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 man may act wrongly from a good motive, and rightly from a bad one, and that the motive would make no difference whatever to the rightness or wrongness of the action. What it would make a difference to is the goodness or badness of the whole state of affairs: for, if we suppose the same action to be done in one case from a good motive and in the other from a bad one, then, so far as the consequences of the action are concerned, the goodness of the whole state of things will be the same, while the presence of the good motive will mean the presence of an additional good in the one case which is absent in the other. For this reason alone, therefore, we might justify the view that motives are relevant to some kinds of moral judgments, though not to judgments of right and wrong.

And there is yet another reason for this view, and this a reason which may be consistently held even by those who hold the theory of our first two chapters. It may be held, namely, that good motives have a general tendency to produce right conduct, though they do not always do so, and bad motives to produce wrong conduct; and this would be another