If the intentions were truly good, they should require no reward : )
We live in reward based world. If I do this, I expect that. No action is done for the pure pleasure or to simply help someone else, without hidden agenda. You could almost argue that charity is a selfish act that is done to satisfy the doer's ego. In most cases, it is. And there is little wrong with it. After all, if we are defined by what we think, by what we do, we might as well be doing good to make us feel good.
Good intentions are the start to doing the right thing. They're not the end however. Good intentions, if based on a dogmatic view of the world, you could as easily lead to do evil as not. So you can't stop at good intentions, you need to have good actions, good rewards, good measurement, etc. In a way, it's just the beginning of being good. That's why so many lose their way, such intention is often hard to keep-up and entropy will drag you down, constantly.
Good intentions are just the beginning. To have them is a gift. All you need now is to implement them everyday, forever.
1 comments:
Intentions do not equal results since not all consequences of an action can necessarily be foreseen. Therefore the saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”. Most decisions made and actions taken cause a relatively minuscule change in a person's character, standing in society and so on. Assuming thousands of small actions and corresponding decisions that were all made based on a person's ability, knowledge, and experience it is understandable how an individual may end up causing the exact opposite of what was intended despite taking every action based in what seemed like good decisions at the time. In fact a lot of good books and movies are spun around this exact theme.
In a slight variation of this theme an individual's actions may cause it to gradually transforming into an emerging self that the initial actor might not at all would want to turn into initially and would categorically refuse to be transformed into in a red pill vs. blue pill decision and in a single step. The transformed self however might actually be quite contempt with its new self and would not for the life of it want to change back into what it was at the beginning of the journey. Similar issues arises with self modifying transhumanists or in fact recursively self-improving superintelligent machines. Assuming a self modifying individual is not all knowing – and remember: superintelligent does not mean all knowing – in regards to potential outcomes of a modification, there is always the risk of turning into something or causing a result that was not intended.
What thus is need is not only an a priori theory of 'goodness' but also a constant effort to live up to that idea.
For a more technical exploration see Resolving Moral Paradoxes and linked pages.
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