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Beneficence/Benevolence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

William K. Frankena
William K. Frankena
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Michigan
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Extract

I begin with a note about moral goodness as a quality, disposition, or trait of a person or human being. This has at least two different senses, one wider and one narrower. Aristotle remarked that the Greek term we translate as justice sometimes meant simply virtue or goodness as applied to a person and sometimes meant only a certain virtue or kind of goodness. The same thing is true of our word “goodness.” Sometimes being a good person means having all the virtues, or at least all the moral ones; then goodness equals the whole of virtue. But sometimes, being a good person has a narrower meaning, namely, being kind, generous, and so forth. Thus, my OED sometimes equates goodness with moral excellence as a whole and sometimes with a particular moral excellence, viz., kindness, beneficence, or benevolence; and the Bible, when it speaks of God as being good sometimes means that God has all the virtues and sometimes only that he is kind, mereiful, or benevolent. When Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good: None is good, save one, that is God,” he seems to be speaking of goodness in the inclusive sense, but when the writer of Exodus has God himself say that he is “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,” God is using “goodness” in the narrower sense in which it means benevolence, for he goes on to make it clear that he is also just and severe. Similarly, “good will” may mean either “morally good will” in general, as it does in Kant, or it may mean only “benevolent will,” as it usually does; in “men of good will” it is perhaps ambiguous.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , Spring 1987 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1987

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References

1 For a similar discussion, see my “Beneficence in an Ethics of Virtue,” Shelp, E. E., ed., Beneficence and Health Care (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1982), pp. 66–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For my quotations from Price in what follows, see Raphael, D. D., ed., A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals by Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), pp. 140, 149.Google Scholar

3 Plato, Euthyphro, 13.

4 Edwards, J., The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 18–22.Google Scholar

5 See Ross, W. D., The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 21–22Google Scholar; Warnock, G. J., The Object of Morality (London: Methuen and Co., 1971), p. 87.Google Scholar

6 See Raphael, D. D., ed., British Moralists – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), vol. I, pp. 207–209.Google Scholar

7 Russell, B., What I Believe (New York: Dutton and Co., 1925), p. 20.Google Scholar

8 In this connection, see my Ethics, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 41–46.

9 ibid., p. 209.

10 For Clarke, see ibid.; for Sidgwick, , see The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1903), pp. 385, 413.Google Scholar

11 Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959), p. 16.Google Scholar

12 For my citations of Wallace, see Wallace, J. D., Virtues and Vices (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 128–131, 133, 157Google Scholar; see also my “Beneficence in an Ethics of Virtue.”

13 Quoted by Paton, H. J., The Categorical Imperative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 48.Google Scholar

14 For some discussion see my “Beneficence,” pp. –; also my Thinking About Morality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), pp. 53–57; Ethics, pp. –.

15 See Kant, Foundations, p. 39; Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1949), p. 53.Google Scholar

16 See my Ethics, p. 47.

17 ibid., pp. –.

18 Williams, B., Moral Luck (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1981), pp. 22–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 See my “Is Morality a Purely Personal Matter?” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. III (Morris: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), pp. 122–132.

20 Kant, Immanuel, The Doctrine of Virtue (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 122.Google Scholar

21 I do something in that direction in Ethics, ch. 5.