Good Will

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Baier thinks that moral worth of a person is just like the market value of a good. It depends on moral excellence, which means the ability and willingness to perform both the theoretical and the practical tasks. Combining this interpretation with Kant’s conclusion, it is clear that when someone does what is his duty and has to go against his own inclinations, his willingness and ability to complete the theoretical task and the practical task is higher that someone whose duty agrees with his inclinations. This implies that the former person has a higher moral excellence. With that higher moral excellence, the moral worth of his action has also increased along with it. This perfectly explains why Kant would say that the presence of inclination contrary to duty gives action from duty higher moral worth. (Baier 25-28)

Thomas Hiller also talked about moral worth from a Kantian perspective in his book Human Welfare and Moral Worth. In chapter 11, “Punishment, Conscience, and Moral Worth”, Hiller brings up his discussion on conscience, which he refers to as “the inner judge”. This is a concept that Kant on which did not expand a lot, but it is absolutely an important factor that we should take into account when judging the moral worth of things. In some popular views, conscience is an infallible God-given internal sense that tells us if we are doing the right thing. However, this account of conscience could be misunderstood. Bishop Butler provides a more minimal interpretation as a faculty of reason (Hiller 347). More recently, cultural relativists think that conscience is just a psychological manifestation of having internalized the social norms of our society (Hiller 347).

From Kant’s point of view, conscience does not determine the basic principles of right conduct as reason does; it is not needed to apply these principles as judgment is; it does not need to be developed to follow the best judgment. Kant takes conscience as an inner judgment system. Such a judging system usually generates two kinds of relevant charges. One of them is that we failed to act in accord with our general moral judgment; the other is that we have failed our duty of due-care by not being sufficiently serious and careful in determining in particular what our duties are. Conscience holds up our “acts-as-we-perceive-them” for comparison with “general-moral-judgments-that-we-accept” in order to see whether we have acted well by our own lights. It also passes judgment on whether we have been careful and diligent in our initial moral judgment about what ordinary people would do in certain situations. In short, conscience is judgment passing judgment upon itself. (Hiller 347-348)

After providing a detailed analysis of the concept of conscience, Hiller goes on to discuss the fact that when motivations come from conscience, there still will be a morally worthy version and morally unworthy version. In the unworthy version, someone may refuse to do what would be morally worthy just to avoid the bad consequences even it seems trivial compared to the good he will achieve. In the worthy version, it is just the same fear toward the bad outcome of that hurting conscience that alerts us and makes us even more aware of our respect of the moral law and its requirements. This fact has a basis in natural psychology, but it is morally significant because it shows that we respect and accept the authority of moral reasons. Even in the process of forming motivation, the slight difference between whether or not we decide to take that pain would assign completely different moral worth to later behaviors. So Hiller once again emphasized the significance and deep influence of motivations here. (Hiller 356-358)

Having read Hiller’s account, I would agree that Socrates may also have the same opinion on this topic that moral worth is determined by motives rather than consequences. The reason for this is connected to his discussion of differences between knowledge and mere true beliefs from Meno. Although this argument is not strictly talking about moral worth, it actually connects nicely with, and supports, Kant’s views on good will.

According to Socrates, people who have only true beliefs about virtue have no idea why indeed they are doing what they do. They are only working to achieve those alluring outcomes that they think their behaviors will bring out but not doing so for these behaviors’ sake. This is to say, they are not really being virtuous people. Whatever they are doing under such situation is not real virtue. By contrast, people who obtain real knowledge of virtue are motivated solely by virtue itself no matter what kind of outcomes would be produced by doing what is virtuous. According to Socrates, truly virtuous people do virtuous things for virtues’ own sake. They are not using it as a tool to reach for other appealing outcomes. This implies that the motivations of behaviors determines whether they are virtuous or not and that virtuous people will never value consequences over motivations. If people truly are virtuous and do virtuous things for virtues’ own sake, it would not surprise us that these things they do are of moral worth. This is obviously in accordance with Kant’s conclusion on determining moral worth of an action. (Plato 90-105)

In this way, people who have true belief of virtue and people who have real knowledge of virtue may do things that lead to the exact same consequences and therefore both seem virtuous to us, but it can never be true that they are the same because their motivations have nothing at all in common. Kant would probably express this fact by claiming that people who have real knowledge of virtue are the ones truly with good will. And only with such good will can they be truly virtuous and do things that are morally worthy.

We can easily distinguish between mere true beliefs and real knowledge theoretically, as these two concepts are clear and easy. But it is actually much more difficult or even impossible to really differentiate between them in real world. When two actions lead to similar or even exactly the same consequences, we will always fail to differentiate between them. Even if we already know that these two kinds of motivations are distinctly not the same, we cannot justify the differences. There is no possible way for us to get a clear and confident conclusion about one’s motivation. For example, if you see someone just suddenly start slapping his friend in the face, do you think this man is doing something absolutely wrong? You might say yes because you saw them talking to each other nicely, and all of a sudden that guy just started beating his friend up. But the actual case might be that they are just classmates from a stage combat class, and they were just practicing for their final project but