In a comment at the end of this discussion, "NDB" highlights a distinction I made:

Do we honestly think that if George Bush, or any of those who supported him, could have designed their bombs so that they never killed an innocent man, woman, or child, they would have done so? …

Now let's ask the same question about the terrorists. Would they avoid killing innocent victims if they could? ...Killing innocent men, women, and children was the entire point.

And apparently sees a contradiction (link added):

In response to that, I counter with your own words from a previous discussion, "I Didn't Mean to Hurt You."[:] "finding someone worse than you doesn't make you good." What I’m getting from that is, you’re saying intent doesn’t matter; rather what IS important are the actions and their consequences. To me, your statements seem somewhat contradictory. Or is my interpretation fallacious?

Great questions! And I'm impressed, or perhaps amused that someone read enough to even bother to see if I'm consistent!

So, in typical fashion, allow me to answer as succiently as I know how. Which isn't very succicint...

1. "I Didn't Mean to Hurt You"

The point of this essay was not that motives don't matter -- motives matter a lot, I believe, since they shape our collective future: "Several billion such compromises are made each day." By far, the greatest source of human suffering is other humans, and very often "I didn't mean to hurt you" is used as an excuse to cover our selfishness: "Sure, I didn't mean to hurt my wife, but satisfying my lust was much more important to me than her feelings or health." If people cared more, they would try harder to find out which policies and actions actually helped people, and which ones hurt them.

My thesis sentence is stated at the end:

Again, it doesn't mean much that we didn't mean to do evil. The real problem is that we often don't mean to do good; "doing good" often loses big time to our desire to benefit ourselves.

So I'm suggesting a better motivation than "not meaning to do harm". If I were a dishonest person, I could leave it at that, apparently correcting your mischaracterization of my statements in this short essay.

2. The Limits of Motivation

But I'm not dishonest, and I also happen to partially agree with you: Though I think motives matter, I think they matter a great deal less, from my perspective, than the ultimate effect to the world or some action or policy.

There are three problems with judging everything based on motives, as some are in the habit of doing: (1) motives aren't always accessible to outsiders (most people don't even fully know their own motives!) (2) motives don't directly effect other people, only actions, (3) a good motive, but without good facts, can result in great harm.

So all things concerned, I'd rather have good motivations than bad ones, and I tend to believe that if one truly wants to do good, problem #3 will resolve itself in time (though perhaps not immediately). But, from my judgements, I agree: motive is far less important than net effect.

3. When Motivations Matter

When a person does what I consider to be the right thing, I generally (one exception, see below) don't care what their motivations are. If a person saves my life, I don't care if they did it out of a good motivation, or because they were running for political office and wanted to get their name in the news. What do I care? -- I'm alive!

I could could care less whether some wonderful-seeming person is that way because deep inside they are "good", and want to help others, or because they are "evil", but also happen to believe that the most enlightened, selfish position is to do "good" because that results in the maximum benefit.

But when a person does what I believe is the wrong thing, it's useful to discuss motives, for two reasons: (a) When evil happens, motive is usually more obvious, and (b) Motive-analysis is important to predicting future behavior and solving the problem, either for the individual or a group.

Take robbery: If a man robs a bank, we can usually tell what his motivation is: greed. He wants to have something he cannot gain by legal means. And because we know greed can motivate theft, society offers a greater counter-balancing motivation -- fear of being caught and punished -- in order to keep the number of robberies down.

An understanding of motive is also important to predicting future behavior, and dispensing mercy. If a man steals food because he was starving, then we're probably not facing a career criminal, and putting him in jail isn't helping to deter anything -- it would be a waste of our time.

Likewise, if a man saves my life, but then wants me to invest my money in a business deal he's doing, then his motivations come into play: I need to know his character. Not because it's my job to run around passing ultimate judgement on people's character, but because it's a reasonable indicator of how he is likely to treat me in the future. So then I might suddenly be interested in his reasons for saving me, as potential evidence of his character.

So from an EXTERNAL view of another, my first question should be about whether good or ill is done. Questions of motive come in second, for diagnosing what went wrong and/or as a means of predicting future behavior, or in learning how good decisions were chosen, so that I can do likewise.

As far as a person's INTERNAL view of themselves, they should examine and question their own motivations, since they are in the best position to do so, and since motivations effect outcome and are a gauge on our character. But they also should be concerned with net effect -- good or evil. Indeed, if they have good character, they WILL also be concerned about net effect.

4. Policies and Iraq

We exist in a world of fallable people and imperfect knowledge. Often, we cannot achieve a "perfect" solution. Every action hurts some, and helps others. And since we don't have perfect knowledge of the future, we must always choose these actions based on the partial knowledge we have at the time, and lessons we have learned from the past.

Since all future actions haven't happened, we can, at that point, only talk about intentions and goals. We cannot yet judge some suggested action on it's future effects. What makes it "good" is not, at this point, the purported motivations ("feelings") of those offering it, but the logical strength of the argument, and how well it takes known data and historical lessons into account. If you care, then you will surely do the best job you can in this area, but the strength of the argument is the only thing which ultimately counts.

My own diagnoses of the rightness or wrongness of the war in Iraq doesn't hinge my own admittely imperfect perception of another's motivations, or my own professed character. You can accept or reject it without knowing the slightest thing about me, just based on its own merits or lack thereof.

