The two additional gifts, to create an endowment for the parish and to support the parish school, are a powerful testament to the donor's goodness and understanding.
But it also makes him feel "less comfortable about humanity as a whole, less confident about the general goodness and understanding in people that we should all have".
According to Hay biographer Robert Gale, "Hay came to adore Lincoln for his goodness, patience, understanding, sense of humor, humility, magnanimity, sense of justice, healthy skepticism, resilience and power, love of the common man, and mystical patriotism".
Our analysis of instrumental goodness presupposes an understanding of what it is for something to be good.
His eagerness for her to be a living exemplar of Unitarian theology, a pure creature naturally endowed with goodness and spiritual understanding, led him to falsify his portrait of her, to leave out the ways in which she was aggressive, temperamental and uncouth.
This is different from deployment of masks in the general population during an outbreak of an infectious disease, where anyone may encounter the infectious micro-organism, implying much greater heterogeneity, in training levels (experience and understanding), goodness of fit of a mask, and activities interfering with mask use and thus reducing potential reduction of transmission.
It is arrogance to question God's existence and goodness when we lack understanding of the infinite complexities of his creation.
Indeed, Leibniz says that "to do less good than one could is to be lacking in wisdom or in goodness", that the most perfect understanding "cannot fail to act in the most perfect way, and consequently to choose the best" (1710, 201).
By understanding God's goodness in terms of God's being (as opposed to God's will alone), we come close to the non-voluntarist stand.
In the Republic, by contrast, a dialogue in which Socrates is also the main character (and first-person narrator) but in which the views he advances go beyond the tight-knit pattern of debates in the dialogues discussed in section 3.1, Plato (424/3 348/7 BCE [7] offers an account of justice linking the political to the psychological and justice to a higher understanding of true goodness.
