GOOD WILL AS THE SOURCE OF MORAL LAW
1. Introduction
2. Meaning of the Term Will
3. Two Aspects of the Will
4. Goodwill is Unlimited Good in Nature
5. Good Will Vs Bad Will
6. Good Will is the Source of Goodness
7. Will and the Moral Law
8. Willing is the Core of Moral Action
9. Relationship between Reason and Will
10. Good Will and Duty
11. Will and Desire
12. Autonomy and the Heteronomy of Will
13. Critical Appraisal
14. Conclusion
Thesis: “The Good Will, which is unlimited good in nature and also the source of goodness is the core of the moral action, which qualifies every moral action of a moral agent or a rational being and thus it becomes the source of moral law.”
1. Introduction
“Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will.” This sentence from Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals shows the importance of the concept of goodwill. The idea of a good will is an important commonsense touchstone to which he returns throughout his works. The basic idea is that what makes a good person good is his possession of a will that is in a certain way ‘determined’ by the moral law. In Kant's terms, a good will is a will whose decisions are wholly determined by moral demands or as he often refers to this, by the Moral Law. Human beings view this Law as a constraint on their desires, and hence a will in which the Moral Law is decisive is motivated by the thought of duty. In this sense good will becomes the source of Moral Law. Thus Good Will and Moral Law is closely connected and it is impossible to be morally good without the goodwill, which is the source of Moral Law. In this paper through the analysis of Good Will I have made an attempt to show that Good Will is the source of Moral Law.
2. Meaning of the Term Will
Will is an Anglo –Saxon term which is equivalent to “Voluntas” in Latin, ‘Boulema’ in Greek and ‘Willle’ in German. The term refers to a potency, faculty, or force in man involved in decision making. In the widest sense, Will is synonymous with conation. However, in the restricted sense, Will designates the sequence of mental acts eventuating in decision or choice between conflicting conative tendencies.[1]
For Plato and Aristotle, ‘Will stands between reason and appetites. Thomas Aquinas defines will as ‘rational appetite’. Descartes regarded the power of Will as almost limitless in comparison to the limitations within which the Reason must work. For him it is the power of will that makes possible human freedom. Will for Leibnitz is a conscious effort or striving, an impulse guided by clear perception. According to John Locke, Will is a power of mind – the power of determining “its thought to the producing, continuing or stopping any action as far as it depends on us”. For Hume Will is not a simple and original datum, but a complex and derivative something. For him Reason is not a governor of the Will, but a slave of the passions.[2]
According to Kant Will is a “faculty of determining oneself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws.”[3] Such faculty can be found only in rational beings. Since that which serves the Will as the objective ground of its self – determination is the end, and if this is assigned by reason alone, it must hold for all rational beings. Thus, “The will is nothing but practical reason.”[4]
Will for Kant is practical reason- that is it is the faculty of principles that recognizes law, adopts maxims, and derives actions from them (G 4:412). So good will is such a faculty which adopts good principles and sets about acting on them. It may do so when it needs to constrain itself in order to do so, but also when it need not, because its good principles are in contingent harmony with inclinations. A good will is thus to be distinguished from what Kant later calls an “absolutely good will” whose principle is the categorical imperative or moral law itself.[5]
3. Two Aspects of the Will
Will is characterized by two aspects.
1. Elective or executive aspect: to this Kant applies the term ‘Willkuhr’ (Choice). The ability to decide either to implement or not to implement is the field of elective of excecutive Willkuhr. A will determined exclusively by pure reason is called pure elective Will. It is not determined by any external cause. It is self determined in the sense that it follows its own laws and never transgresses them. Such a Willkuhr which remains the bounds of its own legislation is a pure holy Will, like that of God.
2. Legislative aspect: The general term to this aspect is ‘Wille’. The legislative is concerned with general principles involves in voluntary causation. The legislative Will may be said to be superior and even prior to the executive Will because it determines the latter without itself being determined by any other factor.[6] It can be expressed in the following way Legislative Wille----> Elective Willkuhr----> Action.
The legislative Wille is identical with pure practical reason. Its main function is to formulate a priori laws. These moral laws are applicable to all rational beings, irrespective of their interests and inclination. They demand unconditioned and universal obedience. All our maxims should be subordinated to these a priori moral laws of the legislative Wille.[7]
4. Goodwill is Unlimited Good in Nature:
“It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except goodwill”. [8] Kant proposes to draw our consent to this striking proposition by considering the goodwill alongside some other categories of good things. They can be divided into three types:
Gifts of nature: Kant says that these are more or less permanent features of a person belonging to ones natural endowments. In other words these are given to one by ones nature. For example talents of the mind, such as understanding, wit, judgments etc. These are intellectual virtues and they seem to be wholly beyond ones powers.[9]
Qualities of temperaments: courage, resoluteness, perseverance in one’s plans etc. Kant says these are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects, but they can also be extremely evil and harmful if they are made use of by a bad will.
Gifts of fortune: Kant says this category includes all the contingently possessed goods we strive after and compete for. For example power, wealth and honor. It also includes everything we regard as constituting our personal self interest: health, happiness etc.
Kant says all these are good, but only when combined with a goodwill. For all these gifts of fortune can easily lead to courage and thereby often to presumption, which is a bad quality- morally as well as prudentially – unless accompanied by a goodwill that restrains its evil influence. Further he says happiness is something we cannot approve as good unless its possessor has become worthy of it through having a goodwill.[10]
Kantian anthropology holds that when people enjoy good fortune they have an innate inclination to infer that they deserve to be better off, and this arrogant delusion frequently contributes both to prudential unwisdom and to moral evil.[11] So happiness becomes good only when it is qualified by good will. This shows that the morality or the moral laws ultimately depends on the goodwill and it is the source of moral law.
In the case of goodwill when it acts from duty exhibits a more genuine moral worth. The good will is unlimited good because the goodness of the good will is neither enhanced nor diminished by its combination with any other thing, good or bad. In this sense unlimited goodness belongs only to the goodwill.[12]
5. Good Will versus Bad Will
While Good Will is a Will which is subject to its own laws (i.e. categorical imperative), a bad will is determined by external causes, i.e. inclinations, desires, impulses etc. while a good will belongs to the world of understanding, a bad will belongs to the world of sense. While a bad will can be suppressed, a good will can never be suppressed. A good will constitutes the law for bad will.
A good or rational will is present in every rational agent, and so in every man. Hence man must be said to exist as an end in itself, one which should never be used simply as a means to the realization of some end whose value is merely relative. A good will has a unique and absolute value. So it must be wrong to subordinate it as a mere means to any end of lesser value, such as satisfaction of personal inclinations. An action is morally good because it is the manifestation of a good will, and the categorical imperative in enjoining morally good action in accordance with a universal law is enjoining that a good will as such should be manifested and not thwarted by mere inclination. A good will manifesting itself in action is the end enjoined by the categorical imperative.[13]
6. Good Will is the Source of Goodness
Kant says it is only the good will that is the only good without qualification. So Kant rejects everything else other than good will. The reason is that, all of them judged good or bad only in so far as they are employed as a means for the realization of an end i.e. they derive their happiness only in relation to something else. Kant further says “A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, because of its fitness for attaining some proposed end, it is good through its willing alone, that is good in itself.”[14]
So the goodness that is aimed by the practical or pure reason has its source in the goodwill, as it is the only good, which is good by itself. It also means that in any given circumstances it must be the ‘highest good’ and hence must be an absolute or an unconditional good. Thus the good will being the unconditioned, conditions all other ends, which are good in a conditional and qualified manner.[15]
The good will is a power of intentional action, as it is good not because of what it produces, but only by virtue of its volition. From this perspective ‘the moral worth’ of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it, and so too does not depend on any principle of action that needs to borrow its motive form expected result. Thus for Kant, the source of a moral action is nothing but the good will, which has universal application in the practical realm.[16]
7. Will and the Moral Law
There is a close connection between Will and moral law. In fact will is the source of morality, which can be clearly understood from the various propositions of Kant. In the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant makes three important propositions. They are as follows.
1. For an action to have moral worth, it must be done from duty, not from inclination. An important point to note here is that ‘in order that an action should be morally good, it is not enough that it conform to the moral law, but it must also be done for the sake of the law’. This proposition means that the legislative Will, must itself be a sufficient cause for the action and must not require the assistance of some other desire or interest.
2. The goodness of an act of Will does not derive from the specific intention or goal towards which it is directed. The moral worth of an action lies in the ‘principle of the Will’ without regard to the ends which can be attained by the action.
3. Duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law. We cannot have respect for inclination, but only for the principle of my will, for the laws of pure will. Our moral actions must be done only from this respect for the law and no other motive. A will is good in itself because of this respect for the law.[17]
8. Willing is the Core of Moral Action
Since good will is good in itself, nothing outside of it, not even the end to which it is directed, can be considered to bestow the good will with goodness. That is whatever action is being performed, which is of immense value from our common point of view of morality, cannot impart any goodness to the goodwill, which is good by itself. Thus willing as the activity of good will which is aimed at the realization of a particular end, becomes the core of moral action and hence it is the unconditional good. So Kant strongly holds that it is nothing but the individuals willing is the source of, which matters in being and becoming moral. So it is the element of good will in action or the good motivation of action, which is more valuable than anything else.[18]
The stress on the good will as the source of morality is the basis of humanity, i.e., that which makes man worthy of happiness, by being prone to do good. Kant’s firm belief in ‘man, who as such can never lose all his disposition to the good, has its foundation in the unconditional value of the goodness of the good will.[19]
9. Relationship between Reason and Will
In Kant’s philosophy reason is the governor of our will. And reason is not implanted in us for the attainment of happiness but for a ‘far noble end’ where private ends of man are to be ignored. The goal of reason is to establish to good will. A rational Will and a absolutely good Will are regarded by Kant as identical. It is reasonable to maintain that a good will is a will which acts rationally. [20]
The intentional action of the good will has certain ends, whenever it is involved in willing. The will is conceived as a power of determining oneself to action in accordance with the idea of certain laws. And such a power can be found only in rational beings. These laws do not result from inclination and thus nothing which rests on the production of something in the natural world.[21]
The will is said to be rational therefore it uses the reason in its practical employment. “Everything in nature works in accordance with laws. Only a rational being has the power to act in accordance with his ideas of laws – that is, in accordance with principles – and only so has he a will. Since reason is required in order to derive actions from laws, the will is nothing but practical reason.”[22]
Human beings have not only the faculty of reason but they are motivated into action also by inclinations. Hence the will need not always act according to the laws of practical reason. The will is a power to choose only that which reason independently of inclination recognizes to be practically necessary to be good. The determination of the will in accordance with the objective laws involves necessitation. Kant calls this necessitating principle as command and the formula of this command is called an imperative.[23]
10. Good Will and Duty
Kant’s insistence on the intrinsic worth of the good will can be seen from the connection that the will acts from a motive of duty, which is considered to be the highest order desire. It leads us to take an interest in acting from the moral law for its own sake. The good will is the only unconditional good from a moral point of view as it results from the disposition to act from a sense of duty; from the willing of good will without any other motive.[24] Thus the sole motive of the good will is to do its duty only for the sake of doing its duty. Moreover an action done from duty has its moral worth.
By stressing that the good will as completely good which is motivated to action by the law of duty, Kant is said to be introducing a moral resolution, accordingly it is only reason in its practical employment is decisive in moral action. Since the goodness of a person’s will is shown by the choices he makes or the actions he wills, any one whose will is morally good, will be disposed to act or choose for the sake of duty. The objective content of moral good is the good will, the imperative form of which neither depends on nor is conditioned by anything else and hence it is categorical in nature and constitutes the imperative of morality.[25]
11. Will and Desire
For Kant, “to will is not to desire.” The moral will i.e. the good will is independent of pleasure and pain, while desire is always connected with pleasure of displeasure. A good will acts in accordance with the moral laws and is independent of all desires and inclinations. Being always connected with pleasure or displeasure, either as cause or effect, the faculty of desire is heteronomous, but the faculty of Will is autonomous, for it imposes its own laws upon itself and is not affected by any extrinsic cause. Finally will is rational, but the desire is sensuous.[26]
12. Autonomy and the Heteronomy of Will
Will is autonomous in the sense that it imposes its own laws upon itself, i.e. it is not compelled to act on any external condition or interest. In contrast with it, a Will is called heteromous when it is subject to a law not given by itself “… this Will was according to a law obliged by something else to act in a certain manner.”[27] In the former the imperative is unconditional and demands universal obedience, but in the latter the imperative is conditioned by certain interests and could not by any means be capable of being a moral command. The former is categorical, the latter is hypothetical. Kant regards the autonomy of Will as the supreme principle of morality. It is that property by which “it is a law to itself”, independently on any property of the objects of volition. The principle of autonomy according to Kant is “Always so to choose that the same volition shall comprehend the maxims of our choice as a universal law”.[28] Morality is the relation of actions to the autonomy of the will. An action that is consistent with the autonomy of the will is permitted, but the one that does not agree is forbidden.
