On Hume's reading of Hobbes, while we approve of kindness, friendship, and other benevolent affections, any desire to benefit others really derives from self-interest, although we may not always be conscious of its influence on those desires.
"After years of capital destruction facilitated by a combination of misdirected growth incentives, volatile commodity cycles and benevolent capital markets, a desire for bottom-line returns appears to be gaining traction," Simmons & Co.
Cornwallis's attituted toward the lower classes did, however, include a benevolent and somewhat paternalistic desire to improve their condition.
Yes, our acts may -- these days, more than occasionally -- misfire (or quagmire), but our intentions are benevolent, motivated primarily by a desire to serve a higher purpose, even as we seek to enlarge our peaceful federation of allied nations.
4. Benevolent dictators are benevolent.
Because the desires of the truly benevolent are properly ordered, they attend to ideas of religion and are suitably affected by the ideas of God's attributes and activities that everyone has.
In various Latin American countries, it is common to hear expressions of a wish for a benevolent dictator who enacts the programs he desires without pesky interference from other branches of government or society.
Both are undependable in the way good fairy stories ought to be: Peter Pan is a hero, but, like a true fairy-tale hero, his motives are suspect and his desires vainglorious; Mary Poppins is essentially benevolent, but she is also cruel, conceited, and unpredictable.
He proposes that, through a series of interlocking definitions, the Dialectics presents a rationalist, a priori argument that "the benevolent and right are what will be desired on behalf of mankind by the sage," a moral paragon with ideal knowledge who weighs benefit and harm on the principle of preferring the total over the unit (1989: 144 46).
