Thought for Today

Real Goodness

The question of good must not be narrowed to investigating the relation of actions to their motives, or to their consequences, measuring the them by a ready-made ethical standard. An ethic of disposition or intention is just as superficial as an ethic of consequences. For what right do we have to stay with the inner motivation as the ultimate phenomenon of ethics, ignoring that "good" intentions can grow out of every dark backgrounds in human conditions can grow out of very dark backgrounds in human consciousness and sub consciousness, and that often the worst things happen as a result of "good intentions"? As the question of the motives of action finally disappears in the tangled web of the past, so the question of its consequences gets lost in the mists of the future. There are no clear boundaries on either side. Nothing justifies us in stopping any arbitrary point we choose in order to make a definitive judgment. In practice, we ever again stop to make such an arbitrary determination, whether along the lines of an ethic of motives or ethic of consequences … Neither has any fundamental advantage over the other, because in both cases the question of good is posed abstractly, severed from reality …. Good is reality, reality itself seen and recognized in God. Human beings, with their motives and their works, with their fellow human beings, with creation that surrounds them, in other words, reality as a whole held in the hands of God—that is what is embraced by the question of good.