The Importance Of Good Will

There are many things that we do to seem good or to be good. We clean our rooms so that our parents do not reprimand us. We do our homework so that we get good grades in school. We volunteer so we can help others. All of these things are actions that we consider to be good, however do they have a good will despite the reasons we are doing them. According to Kant, doing something out of good will means that it is being done precisely for the sake of duty.

To do something out of good will is equivalent to doing something because it is your obligation to do it. The will is not good once you do an action because you are prone to do it in order to receive a prize, gratification, or reward. A good will can only be considered a good will if an …show more content…
The discussion about the will – in terms of whether a good will is determined to be a good will – was unfamiliar to Starte. Starte’s popular phenomenological ontology of the type of being unusual to humans has already declared that freedom misleadingly becomes comprehended as a property of something. According to Starte, a “good will” or a “bad will” is not one that makes accurate coherent decisions, but a “for-itself” being that sees itself as always making choices. Contrariwise, a “bad will” would not be a for-itself thing that decides senselessly, but one that does not observe itself as selecting freely or in a free sense and manner. Starte states, “This alienated freedom that makes itself impersonal in itself, negating everything about itself in order to realize an abstract and unconditioned will that is revealed to it by others who are its impersonal bearers, is duty, that absolute obligation each one of us can demand from others…(Starte 1992: 267) Starte does not deem that the categorical imperative or the ethics of duty are an accurate …show more content…
The meaning to be truly free is related to a good will. Freedom is not to do anything that you want. Freedom is also not to live concurring to a law designed by someone or something else. This is because what you “want” is obligated on you by strengths separate from yourself. Meaning, someone is given their wants and they are therefore not selected freely. Freedom is to live by a law someone gives themselves as a free being. A person whose actions are ruled by their own inclinations, those needs and desires enforced by someone or something else is a dominated person, and therefore does not behave freely. Their actions are decided by the power of the thing influencing them. However, when someone behaves out of regard or admiration for the moral law, a law someone unreservedly and freely chooses to obey, the person is viewed as a merely reasonable representative, untarnished by inclinations, then one behaves independently and