Kindness Trumps the Virtues?

"If, then, you are tempted to think that we modern Western Europeans cannot really be so very bad because we are, comparatively speaking, humane - if, in other words, you think God might be content with us on that ground - ask yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the cruelty of cruel ages because they excelled in courage or chastity. You will see at once that this is an impossibility."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 57

Kindness Among the Virtues

"We have so concentrated on one of the virtues - 'kindness' or mercy - that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. ... The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 50

Killing With Kindness

"There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness ... is separated from the other elements of Love, it infolves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object - we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 36