Ethics, Intent, and Morality: Kaitlyn’s John Locke Essay Success
Congratulations to Year 11 student Kaitlyn, who has been shortlisted for the John Locke Essay Competition, one of the world’s largest and most competitive essay writing contests for secondary school students.
This year the competition attracted more than 100,000 entrants from 191 countries, with only around 17.5% of submissions making the shortlist we are incredibly proud to have a Lauriston student amongst this outstanding group of students.
Submitted under the Philosophy section, her essay responds to the question: ‘Is it ever wrong to do the right thing for the wrong reasons?’ She opens with the example of a billionaire who donates generously to a children’s charity, motivated less by compassion than by a desire to boost his public image and reduce his tax bill. The outcome is good, but the motive is questionable, raising the central dilemma of whether the act was truly right.
Kaitlyn traces her interest in the topic back to the IB Programme, in particular a Theory of Knowledge (TOK) discussion about morality. In that lesson, the class explored ideas of Kantian deontology and consequentialism that would later anchor her essay. Driven to do further reading after the discussion, she seized the opportunity to dig deeper when the John Locke essay question appeared a month later. For Kaitlyn, who is also drawn to STEM, the appeal was partly personal, as she wanted to explore the ethics behind scientific progress and ask what gets lost when innovation moves faster than the moral reasoning behind it.
To work through that tension, she turned to three major schools of moral philosophy: Kantian deontology, which judges an action by whether it follows duty rather than personal motive; consequentialism, which looks only at outcomes and sets aside intention altogether; and virtue ethics, which asks instead what the action reveals about a person’s character.
Her conclusion lands firmly with virtue ethics. Rather than judging a single act in isolation, she argues that moral worth is better understood as something built over time through the steady cultivation of character and practical wisdom. It is a considered, mature piece of reasoning, and a reminder that some of the best philosophical thinking starts with an everyday scenario rather than an abstract one.
Her advice to other students considering a similar challenge is simple: put your ideas out there and back yourself. She sees essay writing as more than an academic exercise. For her, it is a way to engage with real issues and share a genuine point of view, something she believes every student should feel able to do regardless of how confident they feel about their writing.
Congratulations to Kaitlyn on this outstanding result, and on representing Lauriston so thoughtfully on the world stage.
