SO LET'S BEGIN at the beginning: with your ability to see, and appreciate, goodness.
Here's a little quiz.
Which do you think would be better:
| A spouse who stays with you because he or she loves you. | or | A spouse who stays with you only because he or she believes in marriage. |
| An associate who doesn't steal from you because he or she values fairness, openness, and honesty. | or | An associate who doesn't steal from you only because he or she has been taught that stealing breaks a rule. |
| A person who doesn't hit you because he or she prefers not to harm others. | or | A person who doesn't hit you only because he or she knows that hitting is against the law. |
In each case, the first choice is obviously better (that is, more good) than the second. On a scale of goodness, we would all agree that the left-hand column rates higher than the right hand column.
I might well be glad that a person who wants to hit me doesn't—even if it's only because battery is illegal—but that doesn't make them more good than someone who doesn't want to harm me.
I may be glad that an associate doesn't steal from me, or a spouse doesn't leave me, even if they want to—and even if it's only because they are following a rule—but that doesn't make them better than an associate who simply values fairness, or a spouse who really cares about me.
The person who acts out of his or her own values in these cases is obviously superior to the person who is merely following a rule, no matter how "good" the rule is.
On the one hand, this just seems obvious, but there are some pragmatic reasons as well.
Depending on your situation, you might not even prefer to have a spouse stay with you if they didn't really care about you. I've seen some marriages, held together only by a sense of duty, which made both partners miserable for years.
But even if you want a spouse to remain under such conditions, how likely is it that they will?
One problem with rules is that it is notoriously easy to find loopholes.
The associate who doesn't steal because it breaks a rule may well find another rule, which allows him or her to do you in without actually "stealing".
The person who tells the truth only because of a rule almost always has a very narrow definition of what constitutes a lie.
I knew an old lady once who was fond of saying, after intentionally misleading someone with literally true statements, "Well, I didn't lie."
Over the centuries humans have devised an enormous number of "perfectly ethical" exceptions to the rule "thou shalt not kill". It doesn't, apparently, apply to wholesale slaughter in war, or capital punishment, even for crimes other than killing.
In practice, the person whose behavior is mostly rule-governed, in terms of things like honesty, or loyalty, or violence is not very trustworthy.
