Not A Poll: Does Motivation Affect Morality?

[robvalue]

Just gonna pop this thought in:

"Morality" is an abstract construct. Actions don't literally "have a morality"; I hope people would agree. The morality doesn't literally exist. It's a way of us assigning value to actions and consequences.

Any abstract concept we decide to take note of, out of the infinitely many available, needs to be useful. Otherwise, we are employing it just for the sake of it. Why do that?

We would generally already agree that a charity receiving money is a benefit to the charity, and therefor to the cause it supports. So we already have an abstract construct in place, to assess any action: "money in" => "benefit to cause" (a desirable outcome).

Why also pick a moral framework that does the same thing in this instance? It's just redundantly telling us, again, that "money in" => "benefit to cause" => "moral" (a desirable outcome)

It's not giving us any new information at all. So although such a framework potentially exists, employing it tells us nothing more than we already knew. This is why I consider the action, the person, and as much extra information as I can get, before estimating a "moral value" to the action. It is (potentially) useful for me to do this. It produces a result which tells me something new about the action, instead of replicating other readouts we already have. Whether or not my result is actually useful, depends on how I make use of these evaluations. I have found them very useful, personally.