The Alibi of Virtue
I originally wrote this essay to explore a deceptively simple philosophical question for a writing competition: can doing the right thing for the wrong reasons still be considered morally right? Drawing on thinkers like Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and Dasan Jeong Yak-yong, I examine how intentions, consequences, and moral responsibility shape our understanding of right and wrong. What interested me most was how relevant this question remains today, especially in a world where philanthropy, political decisions, and corporate actions can produce public benefits while being driven by self-interest. It made me question whether we judge people by what they accomplish or by why they act in the first place. That’s why I decided to share this essay on Medium.
In the Akan tale of Anansi and the pot of wisdom, the spider Anansi is gifted with a vessel containing all the wisdom in the world by Nyame, the god of heaven. Every time he looks into the clay pot, he gains a newfound epistemic enlightenment, yet instead of sharing this wisdom, Anansi displays a clear mens rea, the guilty mind, of greed as he decides to monopolise it. He hides the pot and climbs a tree to prevent others from accessing what should have been a universal resource. As Anansi struggled to climb the tree with the pot at his waist, a young boy came by and suggested that he tie the pot to his back. Realising that the child possessed greater intelligence than he did, Anansi became enraged and smashed the pot, thereby releasing wisdom into the world and allowing humanity to undergo widespread cognitive and civilisational advancement (Anike Foundation 2021).
Anansi’s conduct with the pot of wisdom highlights a much larger moral and legal framework that encompasses a range of intentions and consequences. Anansi’s act ultimately benefits humanity, but his motive was driven by corruption rather than altruism. This gap between wrongful intent and beneficial actions inevitably creates ambiguity in how this conduct should be evaluated and raises multiple questions: can Anansi’s act of destroying the pot, despite its greed-driven origin, be morally excused because of its beneficial outcome for humanity? And in assessing Anansi’s guilt, should greater weight be placed on his initial intent to hoard wisdom or on the civilisational benefit that followed his act of destruction? Taken together, it is clear that a right action, though undertaken for the wrong reason, may be wrong depending on the circumstances.
Yet this distinction is not purely straightforward: judgment in both philosophy and law rarely turns on the act alone. Conduct in law filters through actus reus, the guilty hand, and mens rea, the aforementioned guilty mind. The law recognises that the same outward act may carry different moral and legal significance depending on the mental state accompanying it. A killing committed inadvertently differs fundamentally from one committed intentionally, even if the physical result is identical. This demonstrates a broader principle: conduct cannot be evaluated solely through consequences, as intention forms part of the act itself.
This tension becomes especially evident in cases of financial gain, where both moral philosophy and legal doctrine scrutinise both the motive and outward act. In The Categorical Imperative by Immanuel Kant, moral worth is not determined through the consequences; rather, “the idea of a good will is the idea of a will committed above all else to making decisions that are morally worthy” (Johnson 2004). Here, it is evident that the moral worth of an action is defined by whether it was performed within the spirit of duty rather than the pursuit of personal advantages. This position directly challenges consequentialist reasoning by rejecting the idea that beneficial results, in any field, such as economics or in society, can compensate for a defective motive.
A simulation of Kant’s contention is as follows: a philanthropist who, after being exposed for corruption, donates a substantial sum to charity. Superficially, the act appears morally good: the donation may provide food, shelter, or medical support to people with vulnerabilities and may produce measurable social benefit. However, if the donation is motivated not by a sense of duty, but by the desire to repair a damaged reputation or avoid further criticism, then the moral quality of the action shifts. The recipients still benefit materially, but the donor’s intention remains self-preserving rather than benevolent. Under Kant’s framework, the action lacks true moral worth because it does not arise from duty or goodwill. Moreover, this distinction is reflected in how legal systems evaluate conduct that appears beneficial on its surface. Such reasoning would make moral evaluation increasingly vulnerable to luck, as actions would be judged primarily by outcomes beyond the agent’s full control. If morality ignored intention entirely, then manipulative or selfish behaviour could always disguise itself behind socially useful consequences.
This focus on intent carries over into law, where fraud is judged not only by outcome but by the purpose behind the act. Under the United Kingdom’s Fraud Act 2006, liability for fraud arises under section 2 when “A person is in breach of this section if he — (a) dishonestly makes a false representation, and (b) intends, by making the representation — (i) to make a gain for himself or another, or (ii) to cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss” (The National Archives 2006). These provisions suggest that legal systems examine intention alongside outward conduct. The law focuses on the dishonest purpose behind the conduct, as social order remains dependent upon reliable adherence to principles of fairness and trust. Therefore, even when consequences are positive and legally permissible, intention and outcome diverge, reinforcing Kant’s rejection of wrongly motivated actions as morally right.
A further dimension of this problem emerges when one considers not merely the internal motivation behind an act, but the nature of the entitlement that act presupposes. To act for the wrong reasons is frequently to act as though one possesses a right one does not legitimately hold, which is asserting dominion over something that morality has not sanctioned. The question of what justifies such entitlement is addressed by John Locke in the Second Treatise of Government. Locke, a central figure of Enlightenment political philosophy, argues that what makes an object someone’s property is not mere possession but the admixture of labour with the natural world: “Whatsoever he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with… and thereby makes it his property” (Tuckness 2005). Locke defines property as a state of nature that has been intertwined with one’s labour, suggesting that ownership is not simply claiming resources by force, but is mixing effort into what nature provides, making it someone’s property through meritocracy. He also adds a key caveat, that the property becomes the sole possession of the owner as long as there is enough for others suggests a natural limit to ownership: people have the right to claim resources as long as “at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others” (Tuckness 2005), and property rights are only justified through the same criteria. Ownership exists within a moral framework of reciprocity and fairness. A person cannot legitimately appropriate everything merely because he possesses the power to do so.
