Why Good People Do Bad Things - Aristotle, Kant, Bentham and Mill

Published on Linked In Jan 30th 2023

In my presentations on 'Why Good People Do Bad Things' I often get asked how I define a 'good' person and it was a question which of course I had to address in my PhD thesis.

The starting point to answer the primary research question in my Thesis was the field of normative ethics which considers how a person should act. This question is addressed in most ethics education courses by considering both religious teachings and the work of the moral philosophers Aristotle, Kant, Bentham and Mill. Aristotle (349BC) considers character to be most important and his work is the field of virtue ethics. Kant (1785) explored duty based ethics and his work is within the field of universalism which aims to determine a set of universal rules that can be applied in any situation. Bentham (1781) and Mill (1863) focused on what is a good outcome and how the greatest good can be created with the least harm. Their work is in the field of utilitarianism.

The aim of reviewing these foundation texts was to dev…