The cult of good intentions -- regardless of the outcomes, often in spite of the outcomes and all historical evidence -- is why the highway to Hell has lanes that number in the millions.
Your good intentions do not make you ethical; only your good outcomes make you ethical. Refuse to even try to match the two, and you're an immoral person.
The person with good intentions is always working from a place of ignorance. With ignorance, you cannot be good. The person who acts from ignorance is a bad person.
Only the person who informs himself as fully as possible before acting or advocating is a moral person. The pretense of knowledge is a kind of ignorance, but is it one of the worst kind -- because you think you know, but you don't know. This creates the certainty the person of knowledge has, without there being sufficient reason to feel such certainty, and to act on that certainty.
Knowledge, however, is not enough. Knowledge in one area often makes one think one should have opinions about any number of other areas in which one is hardly an expert. And being an expert hardly means one also has the wisdom necessary to act. One should have the particulars of knowledge, yes, but one should also have the unity inherent in wisdom. The combination of knowledge and wisdom is beauty, and virtue aims at the beautiful.
The person with good intentions has no virtue. Only the person who acts in knowledge and wisdom both and thus aims at the beautiful has virtue.
Who, then, today has virtue?
