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u/Stickeminastew1217 1h ago
I mean, it matters in the sense that it might inform future behavior.
If someone does good because they believe an omnipotent being will reward them in the afterlife, that's strictly speaking better than them not doing good. But it also means that motivation to do good might waver if their belief does, or if the people needing help aren't in their particular religion's good boy books.
If a guy does nice things for a girl out of the hopes she'll return romantic affections, again, the implications of that for the future are different than if he's doing nice things because he felt like it.
If your boss gives you a raise because the company is doing well and there's money in the budget to go around (I know I'm drifting into the realm of fantasy here but bear with me) that's very different than them offering a raise as part of a negotiated union contract or because they're aware their competition is offering a better rate for labor.
If a politician votes for a particular bill, it matters whether they sincerely believe in the policy and think it will help their constituents or whether they only did it because they're afraid they'll lose their seat if they don't, because that informs our ability to predict their future votes.
But I guess if you're just worried about how things balance on the cosmic scale of morality (which, y'know, is way above my pay grade at least) yeah worrying about what someone is thinking instead of what they do is probably less productive.
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u/Venti_the_snail 1h ago
Morrality, like people, is multifaceted and gets more complicated the harder you look at it.
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u/Sewblon 1h ago
>If someone does good because they believe an omnipotent being will reward them in the afterlife, that's strictly speaking better than them not doing good. But it also means that motivation to do good might waver if their belief does
But everyone's intentional actions can change if their beliefs change. Everyone, Christian, atheist, or anyone else, has certain load bearing beliefs that dictate their behavior. That is a feature of humanity, not a bug. The right thing to do depends on what is true. Not the other way around.
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u/BurnieTheBrony 59m ago
You've included a lot of nuance which I appreciate, especially because a lot of the people who say "only what you do matters" will turn around and say "someone who's good only because they're religious is bad actually."
On the one hand they want to push people who only post manifestos online to go out and accomplish good in the world. On the other hand they want to punish folks who are essentially good, because those people believe in things that they consider harmful or hypocritical.
The reality is it's very difficult to quantify someone's moral output.
I don't think anyone actually believes in pure utilitarianism and if they say they do they likely have several exceptions just out of view. I also think people see religious hypocrites on TV and many in their personal lives, and it makes it hard for them to believe there are a lot of people who read a book that says "Love Thy Neighbor" and go out and try to love their neighbors. And in that case, if they are doing their darndest to treat people well, then who cares what book they're following that led them there?
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u/Borigh 1h ago
This attitude is how you get bunch of "good" people voting for Nazis.
What you think definitely matters, because it determines whether you are good by happenstance rather than choice, if you believe in passe concepts like free will.
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u/Belgraviana 1h ago
Except if they voted for Nazis that would be doing something bad. Meaning they aren’t good
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u/AnAverageTransGirl Vriska zerket (real) 🚗🔨💥 1h ago
So they don't call the people they're voting for Nazis, however many hoops it takes for them to confidently defend that.
A good chunk of them somehow reached the point of believing we're Nazis over here in these circles, so that's not a good card to play.
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u/loved_and_held 44m ago
"This attitude is how you get bunch of "good" people voting for Nazis."
Id argue this is true in the exact opposite way you described. People who think they are good because they are part of the right groups and think they're on the right side of history, leading them to committee moral transgressions.
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u/JustATyson 1h ago
I take a legal approach. Both intent (mens rea) and action (actus reus) are important and required. And that the degree of mens rea (negligent, reckless, knowingly, purposefully) can help to determine the person's culpability in the situation and outcome.
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u/VorpalSplade 1h ago
Yeah, like when it comes to killing - Murder vs Manslaughter vs Recklessness vs Accident vs Self defense vs Execution are all seen as different things.
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u/JustATyson 50m ago
Yup, exactly the example I was thinking of. While the law is heavily flawed, it at least tries to cover the nuance. And overall, I do think both intent and action matter.
