Dominus Atheos wrote:You're right, I screwed up with that description. A better description would be:
Your (as in you, the person reading this) moral standards, whatever those may be.
The problem is that this invites ethical debate, which you claim not to want, because it means different people will naturally disagree and discuss that disagreement.
Purple wrote:salm wrote:Purple wrote:Actions are judged based on their consequences and not their motivations.
Actions are judged based on their motivations all the time that´s why there are different penalties for commiting a crime deliberately or negligently for example. Or why something like self defense exists.
That may be the legal approach. But we are not discussing legality here but morality. And I think you'll find that in many a thing the two not only disagree but are outright opposite.
This is rarer than you might believe, because most legal rulings in a functional society make sense in
some ethical system, even if they don't make sense in
all ethical systems.
Also, there are numerous ethical systems where actions are judged based on their motivations. In fact, pretty much everything except the most primitive versions of classical utilitarianism do that. They do it in different
ways. In some cases they even do it counterintuitively. But they do it.
For example, as I understand Kant, he would judge a person as
more ethical and good for doing good things that they dislike doing- at least, if they do so for ethical reasons. Doing nice things for people because you think well of them is easy- doing nice things for people you secretly hate,
because it is right, is harder.
However, this is totally different from approving of someone who wants to do evil, and thinks it is right to do evil, but who does good unwittingly or out of fear of consequences.
Purple wrote:salm wrote:Not in my book, but perhaps you follow an extraordinary moral system. If so, please explain.
I'll just address this as it's easier and more to the point. Basically I think that the moral value of an action is determined by the end results of that action. It does not matter what you wanted to achieve but what you actually did achieve.
Why?
Morality refers to
what it is good to do, not just to what happens to occur as a semi-foreseeable result of what you do.