Footnote

I see fit today to add a footnote to my counterexample to the Kantian idea of moral worth. It's a quotation that I read from Michael Moncur's Collection of (Cynical) Quotations for today:

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 10
British author, mathematician, & philosopher (1872 - 1970)

It would have been inappropriate to approach the crying woman out of duty. She would have responded to the emotions of the person approaching her rather than the reasons. If you are approaching someone in that position out of duty, what would be the accompanying emotion? Most likely patient resignation. If you are approaching her out of sympathy, what would be the accompanying emotion? It is probably too strong a claim to say that you like a person that you don't even know. Yet you seem to be at least giving her the benefit of the doubt if you feel sorry for her, and at the very least this would incline you to like her. So I think that Russell has at least latched onto a very closely related point to the one I was making in my counterexample. I would add that the more vulnerable people are, the more they wish to be liked. That has an obvious evolutionary advantage. The more other people like you, the more likely they are to help you, thereby enabling your survival. The more vulnerable you are, the more likely you are to need that help. Consequently, we would expect people to have evolved to wish to be liked more the more vulnerable they are. Therfore you would have a much greater power to hurt a person like that in a position of vulnerability by approaching her out of a sense of duty. You would be going against her wishes at a time when she needed to be liked (or loved) more than ever.