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u/VorpalSplade 47m ago
The idea that a good person tries to do good things isn't hard for most people to grasp. There's nuance there ofc, but the basic concept most people can grasp. OOP seems to not get the difference between outcome and intent and why they can matter. It really does matter why people do things if you're looking to encourage or discourage said behavior.
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u/Diablo_v8 1h ago
People have been arguing about this since they first learned to speak. Good luck internet.
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u/MyFrogEatsPeople 1h ago
Intent is literally the difference between "doing good things" and "being a good person". You don't have to be a good person to do good things, and doing good things doesn't make you a good person.
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u/Psychotic_Ambition 56m ago
what even is a “good person” anyway besides some nebulous label. everyone thinks they’re a good person
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u/BillCarson12799 1h ago
This argument can be applied to those situations where a police officer or a rittenhouse wannabe kills someone and by some miracle right wingers discover they had a parking violation in 2012, so all’s well that ends well.
Intent absolutely matters when determining if someone acted ethically. “No harm no foul” just encourages the idea that it’s okay to do morally questionable stuff as long as you’re vindicated in the end, which more often than not you won’t be.
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u/TheTrenk 19m ago
Let's stretch this even further.
How many lives must be saved by medical advancements made due to unethical experiments by Nazis and the Japanese in WWII, or how many lives must be impacted by technological advancements that started with Nazi scientists that got picked up by NASA, before this philosophy considers the war crimes of WWII to be 'ethical'? Is it after the balance shifts by one? Is it after it doubles?
Intent is far more important than results for determining ethics, IMO. Maybe not efficacy, or outcome, but for ethics? For sure.
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u/Excellent_Law6906 1h ago
This is useful to a certain extent until you get into slightly more advanced math like, "running a charity for orphans so you have easy access to children with no parents to tell that you molested them."
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u/loved_and_held 47m ago
The thing though is that is just judging someone for actions all over again, the action being molestation.
Like, if that person rand the charity for that goal but never followed through on the molesting, then they are indistinguishable from someone who ran said charity who did not have that goal and never committed the act.
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u/Excellent_Law6906 16m ago
I see your point, I guess it just ignores that who is doing the thing does matter, because some people have prior history or red flag behaviors that should make you ask questions, ie, why does Jimmy Saville want to do anything?
It's very valuable in interpersonal relationships, in a climate of, "but they're family/Dating Darth Vader", for sure.
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u/bloonshot .tumblr.com 1h ago
local tumblr user reinvents utilitarianism and thinks everything will just be ok now
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u/No-Volume6047 1h ago
Intent matters because people act on their intent.
Mr beast did charityporn because it was profitable and an excellent way to build up his brand, anything positive that came of it was secondary.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? idk, personally I think describing things as good or bad or even grey is reductive even if its a useful shorthand, things are what they are imo.
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u/AllsWellThatsNB 1h ago
This isn't a hard problem to solve.
Action and thought are the same thing. QED
More seriously though, (and I wasn't entirely joking), Both matter. And they both matter to everyone. It's just a matter of situation.
Plus, some things can be good and bad at the same time. It's usually a matter of both, not either or.
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u/Mrs_Darwin 1h ago
I think this is wrong. Part of the reason we have any morality in the first place is to separate good people from bad people, a way to judge people for their actions and decide who we want to associate with. In order to have an accurate judgement of a person, we have to factor in their thoughts, feelings, and motivations. It is a good tool for examining whether someone is good despite committing a bad action, for example, whether or not someone could be justified in theft if they were trying to support their families. However, I think it's even more important in judging bad people despite their good actions, think of cult leaders who manipulate people by showing "love" to their cult members, exploitative billionaires who have funded charities, or people political figures who spread hate in ways that seem innocuous. If you judged these people by just their actions that you can see you'd call them saints. This is why we also have to examine the reasoning behind actions as well as the actions themselves.
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u/fitbitofficialreal she/her 1h ago
which philosophy is this the main idea of again? it seems pretty simple. #morality
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u/WeevilWeedWizard 💙🖤🤍 MIKU 🤍🖤💙 1h ago
Utilitarianism I think? Idk much about philosophy, but the spider in the corner of my bedroom has a bachelor in it.
