Do Good Intentions Justify Bad Actions?

The comparison is between the biographies of a dedicated communist commander of one of the Gulag camps and of a Nazi SS officer. Each is guilty of having done very bad actions. Each believed that his intentions were good and that his bad actions were justified in the circumstances. One intended to protect his country against its enemies. The other intended to save as many lives as he could by means of his bad actions in order to gain the trust of other SS officers. He was an intentional collaborator in the crimes of the SS, but he thereby saved many lives. A reasonable answer to this hard question depends on whether their intentions were really good or merely believed to be so; on what the overall balance was of their good and bad the actions; on whether they should have had doubts about the nature of their intentions and actions; and what the justification of their bad actions was supposed to be. There are reasonable answers, but they vary with persons, intentions, actions, and contexts. If we bear in mind the questionable good intentions of the communist and the Nazi, we should become less trusting of our own supposedly good intentions and more attentive to the likely consequences of our actions.

Must Justice Be Done at All Costs?

In the Tibetan Sherpa society, the dominant value was social harmony, and it was valued much more than justice. In ancient Greece, Sophocles’s Creon and Antigone thought that the dominant value was justice, but they radically disagreed about whether it was primarily political or religious. The comparison in the chapter is between a Sherpa who had reason for accepting the unjust treatment he received and Creon and Antigone who had reasons for defending what they took to be justice at great cost to themselves, others, and social harmony. This chapter is concerned with evaluating the reasons for and against regarding justice as necessary. The crucial point is that there are good reasons for both of the conflicting answers, but they vary with the contexts of those who face the question. And that rules out the possibility of relying on an absolute value that could determine when justice is and is not necessary. We can then ask ourselves whether we in our context would be reasonable in regarding justice as necessary even if it conflicts, for instance, with peace, compassion, or loyalty to those we love. And that must be an individual, not a social, decision.

Is There an Absolute Value that Overrides All Other Considerations?

One answer was given in Maccabeus 2 by a venerable old man and his imagined younger alter ego. The old man was guided by what he took to be an absolute value and died rather than violate it. The young one accepted the same value, but when it came into conflict with other things he had reason to value, he did not think it was absolute. This chapter considers how the reasons for the certainty of the old man and the flexibility of the young one could be evaluated. It shows that although their reasons were derived from their different personal and social circumstances, yet the reasons of one were better than those of the other. Having their cases in front of us, we can consider whether we have or should have an absolute value that we would be ready to die for, if it becomes necessary. I give reasons why we may individually make a reasonable absolute commitment to a person, ideal, or cause without claiming that reason requires everyone to make that or any other absolute commitment.

Is It Always Good to Be True to Who We Are?

The hardness of this question is made clear by considering the actual case of an honorable army officer who found that circumstances prevented him from doing the duty he was wholeheartedly committed to doing. I compare him with a young man in Koestler’s novel, Arrival and Departure, who mistakenly blamed himself for a fatal accident. The soldier could not remain true to who he was and wanted to be and killed himself because of it. The young man was deeply dissatisfied with who he mistakenly supposed he was and did not want to be true to it. This chapter shows that a reasonable answer depends on having a realistic view of who we are, on the reasons for and against being satisfied with it, on having an opportunity to change, and on the nature and seriousness of the challenge that leads to the hard question. Remaining true may be stupid, pig-headed, or a sign of integrity and strength. Endeavoring to change may be the result of weakness, cowardice, and opportunism, or the desire to reform and self-discipline. There is no universally applicable answer to this hard question because the reasons for and against being true to who we are depend on who we are and take ourselves to be. Thinking about this hard question makes it obvious how simple minded are the contemporary celebrations of autonomy, authenticity, sincerity, and doing our own thing. Whether it is good to be true to who we are depends on who we are.

Does Shame Make Life Better or Worse?

