Kantian Ethics: Good Will, It's. - Unenlightened English.
Kant develops a relationship between good will and conditioned happiness. He says that our actions are good only if there is a goodwill attached to it. In order words, without goodwill, all our actions will be bad and hurtful to others. Goodwill also helps us in achieving moral satisfaction.
Kant begins the Groundwork with the concept of the good will in order to answer the question: How do we know that what we are doing is morally right or wrong? Acting with a good will depends upon a moral principle for guidance, and the main point of the Groundwork is to search for and establish the supreme principle of morality.
Constructing his moral philosophy in detail, Kant say that there are good and bad actions. But morality of such actions has no intrinsic value. These actions have no value when done out of good will. Good will is something which is without any qualification good.
Kant believed that action is judged based on logic and motive, rather than the actual outcome of the action. This was what he labeled as “the good will”, which was the focal point of his theory. It is a good will that makes intelligence, wit, judgment, wealth, honor, pleasure, and even happiness good.
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The work of Immanuel Kant focuses on the idea that of everything in the world it is only good will that can be taken as “good without qualification” (Kant, 393). Unlike qualities or talents, which can be used both for good and for bad, good will is considered by Kant to be unequivocally good.
Kant's ethics are of a sort called deontological, or based on an absolute notion of duty. To discover whether an act is morally good, one should ask whether it was done from a sense of duty alone.
According to Kant, good will such as wealth, power, happiness, hour, general well-being among others can be said to be good if their influence gets corrected in mind. For instance, if you use your wealth for assisting people in the society, that may be said to be good.
In The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant examines the question of how humans can act in a good way. For Kant, the basis for acting good is the good will. His criterion for the good will is acting from duty. Kant gives the example of a salesman, who serves his customers honestly and for fair prices.
Kant believed that good will was the only thing truly good that could be used to determine a person’s morality. This good will would make people act out of a sense of duty and not for example, out of self-interest or emotion. Kant used a categorical imperative to determine an actions moral worth.
Kant argues that no consequence can have fundamental moral worth; the only thing that is good in and of itself is the Good Will. The Good Will freely chooses to do its moral duty. That duty, in turn, is dictated solely by reason. The Good Will thus consists of a person’s free will motivated purely by reason.
That Kant launched a violent attack against those metaphysicians who barricaded themselves behind their high-minded speculations in order to avoid what the threat of the Critique of Pure Reason could do to them appeared utterly uninteresting to Greenberg (even though I will maintain that this is a crucial and radical aspect of Kant’s criticist theory).
