Why Good People Do Bad Things - Aristotle, Kant, Bentham and Mill
by A.C. Ping January 2023
In my presentations on 'Why Good People Do Bad Things' I often get asked how I define a 'good' person and it was a question which of course I had to address in my PhD thesis.
The starting point to answer the primary research question in my Thesis was the field of normative ethics which considers how a person should act. This question is addressed in most ethics education courses by considering both religious teachings and the work of the moral philosophers Aristotle, Kant, Bentham and Mill. Aristotle (349BC) considers character to be most important and his work is the field of virtue ethics. Kant (1785) explored duty based ethics and his work is within the field of universalism which aims to determine a set of universal rules that can be applied in any situation. Bentham (1781) and Mill (1863) focused on what is a good outcome and how the greatest good can be created with the least harm. Their work is in the field of utilitarianism.
The aim of reviewing these foundation texts was to develop a theoretical answer to the question of why good people do bad things. Aristotle, as noted, was focused on character and a good person, according to Aristotle, is a person of virtuous character – the key virtues being courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, honour, patience, amiability and sincerity. A good person doing a bad thing is a person of virtuous character being incontinent and acting from emotion rather than from rational thought. The challenge for the good person, according to Aristotle is the battle between emotion and rational thought.
Kant considered the crucial internal battle to be between the will and desire. A good person is a person who is acting with a free and autonomous will in a rational way and who is willing to obey the imperative of morality regardless of the consequences. A good person doing a bad thing is a person who believes they are acting with a free will but in fact are deluded, their faculty of pure reason compromised by desire. A good person doing a bad thing is therefore a self-deluded person driven by desire and the attachment to a certain outcome who has lost touch with their ‘genuine’ self and is not truly free.
From a utilitarian perspective, a good person is one who creates good outcomes, upholds the principles of impartiality, truthfulness, equality and unity and acts in a way that reflects the principle that everybody has an equal right to happiness. A good person doing a bad thing is a person who has made an error of judgement with regard to the circumstances and/or has used their power of intellect to justify why they are taking certain actions. The internal challenge from a utilitarian perspective is between will and desire. A good person doing a bad thing may be a person of weak will who has given in to desire and is rationalising away the internal moral conflict.
The common theme running through these three schools of thought is the internal conflict between rational thought and emotion or desire and the fact that personal desires override rational thought. These moral philosophers also propose that when creating a bad outcome there are also two key things occurring: self-delusion and the engagement of the rational mind to rationalise away the internal moral conflict. A good person doing a bad thing therefore is a person of good character, driven by emotion rather than rational thought, who has good intention and believes they are acting with free will but are in fact deluded because their faculty of reason has been compromised by desire and they are rationalising away their internal moral conflict. This view of the key moral philosophers highlights the shortcomings in the current theories dominating the field of empirical business ethics and indicates that there is more involved in the process of creating unethical outcomes than higher order cognitive reasoning and the ethical decision making process. According to Aristotle, Kant, Bentham and Mill there is a significant role being played by perception and self-delusion and the ability of the rational mind to rationalise away internal conflict.
With this consolidated view of good people doing bad things my research then turned to inter-disciplinary research from the fields of criminology, social psychology and neuro-cognitive science to consider the impact of perception, self-delusion and rationalisations on the creation of unethical outcomes. The result of my work was the creation of a causal factor model that explains the process of 'Why Good People Do Bad Things' and a dynamic normative ethical theory called 'Moral Intention Theory'. For more information see the article 'An Explanation of Moral Intention Theory'.