sequences. The value
of a good or a moral act does not consist in its results. The
moral value of an act consists in the "good-will" of the agent,
and the "good-will" of the agent consists in his willing and
conscious conformity to the absolute moral principle involved.
"Nothing is fundamentally good but the good-will." That is,
an act to be moral, must be the conscious conformity of a
rational agent to the moral law, which he recognizes to be
morally binding. To Kant, the classic exponent of this position,
an act performed out of mere inclination, if not immoral,
certainly was not moral. A moral act could only flow from
reason, and reason would dictate to an individual conformity
to the moral law, which was a law of reason. Conduct that
is determined by mere circumstance is not moral conduct.
Morality is above the domain of circumstance. And the
moral agent is above the defeats and compromises imposed
by time and place. He is a free agent, that is, morally free.
He accepts no commands, except those of reason. A man, in
following impulse or being dictated to by circumstance, is a
mere animal or a machine. He is only a reasonable, that is, a
moral being, when he conforms to the laws which are above
time and place and circumstance, and above the whirls and
eddies of personal inclination.

Concretely, one may take the absolutistic attitude toward
a specific virtue: honesty. The morality of telling the truth
consists in a conscious conformity to the moral standard of
honesty in the face of all deflections of inclination and
particular situations. It makes no iota of difference what the
result of telling the truth in a particular instance may be.
It makes no difference what urgent and plausible and practically
decent reason one has for not telling the truth. The
truth must be told, as justice must be done, though the
heavens fall. We have a case, let us suppose, where telling
bad news to a very sick man may kill him. That temporally
disastrous consequence is, from an absolutistic point of view,
a totally irrelevant consideration, as is also the pain we feel
in telling the truth under such conditions. But the single
moral course is clear; there is no alternative; in absolutistic
morals there are no extenuating circumstances. The truth
must be told, whatever be the consequences. For to tell
the truth is a universal moral law, and conformity to that law
a universal moral obligation.

The defects of this position, if they