Word for the Day: "He Meant Well"

NYU's Stern School of Business requires a course in professional responsibility and offers an elective on CSR and other topics. Its Markets, Ethics and Law (MEL) program is responsible for teaching and research on professional responsibility and CSR. The MEL faculty has recently been focusing on utilitarianism as a guide for moral conduct, and the text has been John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism.

Mill has a dispositive retort to those who defend perpetrators of acts with bad consequences on the basis of their having had good motives. This is the quote of the day:

"It is often affirmed that utilitarianism renders men cold and unsympathising; that it chills their moral feelings towards individuals; that it makes them regard only the dry and hard consideration of the consequences of actions, not taking into their moral estimate the qualities from which those actions emanate. If the assertion means that they do not allow their judgment respecting the rightness or wrongness of an action to be influenced by their opinion of the qualities of the person who does it, this is a complaint not against utilitarianism, but against having any standard of morality at all; for certainly no known ethical standard decides an action to be good or bad because it is done by a good or a bad man, still less because done by an amiable, a brave, or a benevolent man, or the contrary. These considerations are relevant, not to the estimation of actions, but of persons; and there is nothing in the utilitarian theory inconsistent with the fact that there are other things which interest us in persons besides the rightness and wrongness of their actions." (Utilitarianism, Book 2 [full text])

In other words, good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things. But note that Mill distinguishes between motives and intentions. See more on Utilitarianism Today at the CSRNYC.com web site.