What makes an act good?:

...Now you'd think that sensible compromise would settle things...

...Or is it obvious...

...Obviously the world would have been better off had they remained childless...

...But absent a crystal ball that really works, how can I tell whether by begetting children I bring more good or evil into the world...

...Take no thought for tomorrow...

...but among them is a decline in the belief in immortality...

...The constant moral theme of Jesus is that conformity to the Law, while important, is not sufficient...

...GOOD RESULTS A perennial dispute among moralists has to dowithhowtheright- ness or wrongness of an action is to be determined...

...There is an old, common sense answer to this question, which splits the difference and says that the morality of an action is determined by a mixture of both factors, intentions plus consequences...

...What they ignore nearly completely is the third...

...such a morality is to be found in the Gospels...

...But what about the grandparents of Adolf Hitler...

...We must conform in the right spirit, with pure motives, with a heart that loves God and trusts in him...

...When Jesus told his listeners that they must change their lives, he meant that they must undergo an inner conversion...

...When I marry, for instance, that action is full of consequences for any children, grandchildren, etc., that I may eventually have, as well as for the future generations among whom those offspring will live...

...If ever there was a morality of intention, if ever there was an anticonsequentialist morality ("Consider the lilies of the field...

...So if pure consequentialism doesn't work, where do we go from here...

...Well, many people have gone to moral agnosticism plus individual choice...

...From its very beginning, from the moment at least of the Sermon on the Mount, Christianity has taught an ethic of good intentions...

...and since we cannot know whether actions are good or bad, we have no right to impose moral rules on others and should thus leave it up to every man and woman to take whatever moral leaps in the dark each may wish to take (individual choice...

...There are many reasons for this shift, which has been underway for at least a couple of centuries now...

...Of the three components of moral action-the motive, the act itself, and the consequences-the Gospels focus almost exclusively on the first, with some incidental attention to the second...

...Do we ascertain this by looking at the motive of the action or at its results...

...His ethical goal was not so much to improve conduct as to purify the springs from which conduct flows...

...If you view this as pluralism and cultural diversity, you will think it a good thing...

...so now it makes perfect sense that I should concern myself about the consequence of my actions far more than about their motives...

...In retrospect it was a good thing that the grandparents of Francis of Assisi had children...

...If I risk my life to rescue a child from a burning building, but do so from motives of vanity (e.g., I hope to become a celebrity on the local TV news), that qualifies as a good deed-though not so good as it would be had it been motivated by humanity or Christian charity with no trace of vanity...

...Whatever contemporary philosophers may have to say about the issue, nowadays at the person-in-the-street level consequen-tialism has the upper hand, while the ethic of intentions, though not extinct, has been thrown far into the shade...

...Francis...

...Who can tell...

...If I survive death, my character and intentions, whether good or bad, will survive with me...

...The trouble with pure consequentialism in ethics is that nobody can accurately predict the long-term results of most actions...

...The logic of this situation has not fully played itself out yet, but the complete rejection of an ethic of intentions is carrying us toward a state in which there is scant consensus on moral rules...

...It was not enough to refrain from adultery, for example...

...The only way to be sure is to live until the end of time and see how things finally turn out...

...But this is not the end of the story...

...if you view it as moral chaos, you will think otherwise.l think otherwise...

...But it doesn't...

...it makes perfect sense, therefore, that I should be greatly concerned in this life about my inner self and its motives, that I may carry into the next life the worthiest character possible...

...Or if my well-intentioned rescue attempt inadvertently causes the death of the child (who, e.g., was about to escape from a window till he heard me calling his name and returned toward the center of the burning building), my guilt will be mitigated or removed by my good motives...

...Will the world perhaps eventually be a better place because of the reaction provoked by the monstrous horrors of nazism, because of our determination never to forget, never to let this sort of thing happen again...

...one had to refrain also from adultery in the heart...

...The most uncompromising expression of this anticonsequentialist ethic of intention is given in Kant's celebrated sentence: "It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification except a good will...

...otherwise there would have been no St...

...It was another philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who gave the most uncompromising expression of the consequentialist point of view: "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to produce happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness...

...That is to say: Since we cannot know most of the consequences of our actions, we have no way, on the consequentialist theory, of telling if those actions are morally good or bad (moral agnosticism...

...But if there is no life after death, then my actions, by contrast, will survive my death, e.g., in my children, in my children's children, in their children, etc., perhaps down to the end of human time...