing entirely bad things then would you really propose that that person is bad or evil?

Again it boils down to intent. If the good person was simply gullible or mislead by someone else, then he's not really a bad person since he never INTENDED to do anything bad. In the original example of a bad guy who does good things...remember he's doing good things for an evil reason. So he's still a bad guy.

[Simon_Jester]

At a certain point, we can separate "is this person good" into two questions.

One involves whether the person is good in the sense of Aristotle's ethics (he literally wrote a book titled "Ethics," and it's a much better book on ethics than his work Physics is on physics). Aristotle's ideas revolve around the idea that a person is 'good' in the sense that a 'good' knife is sharp or a 'good' tree provides fruit, shade, and other benefits. Basically, the goal of life is to find out what people should be, in terms of their character. And then people should strive to exhibit those virtues.

The other involves the kind of deontological and rule utilitarian systems we now mostly embrace, where ethics is about what actions you should perform. Not so much about your personality.

A persistently virtuous person who does nothing but bad, despite good intentions, will always be 'good' by most systems of rule utilitarianism and deontology. They will be 'bad' under pure utilitarianism, but pure utilitarianism is pretty stupid.

Under Aristotelian ethics, though, they are arguably NOT good, or at least not perfectly good- because their failure to achieve good results is likely to reflect some defect in their character, which a truly good person (in the sense that a 'good' knife is sharp) would seek to remedy.