The Necessity Of Righteous Motives

The person who looks to the first sign of positive behavior from someone else and immediately concludes that the observed must be righteous has a heinously simplistic, incomplete understanding of morality.  It is rather easy to deceive the average person, as minimal social experience can reveal.  Many people will not sincerely question first impressions or mere appearances.  However, since any moral truths that exist do not hinge on human awareness or preference, even the mass misperception that someone is righteous for only behaving rightly cannot make it so.  It takes far more than outward conformance with morality to be an upright person.

After all, someone could engage in highly benevolent activities, like giving to the poor or opposing tyranny, without consideration for the goodness of such things.  There is not any righteous deed that cannot be performed with illegitimate intentions.  Even something as noble as upholding justice (which cannot be known on the basis of something as pathetically useless as conscience, being the purely arbitrary and subjective tool that it is) can be done merely to obtain social favor, allegiance, or other rewards of a material or nonphysical kind.  Of course, it is better for someone to do the right thing because of secondary, pragmatic incentives than for them to not do the right thing at all, but their seeming righteousness is nothing more than a facade.

Upon realizing these basic facts about motivations, some erroneously think that motives, not deeds themselves, must dictate ethics.  Christians who trivialize the intrinsic importance of behaving in a just way cannot do so without succumbing to this irrational idea.  On the contrary, good motives without righteous deeds can be just as incomplete and morally useless as righteous deeds without good motives.  A person who treats people justly only in order to manipulate them is in error, but so is a person who desires to treat people justly but endorses unjust actions or fails to do that which is just.

Carrying out good actions alone does not make a person good; something more is required.  People must commit morally good actions with the correct motivations.  At the same time, they must not think that they are without moral blemish simply for wanting to do the right thing.  It could be easy for some to mistake a yearning for moral excellence as all the confirmation they need to demonstrate to themselves that they are good people.  In reality, far more is needed than this yearning: anything whatsoever could be illicitly excused, regardless of how abominable it is, because of the doer's intent.

There is a great need to emphasize the moral necessity of right motives coupled with right actions.  Anything short of this union, however it may appear, can only be morally incomplete and therefore worthy of condemnation.  Morality demands of us our behaviors and motivations alike.  Since there is no legitimate divorcing of one from the other, the fact that there is not a single moral obligation that is beyond the human capacity to live out can serve as a great comfort.