Picture of Dorian Gray VIII: Ch. 18-20

Morality is not an accumulated quantity; it is a rate of change of quality of the soul. The quality of a person's life is the aggregate of the morality of their actions, and morality is the change in a person's quality over time. If someone is doing an act that is morally right, than their quality is increasing, and vice versa. This is illustrated when Dorian says "I am going to be good" (160). The specific meaning of "good" in this context refers to morality, not quality. The future tense indicates that his future deeds will be "good," and therefore the quality of his soul will, from that point on, be increasing. He is not stating that the overall quality of his soul over all of his life will ever be "good," nor that he can compensate for killing Basil. Instead, he is claiming that he will improve the quality of his soul, that he will be morally good. That he is "going to be" morally sound indicates that he has changed. The judgement of a person's quality of soul is a meaningless value, because people change; Dorian's past self has been morally wrong and his future self will be morally right, but measuring the overall quality of his soul will simply return the average morality of his life. If his "soul," such as it were, were to be judged, then this quality, average morality will not necessarily refer to how he would, theoretically, act in such a place. For a proper judgement, Dorian's soul would have to be judged at every instant in his life, and in those instants in which he is morally sound, he goes to "heaven" or some equivalent, and vice versa. In summary, a person cannot be judged based on their average morality; instead, they must be judged in any particular moment based on the morality of that moment.