For posterity, and so that this post doesn't become too large, I have written this analysis down here. I'm not offering it to convince you of it, but simply trying to show, for example, one potential way of going about offering an argument about the best course of action.

Now, if you can show the above analysis to be factually wrong, and that more Iraqis are dying than would have under Saddam, and that we could have reasonably known this in advance, then we might argue it was a mistake, and that the policies behind it were wrong. And then we could start getting into the reasons this error occurred, including questions of purported motive. But until that larger question is answered, I don't see what role a discussion of motive plays.

One last thing I want to point out here is that I'm talking about juding policies, not people. Well-meaning people can unintentionally support bad policy, and bad people can support many good policies. It's not my job to judge some particular person's ultimate moral rating (I view that as God's job), but it is my job to judge which policies to support. And, as I said above, we must also sometimes make tentative character assessments when we need to place trust (or not) in specific people.

That was a lot, but I hope some of it made sense to you.

5. Morally Equating Terrorism and the Iraq War

One problem I have with the modern political left is that some seem fixated on negative consequences of policies they don't like, but seemlargely uninterested in negative consequences (usually much greater in scope) of policies they favor.

Concerning Iraq, this has been done by looking at people killed by insurgents, and looking at people killed by the troops, and saying: "Well, it's all killing. Thus it must be the same." The alternative, and how many deaths would result, are not considered.

Since this argument is repeated often, it's not surprising that many hear it, mentally, when they read my arguments, and think I'm saying the only difference is the motivation. In particular, it's understandable in light of this, though note the underlined part:

But there's a crucial difference: Do we honestly think that if George Bush, or any of those who supported him, could have designed their bombs so that they never killed an innocent man, woman, or child, they would have done so? …

Now let's ask the same question about the terrorists. Would they avoid killing innocent victims if they could? ... Killing innocent men, women, and children was the entire point.

But some apparently refuse to draw any moral distinctions between those positions: of attempting to do something which will save more lives in the long term, even if it regretably kills some innocent people in the short term, and those who set out with the specific intention of targeting and slaughtering the innocent.

I'm not saying motivation is the only relevant thing here. I'm saying that the killing of civilians is a regrettable side effect of a larger policy, and using motivation to illustrate this by pointing to the greater goal of the US military, and likely outcome should they prevail, versus the greater goal and outcome the terrorists desire.

If the military could choose to kill only "bad guys", they certainly would -- killing innocent civilians runs counter to their overall goal of a net savings in Iraqi lives, by bringing security to Iraq. Whereas the whole point of "terrorism", just as with the mafia, is to kill or harm enough ordinary bystanders to instill fear in the population, resulting in absolute subservience. Which I *do not* view as a moral or beneficial end goal.

And the Iraqis seem to feel the same way.

So my point here isn't about the sterling character of the troops or my own alleged intentions. My point is that the policy is to save Iraqi lives through increased security. One can question the goal -- maybe Iraqi lives shouldn't be saved. And one can question whether the policy of, say, fighting the insurgents will achieve the goal of saving Iraqi lives. But none of these are arguments about some person's purported morality or motivations.

You can support the policy for all kinds of reason, selfish or selfless, or equally oppose it out of same kinds of motivations.

6. Motivational Taint: Right Versus Left

I've probably gone on too long, but there's one last thing I'd like to address.

The "left" sees motivation different than I. As I said above, if someone does the right thing I usually couldn't care less about motivation. Say that 20 soldiers decide to secure an area. 19 of them go with the motive of helping the people who live there. One goes because he likes waving his weapon at civilians. Provided that last one doesn't actually do anything wrong, I simply don't care that he did a good thing out of a bad motive. Nor does his bad motive taint the entire effort.

But the far left's narrative on Iraq is that somone within the White House -- some "neocon" like Wolfowitz, for example -- had a bad motivation, and thus the entire enterprise is immoral. Apparently, when they oppose some action or policy, ONE bad motivation is enough to taint the entire effort.

No debate is had about the reasons that motivate most war supporters -- whether arguments like mine are correct. Since we on the left are mind-readers, and since we can look into at least one soul in the White House and judge it morally lacking, the entire Iraq war must be immoral. Forget about the net effect!

In contrast, any amount of harmful results perpetrated by policies on the left are to apparently be excused by ONE good motivation. It doesn't matter if, say, communism killed a lot of people. It doesn't matter if tax hikes actually hurt the poor, or if affirmative action harms its intended beneficiaries. As long as someone on the left meant well, or at least said he or she meant well, the whole effort is noble and unquestionable.

You may call this extreme, but I have to say, from debating those across the aisle, I've seen this defense over and over.

Again, I think this is all a distraction: the leadership of the contemporary political left knows, at some level it can't win the debate as to what's the best policy. So, they like to focus on motivation instead, because that's something which can't be answered.

The left can't know, say, Paul Wolfowitz's inner motivations any more than the right can. So if you make that the basis of your argument, you might not win, but at least you're on grounds no-one can disprove. And if you can convince someone, for example, that Wolfowitz might not be trustworthy, then you have "won" that person over to believing the war is wrong, without ever making them ask the big questions about who and how many will be helped or hurt if we do this or that.

It's a very bad situation, in my opinion.