Anti-Climacus

LINK: SIAW has a good post here, and I've sort of been thinking about it:

"We do try, and should perhaps try harder, to keep in mind that there are well-meaning pseudo-leftists and then there are other, truly malevolent pseudo-leftists, and have been for several generations. We think of an elderly Quaker lady we know whose days are spent in the good works that the Society of Friends still fosters, and who actively supports the Labour Party, Amnesty International and Oxfam - but who also insists that everything the rest of us think we know about Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China is nothing but capitalist lies; that Uncle Joe was a worthy successor to Lenin, and an exemplar of sincere and benevolent socialism; and that all the Labour Party needs to do to win back the working class (win them back from whom?) is to turn to Arthur Scargill and Tony Benn once again. Her motives are entirely pure and admirable; her good works, within their limits, are effective; her political ideas stink. What can you do?"

but I find this judgment to be a little off:

"Good intentions are to be prized, and those who have them deserve some understanding and forgiveness; but good effects, regardless of motives (which may be obscure even to those who have them, are often unstable and incoherent, and are easily misrepresented and manipulated), matter far more."

Certainly, the ends are creditable for both the person who acts rightly from a properly construed sense of morality and a person who does the right thing in spite of their other beliefs. But this seems to run the dangerous risk of saying that the person who fails to acheive good in spite of having the right moral objectives is somehow equivalent to the person who neither does the moral thing nor wants to. In some ways, Kant is right, and the highest instantiation of moral right is the person who does right even though they know they'll fail (take, for an example, the obvious rightness of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and ask yourself why you'd have that reaction for a man who utterly fails at what he set out to do?).

I also think, as to SIAW's point and not my derivation from it, that Aristotle might have something to say on the difference between the two people he posits, but I must off to class now, so I'll have to save that for later.