Heteronomy of the Will, is the source of all spurious principles of morality. Since it seeks the law which is to determine it in its objects and not in itself, it cannot invite a dignified moral worth. Any external and selfish determinant of Will is bound to produce contingent and adulterated principles of morality.[29]
13. Critical Appraisal
One of the objections raised against the concept of good will is that it is a will which wills nothing, that good will considered in isolation from its objects is itself mere abstraction. A good will must have an object; and the goodness of a Good Will must be estimated by the goodness if the objects which attains or seeks to attain. Kant regards this objection as a fundamental error, fatal to any sound moral philosophy and indeed to morality itself. If the objects of a good will are conditioned goods, and a Good Will itself is an unconditioned good, the goodness of a Good Will cannot possibly be derived from the goodness of the objects at which it aims.
It is also said that he shunned away happiness completely from the realm of morality. So his philosophy is a dry asceticism. This criticism is also unjustified because in the perfect good Kant includes happiness. H.J Paton says “the common view that Kant underrated the value of happiness is a complete mistake.”[30] Similarly Kant is charged because he excluded emotions, passions, love, affections etc. from morality. Dr. Collenbusch finds no difference “between the morality of the devil and the morality of Dr. Kant”. Schopenhur characterized Kant’s morality as the ‘Apotheosis of Loveliness’.[31] All these criticisms are unfounded and biased. Kant is criticized because his views do not conform with the morality which lays too much emphasis upon love and affection. A crave for passion and emotion is a symptom of animality in man. Kant emphasized the rational aspect of morality by suppressing these instincts so that man may look different from animals. Inclinations may present but they must not be the motive and the determining factor in our moral actions. “It is therefore a distortion of his view to say that for him an action cannot be good if inclination is present at the same time as the motive of duty.”[32]
14. Conclusion
It is clear from the analysis that good will is at the centre of moral action. It is the good will that qualifies the moral action of a moral agent. Because Good Will is subjected to its own laws i.e. categorical imperatives. It constitutes laws for all moral actions and even to the bad will as well. Since this Good will is present in every rational being, Kant says, one must not act in desire and inclinations which makes the moral actions of a moral agent evil and thus one ceases to exist moral or a rational being. Kant regards the autonomy of the will is as the supreme principle of morality. It is that that property by which it is a law to itself and hence guides all the actions of the moral agent.
Human beings are so constituted that under normal conditions, they always possess inclinations, desires, passions etc. as obstacles in their moral actions. Those obstacles give rise to the obligation of duty. However, according to Kant, the perfectly good will must act spontaneously, and necessarily, from sheer love of goodness. In the Good will there is no obligation of duty because there is no obstacle to overcome. This he regards as ultimate moral idea in which we should forever strive, but to which- under human conditions- we can never attain. For him a Good or Holy Will would be wholly good, it would always issue in good actions and would never be tempted to sin. Such a Will may belong to God, but not to man.
A Good Will does not go unrewarded. Good Will is the virtue which every rational being should cherish. And this virtue is rewarded with happiness. Though we should not do our duty for the sake of happiness but for duty’s sake, happiness accrues automatically when we try to be moral under the influence of Good Will.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chackalackal, Saju. Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant. Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 2002.
Kant, Immanuel. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. T.K. Abbott. Delhi: Orient Publications, 1987.
Pandey, Ashok kumar. Aspects of Rationality: Analysis of Reason and Will in Kant’s Philosophy. New Delhi: ACP Publications Pvt. Ltd. 1997.
Patson, H. J. The Categorical Imperative. London: Hucthinson & Co., 1958.
Wood, Allan W. Modern European Philosophy: Kant’s Ethical Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Wood, Allen W. Kantian Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
[3]Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, 45.
[5]Wood, Kantian Ethics, 32.
[8]Wood, Modern European Philosophy, 21.
[9]Wood, Modern European Philosophy, 21.
[10]Wood, Modern European Philosophy, 21.
[11]Wood, Modern European Philosophy, 22.
[12]Wood, Kantian Ethics, 32.
[14]Chackalackal, Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant, 202.
[15]Chackalackal, Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant, 202.
[16]Chackalackal, Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant, 203.
[18]Chackalackal, Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant, 204.
[19] Chackalackal, Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant, 204.
[21]Chackalackal, Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant, 205.
[22]Chackalackal, Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant, 205.
[23]Chackalackal, Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant, 205.
[24]Chackalackal, Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant, 207.
[25]Chackalackal, Unity of Knowledge and Acting in Kant, 209-210.
[27]Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, 61.
[28]Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, 71.
[32]Patson, The Categorical Imperative, 49.
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