However, questions of entitlement alone do not exhaust moral assessment, as they still fail to account for how repeated action forms character, a problem Dasan Jeong Yak Yong addresses in his account of moral cultivation, where in Dasan’s Analects, he rejects the Neo Confucian virtue as an innate principle, arguing that virtue is the outcome of a disciplined practice. He believes that the “more [people] repeat acts of shu, the more accurately [people] calibrate our grasp of the Pattern and thus approximate the virtue of zhong” (Cawley 2021). Shu, in this account, is a repeated self-adjustment in relation to others through which the agent continuously corrects bias by taking another’s standpoint seriously in action. Zhong, by contrast, is not a pre-existing moral purity like the Neo Confucianists waiting to be expressed, but the stabilised condition that emerges from such repeated correction.
This emphasis on repetition aligns with a foundational principle in criminal law, as liability is assessed not fully through isolated acts, but the conjunction of conduct and mental state, where intent is frequently inferred from patterns of behaviour rather than single instances alone. In R v Cunningham in 1957, recklessness is defined by being “aware of the risk of such harm” (National Case Law Archive 2026), highlighting that mens rea is something inferred from how conduct manifests over time within specified circumstances, reflecting a broader doctrinal assumption that responsibility becomes clear when actions are situated within a consistent pattern. Even when an act produces an externally correct outcome, its moral significance depends on whether it forms part of a pattern of conduct capable of cultivating zhong. A right action performed from defective motivation may still satisfy surface-level correctness, yet fail to contribute to the formation of stable moral reliability. On Dasan’s account, what ultimately matters is not only what is done, but whether repeated actions produce a coherent and dependable moral agent, whose own morality is sustained even as incentives shift, which is what society depends on.
Get Gio Kim’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Even so, consequences remain morally significant. A defender of consequentialism might object that history itself demonstrates the value of judging actions by their outcomes rather than the motives behind them. Many transformative developments emerged from self-interested incentives. The Magna Carta was initially created largely to protect the privileges and land rights of the English barons rather than to establish universal liberty. Yet over time, it became foundational for constitutional government and limitations upon arbitrary power. Equally innovative, beneficial actions throughout history largely came from immoral actions. On the consequentialist view, it would be perverse to condemn these as morally deficient simply because their authors acted from selfish motives: what endures is the benefit, and what the benefit demonstrates is that good outcomes are what morality should ultimately care about. To insist otherwise, on this account, is to privilege a clean conscience over a fed population.
These scenarios are important as they show that good consequences can emerge from mixed or even corrupt motives. However, they do not prove that corrupt motives become morally good; rather, they only prove that history can convert selfish incentives into unintended public benefit.
To praise immoral motives merely because they occasionally produce useful results would be fatal. It would encourage society to excuse greed whenever prosperity followed, or excuse exploitation whenever innovation emerged. Such reasoning collapses morality into retrospective calculation; it transforms ethical judgment into little more than outcome accounting. More importantly, consequences are often shaped by luck and circumstances beyond the actor’s control. Anansi did not intend the enlightenment of humanity. The barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta did not intend modern constitutional democracy. A person may act selfishly and accidentally generate public benefit, while another may act nobly and fail because of unfortunate circumstances. If morality depended solely upon outcomes, then ethical judgment would become hostage to luck.
In summation, intentions matter as they belong to the agent at the moment of choice; they reveal the principle according to which the person acted before chance intervened. Consequences may alter practical evaluation, but they cannot fully redefine the moral quality of the original decision. This highlights why right outcomes cannot entirely cleanse wrong reasons. A beneficial result may reduce blame or produce gratitude from those who benefit, but gratitude is not equivalent to moral approval. Society may appreciate the advantages generated by an action while condemning the reason behind it at the same time.
The tension between motive and consequence, therefore, sits at the centre of both ethics and law. Because human conduct simultaneously involves intention, character, rights, and social effects, any framework that attends to all these dimensions provides a more complete account than one that reduces morality to outcomes alone. Taken together, it can be wrong to do the right thing for the wrong reasons: a right outcome does not automatically justify the motive that produced it, and an action may remain morally compromised at its foundation even where it proves socially useful, legally permissible, or historically significant.
Anansi released wisdom into the world, but he did not become wise: his story reveals the essential distinction between producing good and being good. The world benefited from the shattered pot, yet the action itself still originated in greed and resentment. That is why morality, the rightness or wrongness of an action, cannot judge conduct by consequences alone — to do so would be to mistake accidental benefit for virtue itself.
Bibliography
Anike Foundation. “African Folktale — Ananse and the Pot of Wisdom — Anike Foundation.” Anike Foundation, 2021. https://anikefoundation.org/african-folktales/ananse-and-the-pot-of-wisdom.
Cawley, Kevin N. “Korean Confucianism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, November 4, 2021. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/korean-confucianism/.
Johnson, Robert. “Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 23, 2004. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/.
National Case Law Archive. “R v Cunningham [1957] 2 QB 396.” National Case Law Archive, March 19, 2026. https://www.lawcases.net/cases/r-v-cunningham-1957-2-qb-396/.
The National Archives. “Fraud Act 2006.” Legislation.gov.uk, January 15, 2006. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35/section/2.
Tuckness, Alex. “Locke’s Political Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, November 9, 2005. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/.
