Lixin Thanh Dao,

In this article, I compare and contrast two perspectives, both of which take for granted, or at least assume, a commonality of action and motive.

First, we have this dichotomy:

A (good) person acts for another (bad) person and, through doing so, benefits this person. (In this, A is the agent and B is the recipient. There will be some overlap, but only in “how much” and “whether” the actions are good or bad.)

Here I argue that the two perspectives are, at least, mutually exclusive. By way of contrast, I’ll now show that these ideas are in many ways fundamentally incoherent, and that this inconsistency undermines the assumption that there is a common motive (the idea of goodness and badness is in fact a result of a single belief but of various competing beliefs about what is good and bad.)

The most common notion of the human motive is, by contrast, this:

A person acts out of selfish motives, not out of an altruistic one. (Here, A is the agent and B the recipient. There will be some overlap, but only in “how much” and “whether” the actions are good or bad.)

This is the “selfish motive” conception of action that is given in most moralist texts. It is the one that most widely is attributed to Aristotle.

To be accurate, one must remember that such an account of evil (indeed, most (sometimes all?) evil) is a postulate rather than a strict definition of the action. It’s one thing for A to cause B a particular injury by doing what is bad in itself, but it’s another thing for A, in an altruistic cause, to cause C that injury by doing what is bad in itself. One needs to be careful with this view, however, since it suggests that, in the absence of a moral obligation, there are no incentives in the world that are in fact “moral” enough. (In the absence of a moral obligation, one is free to do all sorts of evil things.)

The problem with this view, however, is that it is so self-referential that it cannot be true. In order to have a sufficient motivation for an act, one would have to have a motivation for the agent in being such a villain. This is obviously not the