Moreover, it has a thin, precarious
existence in most of us at best, and needs all the encouragement it
can get. Practically, we need Kant's kind of sermonizing; we need to
exalt abstract goodness and resist the appeal of immediate and sensuous
goods. So Kant has been popular with earnest men more interested in
right living than in theory. But as a theorist he is hopelessly
inadequate.
(2) It is true that we admire good will without consideration of the
effects it produces, and even when it leads to disaster. But if good
will USUALLY led to disaster we should never have come to admire it.
Chance enters into this world's happenings and often upsets the normal
tendencies of acts. But we have to act in ways that may normally be
expected to produce good results. And we have to admire and cherish
that sort of action, in spite of the margin of loss. The admiration
that we have come to feel for goodness is partly the result of social
tradition, buttressing the code that in the long run works out to best
advantage; and partly, of course, the spontaneous emotion that rises
in us at the sight of courage, heroism, self-sacrifice, and the other
spectacular virtues. But however naive or sophisticated a reaction
it may be, its psychogenesis is perfectly intelligible, U and its
existence is no proof of the supernal nature of the goodness of "good
will."
(3) Kant argues as follows: "Nothing can possibly be conceived, in
the world or out of it, which can be called good WITHOUT
QUALIFICATION, except a good will.
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