Not A Poll: Does Motivation Affect Morality?

[robvalue]

Let me re-phrase, since it seems I buggered up the point:  Is a particular action more or less moral because of the motivation of the actor?

Boru

In my opinion, yes. But then, to someone else, they might say no. I don't think there's a "correct" answer. Morality is a value judgement; to make it objective it must become a measurement, and that means someone deciding how exactly it will be measured. It then becomes useless, in a way that "length" doesn't.

I would personally find any moral system that only assesses the action and its consequences, without taking anything else into account, to be so simple as to be useless. I cannot detach the person from the action. Without the person, it's just "stuff happening" and morality is irrelevant.

I find people rarely agree on what morality means before getting into a massive discussion about it. Definitions are very important. We have individual morality and we have societal norms. It's important to distinguish between these.