‘INTENTION AND MOTIVATION’
CAERS SUBSTACK ARTICLE #17
You may have heard the old adage that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. It reminds me of the single most important lesson I learned when I formally studied ethics in 2004: Good people trying to do good things with good intentions can still end up doing bad things.
Both of these statements seem to provide a dire warning with respect to ‘good intentions’, almost a confusing pessimism that somehow ‘good intentions’ are a problem. But I think what they tell us is that good intentions alone are incomplete and need something else to balance them so that things don’t go sideways.
For example, imagine that I am a sports coach and my intention is to train my protégé to excel in a particular sport. And let’s say that their hope is to excel as well, so we both have the same intentions. Is that enough to assure that I am doing something good for them and not doing something bad?
On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything automatically ‘bad’ about wanting to excel in a sport nor in assisting someone to do so. So, is it possible that such a ‘good intention’ could go awry?
As we explored in previous articles, we can get trapped in our own heads and have difficulty seeing things from someone else’s perspective. But not infrequently, the greatest challenge we face is trying to know what’s going on in our own heads. How well do we really understand the motivation for our own actions? Can sincere introspection help? How objective and honest can we be with ourselves? How well can we understand the motives in other people’s heads until we know our own first?
Am I mentoring the young athlete so that I will become rich and famous? Or to fulfil my unaccomplished goal of excellence vicariously through them? If so, might I push them a little too hard primarily for my benefit, not theirs? Would I be willing to accept that they are not going to be the best in the world as I had dreamed? If they decided that their passion for their sport was such that their dream of being the best was simply not worth the extreme sacrifice, would I be okay with that? In other words, what is the motivation behind my intentions?
Equally, is the young athlete striving for excellence to hide a fundamental insecurity that they are not ‘good enough’? Or to gain the affections of an emotionally distant parent? Or to obtain a power advantage that they can lord over ‘ordinary’ people? Are these motivations mature and loving, or are they narcissistic and potentially harmful to both themself and others?
These are tough questions because they are intensely personal and the answers reveal aspects of ourselves that may be unflattering or painful. But perhaps they provide the necessary balance so that our good intentions alone don’t result in actions that may hurt ourselves or others.
In previous articles we have discussed important ethical concepts like truth-telling and transparency. They are critical if we are serious about doing good in the world because they assist us in examining the motivation behind our good intentions, and those of others. During the pandemic, I suspect that many good people tried to do good things with the best of intentions. But when so much is at stake, it might be worth a closer look to assure ourselves that all of the motivations undergirding those apparent good intentions were as transparent and truthful as they could have been. Usually, a good start is to ask those who will be affected by our actions what they would like us to do, and for them to reflect deeply on their answers first. As we explored above, emotions like greed, insecurity and especially fear may not be the best motivations we can muster.
The study of ethics implores us to reflect deeply on why we do the things we do, without which it is easy to head down the wrong road, no matter how well-meaning our intentions.
J. Barry Engelhardt MD (retired) MHSc (bioethics)
CAERS Health Intake Facilitator