But is this so?  May not a man have good will and yet do much mischief?  If courage, wit, etc, need to be employed by good will, so does good will need to be joined with common sense, knowledge, tact, and many other helpers.  Good will is good only if it is sanely and wisely directed; else it may go with all sorts of fanaticism.  If one says, “It is still good qua good will,” we may reply, “Yes, but so are all goods; courage is always good qua courage, knowledge qua knowledge,” etc.  All harmless joys are good without qualification, and all goods whatever are good except as they get in the way of some greater good or lead to trouble.

(4) Kant’s formula “good will” is ambiguous.  Of course a good act of will is good; that is a mere tautology, and gives us no guidance whatever.  Which acts of will are good is our problem.  Kant, however, worked out his empty formula into a concrete maxim, “Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature.”  But how should we wish others to act in the given situation?  It would be quite possible for a lustful man to be willing that unrestrained lust should be the general rule; he would be much more comfortable and freer if it were.  There is nothing in the law of consistency to direct him; men might be consistently bad as well as consistently good.  We have still no criterion, only an appeal to coolness, to detachment from hot impulses and selfishness.

Practically, what the Kantian viewpoint amounts to is an exaltation of conscience-a much more concrete (and variable) thing than this abstract formula.  Do your duty, at any cost!  Our hearts respond to such preaching, but our intellects remain perplexed, if the practical apotheosis of goodness is not supplemented by an adequate theoretic justification thereof.

What evils may go with conscientiousness?

At this point it may repay us to note more carefully the inadequacy of that mere blind conscientiousness which is the practical burden of the Kantian teaching.  One would think that the only source of our troubles lay in our lack of desire to do right!  As a matter of fact, there is a vast amount of good will in the world which effects no good, or does serious harm, for want of wise direction.  Much of the tragedy of life consists of the clashes between wills equally consecrated and pure.  Conscientious cranks and blunderers are perhaps even more of a nuisance than out-and-out villains; they hurt every good cause they espouse and bring noble ideals into ridicule; they provoke discouragement and cynicism.  There is hardly a folly or a crime that has not been committed prayerfully and with a clear conscience; the saint and the criminal are sometimes psychologically indistinguishable indeed, by which name we call a fanatic may depend upon which side we are on.  We may discriminate among the types of perverted conscience: 

(1) The fanatical conscience, the meddling conscience, that feels a mission to stir up trouble.  Under this head come the parents who interfere needlessly with their children’s ways when different from their own, the breakers-up of love-affairs, the fault-finders, the militantly religious, all that great multitude of men who with prayer and tears have felt it their duty to override others’ wills and impose their codes upon the world.