Good intentions -- how much do they mean to you?

[Excited Penguin]

You can't just start "being smart". People are already as smart as they could be. I really doubt it that there are more important things in life than wanting to help other people - it's what keeps society going.

I seriously can't think of any cases right now where good intentions hurt. They are almost always welcome and helpful. The more, the better. It's genuinely hard to screw up with a good intention.

For example, I have nothing but good intentions towards you right now. I find it hard to believe that counts for nothing.

But if you're willing to diminish it so much by comparing it to slapping a mosquito, go right ahead.

Wut O_o

I'm not comparing anything you do. I joined a general discussion.

I think I made it clear that I meant people should think things through before they do them when I said "being smart".

If you think good intentions never cause harm you're not paying attention.

IMO the average person does all things with good intention or at the very least some kind of intention that they have justified to themself as "right". Still, people cause harm all the time. We all do. We hurt each other physically and emotionally by accident and accidentally on purpose and good deeds gone wrong. This is a part of life. A person's good intentions, IMO, lose their value when that person is so thoughtless/careless that the majority of the things they do have a negative outcome.

I already gave an example of such a situation in this thread. Feel free to look back and find it.

 You alluded at an example, you never actually gave it.

You seem to be assuming good intentions is all people have. That is simply not true. People have bad intentions towards others all the time. That has nothing to do with whether they consider them to be wrong or not. No one will ever do something they consider to be wrong beforehand. That is simply impossible. You will necessarily think what you're doing is right if you're going to do it. Otherwise, you wouldn't be doing it. But you could at the same time have malicious intentions towards other people. We have them all the time, everyone of us, IMO. We may not like to admit the fact or think about it too much, but we do. There is no perfectly good person in this world. We just tend to focus on the good and disregard the bad, thus the illusion that this is not so.

Explicitly bad intentions are far worse than good ones. Your intentions tell me everything about what you're going to try to do next. Your actions devoid of those intentions might not tell me as much. In fact they'll rather confuse me absent of anything pointing to an intent.