There is no greater principle of the good other than what you might want to put into. This is not to say that the good is relative or that you can’t be wrong about it, it just means that whenever you make an honest assessment about you think you should do, you are at the same time deciding what you think is good. If you say: I should rather take care of my family than some random starving children in Africa, that means you think taking care of your family would be good and sacrificing them for the benefit of strangers would be bad. It’s not like you think it’s a bad thing to do, but you are doing it anyway out of some vicious urge that you have.

If you recognize that you are not as good as you could have been, that only implies that you realize you have shortcomings not that you act contrary to your own perception of the good.

There is no tightrope to walk. The good man never has to sacrifice good for safety, because a reasonable amount of safety would naturally be included in the good. It would be bad to take crazy risks.

If you recognize that you are not as good as you could have been, that only implies that you realize you have shortcomings not that you act contrary to your own perception of the good. — Congau

I mostly agree with everything you said, but in this one bit I'm not sure I do, though I might. There is such a thing as weakness of will, where you think that you ought to do something, make up your mind to do it, and then find that you do not actually follow through on that decision even though you think you should. In that case you are "acting contrary to your own perception of the good"; but, maybe you mean to include that among "shortcomings", and there's no real disagreement here.

Your response is helpful to me. I don't mean to say that being virtuous means seeking out circumstances that will assuredly kill a person, especially me.

On the other hand, I did say no to a lot of stuff and that has shaped my life. Those choices could be presented as a matter of principle in the Kantian register or just personal reactions to barely understood circumstances. I think it has been some of both. And my kids will live with some of that. An inheritance, if you will. Just like the one I got.

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Credit to everyone posting except the OP (that's me) — tim wood

Ok, fine then. I’ll credit you for putting forward a worthwhile subject for discussion. Seems to be a dearth of them, if anyone were to ask me. Which I have no reason to suspect anyone will, but anyway.......

Your response is helpful to me — Valentinus

Thank you. I'm happy to hear that.

In that case you are "acting contrary to your own perception of the good"; but, maybe you mean to include that among "shortcomings", and there's no real disagreement here. — Pfhorrest

That's right. I call that a shortcoming.

There’s no real reason to distinguish between the good man and the moral man. The meaning of moral (or ethical) is whatever is good human conduct. A good man is moral, and whenever he acts well, he acts morally.

Your definition of a moral man seems to be “someone who follows moral rules” or “a follower of rule or duty ethics”. In my opinion such a person is neither good nor moral. When blindly following rules, a lot of the time one knowingly ends up hurting people and doing more bad than good, and that must necessarily be the opposite of good conduct.

In utilitarian ethics there are no rules and no abstract “you should”. A successful follower of this system would be a moral man, in my opinion.

But if you insist on making a distinction between the good and the moral man, one could maybe say the good man doesn’t necessarily have to think about morality in a systematic way. He could be naturally good (and virtuous) without needing to explain what he does.

Another possible distinction could be to equate a good man with a virtuous man and demand he should have his emotions attached to his good conduct, whereas a moral man simply does the right thing. But this distinction also seems somewhat forced.

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There is an argument, or maybe just an interpretation, that if morality presupposes a will, and all wills are good, then every man who is a moral agent possesses a good will. If true, the good mark of a man can’t be that which is presupposed in him.
— Mww

I don't understand. — tim wood

I guess I was thinking the possession of a good will does not predict with certainty a man will act in accordance with its volitions. He ought to, sure, but that in itself is no guarantee. Therefore, the good mark of a man, is that he actually does so act in such accordance, which must depend for its reality on empirical conditions, and not the rational conditions which ground the origin of the volition in the first place.

And partly I might have been thinking with a certain degree of semantic dislocation, insofar as the good mark of a man, is very far from the mark of a good man. The former cannot be from a mere presupposition, for it is entirely empirically discovered, but the latter can find its theoretical validity by no other means than that presupposition, which is pure a priori speculation.

And partly I might have been thinking a kind of syllogistic dislocation, because it does not necessarily follow from the analytically certain first minor (every man possesses a good will), that we are allowed a synthetic, hence merely possible, conclusion (the good mark of a man is his possession of a good will).

Take your pick? Dump ‘em all in the circular filing cabinet?
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obligation under the law may well be mandatory, but determining that law may involve some art. — tim wood

Oh HELL yeah!!!! The ol’ be careful what you wish for thing. I might think the greater saving grace for moral artistry is the availability of such transcendental hypotheticals as innate values (beneficence, respect, etc), and natural dignity (humility, forebearance, etc), that by which the instillation of one’s moral laws arises, and where one’s obligation to them resides. It’s also that artistry’s greatest stumbling block: how does one think laws for himself and immediately think himself obligated by them.

The answer is so simple, it escapes attention thus casting the whole moral theory in doubt.

I still don’t know why you insist on calling the man who follows rules a moral man. I want to contest the notion that morality is about rules.

Your own examples illustrate that perfectly. There can be no rule against torture for the very reason you mention. Torture might conceivably be defensible if it could save a lot of lives. A rule has the form “never do x!”, but we seem to agree that it’s not possible to say “never torture!” If we allow for exceptions to the rule, it is strictly speaking not a rule anymore. It may be a rule of thumb, a general guidance that makes ethical decisions easier because it would be inconvenient to go through a detailed weighing of alternatives every time we act. But the ultimate judgment whether something is right or wrong, doesn’t rest on rules - just like in the torture example.

Your moral man, who follows rules, does something immoral if he in your example indirectly causes the death of a lot of people.

Define crazy risk. And why take any risk? Why does the "crazy" matter if the risk itself is acceptable? — tim wood

You should act so that the outcome of the action is LIKELY to produce a good result (more good than bad). "Not likely" means that the risk is too high.

Quotes from Kant’s “Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals”:
“Nothing (…) can be called good, without qualification, except a good will”
“the notion of duty, which includes that of a good will”
“he tears himself out of this dead insensibility, and performs the action without any inclination to it, but simply from duty, then first has his action its genuine moral worth”
From which this follows:
moral worth = action simply from duty = good will = good.
That is, the ultimately good man acts simply from duty and he doesn’t enjoy his good action

The virtue of this man is achieving balance between extremes, including extremes of virtue! In any case, certainly he would not choose to make 100 enemies happy at the expense of even two of his compatriots - or do you think he would? — tim wood

The virtuous man achieves balance between extremes, not too much and not too little, as in courage being the balance between cowardice and foolhardiness. Since virtue IS the balance, there can be no exaggerated extreme of virtue itself.
I didn’t say Aristotle is a utilitarian (although he’s certainly not a deontologist). Whatever he would choose in that example would be what he thought would be the most virtuous thing to do.

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Certainly, good action and good intention are very different. A good action can occur by accident and be performed by a villain - it just requires a good result. It is also true that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

We don’t know the ultimate outcome of our actions and the idea that “the ends justify the means” have frequently led to an end-result that was vastly different from anything that was initially imagined.

We should not try to predict what is unpredictable, but often we can quite easily predict the immediate outcome of our action, and then it would naïve and even immoral to deny one’s responsibility by sticking to some preconceived rule. The infamous example about the murderer who asks for the whereabouts of your friend is a case in point, but examples don’t need to be that farfetched. If your child is very hungry (but not necessarily dying from hunger) and you don’t have money available at the moment, it may be a moral thing to do to steal a piece of bread. Here there’s no gap between intention and outcome. There is no doubt that the outcome will be what you intended: When the child eats bread, it will for sure not be hungry anymore.

Sometimes the gap is greater, I admit, but for practical purposes, if it’s overwhelmingly likely that the next result in the causal chain can be predicted, it may be safe to consider intention and outcome to be almost identical. Then the action has moral worth.

If the outcome is very unpredictable it would certainly be immoral to act only on good intention. For example, killing a lot of people to start a revolution that in your dreams will lead to a glorious society. I agree that the torture example is debatable. We can construct scenarios where the likelihood of the wished-for result to come true will vary.

Don’t ask me where I want to draw the line for how much risk is acceptable. Even if you could hardly accept any risk at all, there are enough conceivable cases where the risk would be virtually zero, and that’s enough to prove the point: It may be moral to act on good intentions even when they don’t conform to moral rules.

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