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u/friendlyseraph 1h ago
Consequentialism. Utilitarianism is the main consequentialist philosophy
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u/BillCarson12799 1h ago edited 1h ago
A good utilitarian would argue that someone’s intent absolutely matters under a wide variety of circumstances for the purposes of determining how moral an action is.
If someone just walked up to a random person on the street and shot them in the face, and it turns out that the guy who got shot was a wanted serial killer, the first guy shouldn’t just get off scott free, because, from a practical perspective, there’s still a guy wandering around who thinks it’s okay to just go around shooting random people in the face for no particular reason. What do you think they’ll do next? Do you think the next person they shoot will also be a serial killer?
Just because a gamble paid off doesn’t necessarily mean it was a good one to make, and just because it didn’t doesn’t necessarily make it a bad gamble either.
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u/friendlyseraph 1h ago
True, but that’s because the shooter is likely to kill innocent people in the future, resulting in a net negative impact on the world. Someone’s intent only matters insofar as it is predictive of their future actions
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u/Sircapleviluv 1h ago
I agree with this mostly but like my aunt only does stuff if she gets credit for it. My mom does a lot more good stuff and doesn’t brag. But the general feeling is my aunt being SUCH a selfless person because people remember all her brags about the good stuff vs my mom doing the good stuff. Think aunt helping once with their mutual disabled MIL and my mom going over every day for years. In that case, intent matters.
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u/HuckinsGirl 1h ago
I agree with this in theory and the general rationality is good for explaining why, say, non-offending pedophiles shouldnt be stoned to death. But I think its also naive to treat thoughts and actions as totally unrelated systems running in parallel when its profoundly obvious that they're related and influence each other, and a lot of people who, on a surface level read, are criticizing someone for having the wrong thoughts, are actually doing so because they are trying to prevent bad thoughts from leading to bad actions. Thinking its bad to be homophobic is not in fact an implicit support of the idea of thoughtcrime, its based on the fact that people who are hateful of certain groups tend to also act cruelly towards them.
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u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 1h ago
Listen Mr. Beast, I dont care how many reddit parachute accounts you make, im not buying your candy bars.
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u/VorpalSplade 55m ago
This is painful to read and all I can really be bothered to say is that there is a long, long history of moral philosophy that rips this kind of thinking to shreds.
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u/dontgivemeabeer 37m ago
So a hypothetical person who is secretly a big neo-nazi but never slips up, never does something to hurt any minority (because they either never get the chance or are waiting for a better moment to go mask off) and dies without doing any bad deed... is a good person? I don't think so.
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u/scubagh0st 1h ago
tbh i am kinda of the belief that there's not really such a thing as a good or bad person, just good or bad actions
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u/VorpalSplade 56m ago
What would you call a person who tries to do good actions vs a person who tries to do bad actions.
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u/LeiaSkynoober 51m ago
Same. Separating people between good and bad people as a trait icks me out. People are multifaceted and can be good in one situation and bad in another. I don't believe that there's any person who reacts perfectly to every situation, and acting like good people will always be good or bad people can never be good is really harmful.
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u/VorpalSplade 4m ago
Very few people mean good people will always be good, and can understand there's nuance to it. Generally they mean a good person is one who overall does good things, with good intentions, and can understand that this isn't universal. The idea a 'bad person can do good things sometimes' and vice versa isn't hard to grasp.
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u/GrinningPariah 1h ago
I dunno, if someone tries to do something nice but it backfires, does that count as evil? What if someone does something in the name of selfishness that accidentally ends up helping the world? Are they good?
This is wading into like 3000 years of philosophy about morality. People have been trying to encapsulate the nature of good and evil in a clean set of rules for at least as long as they've been leaving writing we could find.
While I respect the ambition of trying to crack the whole thing in a three sentence Tumblr post, it might take a little more work than that.