Is kindness our Chief Aim?

Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. . . It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and wound rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than kindness. . . He has paid us the most intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain