Concerning Matters Moral
As I biked home from Shields library where I spent the afternoon reading the works of Salman Rushdie and commentaries on them, I took a few minutes to ponder the problem of morality again. The conclusion I reached was that Kant was right to a large extent. By this I mean that an individual's goodness or evilness is dependent upon the said individual's intentions. It is hard to label a well meaning fool as evil if he/she has good intentions but manages to cause great harm. The deed may be evil, but the label doesn't really transfer to the agent. The connection between these thoughts and reading Rushdie may not be readily apparent to those who aren't sickeningly familiar with my my convoluted brain so I'll try to fill some gaps. Rushdie was extremely left-leaning and as a polemic he attacked Islam and the West as well as just about everything else (except the Sandinistas but that's irrelevant here). This got me wondering who is really right and how we can trust a government (any government) when it seems that a government's interests nearly always run counter to those of the governed. The end I arrived at was that governments as entire entities may bring about goods or evils for their citizens and the world but they don't have any real moral character in and of themselves, the moral agents are the politicians. Good politicians would be those who have the interests of their constituents and any others they may affect in mind while bad politicians are those who hold office for selfish benefit. Of course, the morality of a politician is far from the only consideration when deciding who to elect because morally upstanding individuals can ruin a country and morally bankrupt villains can on occasion be saviours. (Examples include Carter and...I won't fill in the other blank to save my hide). The bottom line as I saw it biking along on this beautiful summer afternoon was that John Stuart Mill's conception of utilitarianism fails to take into account the beliefs that a moral agent holds and the agent's integrity to these beliefs or values, and for this reason seems to have a serious lacking. The relative moral values of different beliefs may be addressed by utilitarianism, but one must really stretch to tie some necessity for adhering to good values or any other sort of integrity into the theory.
Disclaimer: This small entry does not represent my entire thought process, which only took as long as the distance between Briggs Hall and La Rue by bike (about 1-2 minutes). I may decide in the near future on further introspection that I was utterly mistaken in my analysis. Good Day.
