Ok, so today I had my Ethics exam, and while I was studying for it, I came upon a sentence which I really liked. "What has more moral value, the intention that inspires an act, or the results that are obtained from said act." (I hope that makes sense, it was originally in Spanish) So, I was wondering what you guys thought about this.
Thats quite interesting. I think the intention has more moral value, since morality is an extremely personal thing, and not all acts have the desired intentions. Therefore, the morality of a person should not be judged solely on what they do. Of course we don't usually have a better measure. However, without the strength to act on a good intention, then nothing ever changes (I'm thinking here about human rights activism). But I wouldn't specifically say that the strength to act is attributed to morality.
In the vast majority of cases, the results of the act are far more important than the intentions of the act. The intentions of an action will have a different moral standing depending on who has them; they are subjective. For example, the terrorists who flew into the WTC buildings were doing so from a moral intention of good, under the delusion that they had been commanded to do so from some higher power. It is blatantly obvious to most people that the intention of killing thousands of people in a terrorist act is 'bad', but the terrorists thought it was 'good'. Therefore how is it decided whether it is morally good or bad when these two viewpoints are at odds? It is much more useful to analyse the results of an action. If you want to use a widely-used definition of morality - reduction in suffering is good; increase in suffering is bad - then the acts of terrorists are certainly morally bad because they increase the suffering of their victims and the victim's families. Morals only have meaning when they affect a population, therefore it is inconsequential to analyse someone's subjective moral view of an action. This doesn't mean personal morals are useless though, because usually they match up with what is best for a population, but personal morals certainly shouldn't be used as a yardstick to determine whether an action is right or wrong. (Of course this does lead to curly situations. e.g. Is someone morally wrong if they give a starving person an apple, only to have the starving person choke and die? In cases like this, where the outcome is completely at odds with what was expected to happen, intentions become more important.)
Results might be more important, but intentions have more moral value. Morally valuable results can come from morally neutral or even evil intentions. Giving to charity so people will find you charitable has the same result for the recipient of charity as does giving to charity anonymously because you feel morally compelled. Asking who can decide what is morally good or bad doesn't really influence the conversation - you could just as easily ask who can decide whether an outcome is worth pursing or not. Basing morals on intentions doesn't mean that anyone is morally good as long as they are doing what they think is right. A person can put too much stock in one virtue and not enough in another, and thereby do something morally wrong. As a vastly simplified example: it is wrong to lie and wrong to kill, but we usually think killing is worse than lying. If I say I am going to kill an innocent person, and I decide that it would be worse to have lied than to kill I am not morally justified in killing. I am doing something for a morally correct reason, but ignoring another more important moral standard, which should have come before simple honesty. I tihnk the same logic applies to the terrorism counter-example given above.
That is assuming your definition of morality is the RIGHT one... the one EVERYONE should use... Which makes it subjective. There's no real right answer here. Anyways, my last english class made me think about this enough... lol and it just goes in circles.