This chapter is a comparison between two women who were shamed by their society. One, drawn from Herodotus, accepts the shaming, and feels ashamed. The other, one of Hawthorne’s characters, rejects her society’s evaluation that shames her, and she does not feel ashamed. In one society, there was no distinction made between social shaming and private feeling of shame. In the other, the distinction could be made. In this respect, the two societies were different. Each woman evaluated the reasons for and against feeling shame, but the evaluations of one were more reasonable than that of the other. Whether shame is good is a hard question because it is difficult to weigh the reasons for and against living in a way that is contrary to the evaluations of one’s society. Different people with different strengths in different circumstances have different reasons for or against feeling shame, and their reasons may or may not be good, depending on their social and personal circumstances. So we can ask about the shame we might feel: whether it makes us less likely to act badly in the future, whether fear of shame weakens our confidence in our own evaluations, and how far we are willing to go to alienate ourselves from our society.

Must We Conform?

This chapter compares Melville’s Bartleby and the Venetian atheist savant, Sarpi. Bartleby lived a miserable life in nineteenth-century New York City. His inner resources were meager, and quiet desperation eventually led him to refuse to conform any longer. He died of self-inflicted inanition. The other lived in sixteenth-century Venice. His inner resources were considerable, and they enabled him to wear a lifelong mask hiding what he really believed. Both had reasons for the different answers they gave to the hard question. Comparison between their responses makes it possible for us from a distance to evaluate whether conformity was or was not reasonable for them and whether it would be reasonable for us as we face the question of whether we should conform to our conditions. I follow Montaigne in concluding that although circumstances may force us to make prudent compromises, there is a limit beyond which we should not go. But what that limit is varies with social and personal circumstances.

How Should We Respond to Evil?

The chapter draws on an insufficiently appreciated novel, Lovely Green Eyes. It compares how a young girl and a Priest responded to evil. The girl could save her life in awful circumstances only by prostitution that forever destroyed her innocence. The Priest sheltered her after horrors she lived through and helped her slow recovery from what she had endured. The girl was young and resilient, responded well to the evil she suffered, and gradually resumed a semblance of normal life. The Priest could not reconcile his religious faith with the condition of the world that led to what was done to the girl. The girl’s reasons for responding to the evil she suffered were direct and practical. The Priest’s reasons were indirect and theoretical. The girl responded to the evil done to her reasonably, dauntingly difficult as that was. The Priest tried to respond to it but could not find a reasonable way of reconciling it with his faith. Each had reasons for how they responded to evil, but the girl’s were better than the Priest’s. The chapter shows how reasons for and against responding to evil in these different ways can be reasonably evaluated. It leads us to ask whether we could be as resilient as the girl was if we had to respond to evil. And to ask as well whether we can reconcile our view of the world in which evil is prevalent without obfuscating the horrors we cannot help knowing about.

Introduction

The book is concerned with what we personally can do to answer hard questions we face in our personal and social circumstances. Reasonable answers depend on a critical examination of anthropological, historical, and literary contexts in which others struggled to give reasonable answers to hard questions. Our understanding of our possibilities and limits are enriched by learning from the good and bad examples of others. Each of the following chapters compares and critically examines two conflicting answers given by two people to the same hard question they faced in different circumstances.

Conclusion

The comparative approach of this book is an alternative to the absolutist and relativist approaches to hard questions. Central to the argument are the unavoidability of conflicts, the context-dependence of reasonable answers, the plurality of evaluations and good lives, and the importance of personal attitudes.

Are Moral Values the Highest of All Values?

Plutarch’s Cato was an ancient moralist who had no doubt about the priority of moral evaluations to whatever conflicted with them. Montaigne was a politically experienced magistrate, legislator, and mediator who knew from personal experience that moral, personal, political, and religious evaluations often conflict. Montaigne thought that there were circumstances in which moral evaluations should be reasonably overridden by non-moral evaluations. Cato denied it. Intransigence led Cato to undermine the Roman Republic he was morally committed to defend. Montaigne’s prudent counsel was a moderating influence in the civil war that raged in sixteenth-century France. The hard question is whether or not there are limits beyond which we could not reasonably go in overriding moral evaluations. The chapter compares how good were the reasons Cato and Montaigne gave for their conflicting answers to this hard question. That should lead us to consider how we in our circumstances should resolve conflicts between our own moral, personal, political, and religious evaluations. And we should be aware of the dangers of dogmatic moralizing that suppresses contrary personal, political, religious, and other evaluations.