Inner vs. Outer justifications

Arguments in ethics often wind up comparing ends and means. What makes an act good? Is it the intent behind that act? Or is it the ends that it achieves? What happens if an act bears good intent but ultimately culminates in bad results? Or if an act bore bad intent but somehow ended up having good ends? It is puzzling to many people, whose answers often border on schizophrenic when asked the same question in different ways.

I believe that it depends on what we see as justifications for something being right. I classify justifications into outer justifications, where an act's inherent goodness depends on social norms and judgments, and inner justifications, where acts have their goodness based within one's self. Why is this so?

When an act is based on social judgment or norms, it is only reasonable that an act's rightness be reliant on the ends it achieve, since these are exactly what affects society and people around you. It doesn't matter  to society if you tried to help remove a hazard when you cut down that rotting tree if it ultimately killed the neighbour's kid or crashed your friend's car. You are still wrong to the eyes of society, from the eyes of other people. They will not stop and say "hey, come on, I know you didn't mean it when you killed my son." So, if you take society and norms (what used to be known to me as external truth) to be the yardstick for morality, ends will be what define your act's morality.

But, if you look inwards for moral justifications, an act's rightness depends on what you think is reasonable and moral. Intent will thus matter more if you truly bear conviction in your acts. Even if you killed someone by some sick twist of fate while trying to save that person, you know that you were right in your act because you had no intent to kill him. If you take your own moral standards and reason to be the measure of morality, intent will matter more to you.

How do we decide which is more important then? I think a system of integrating these two into one coherent narrative is needed, because both matter in decision-making and leading a moral life. But the problem is how people with different dispositions find solace in either of these two narratives. Those who seek affirmation from society and those who seek affirmation within themselves will react differently to the end/intent debate.

More of morality in the next post, which will probably talk about abstract and practical moral reasoning.