Kindness and Motivation to Be "Good"

So, while thinking about motivation and intent, as I seem to touch on regularly, I considered its implications for kindness.  Another aspect I'm going to throw into this is the all-too-applicable ulterior motive.  So why should we be nice?

It's hard to not sound pretentious for this discussion, so... let's just go with it.  Let's go ahead and say that you should be good for goodness sake(too soon?).  Let's rearrange the words and add an article with the beauty of language to get "be good for the sake of goodness".  This still turns out to be a pretty vague statement as far as how to think about goodness, but I think we're on the right track.

Let's look at ulterior motives as reasons other than the sake of goodness to perform such an act(or inaction). One might do something in the hopes of causing someone else to consider them of greater value in some way, or to establish a credit with said party. Please note that these are not the only two forms of ulterior motives.  There is also doing nice things in the idea that this will increase your "good" levels.

This is the silliest thing to pick a fight with, so I'm going to.  Let's approach this from the perspective that the last idea is a self-defeating concept.  It's the thought that counts... but we should all be able to agree that this is too vague of a concept.  There are times that I feel like I do nice things out of spite, anger, or frustration.  This causes me to evaluate why I do nice things, so I decide it's because even though the end result may anger or frustrate me, I have some human impulse to do something nice.

Now to make sense of all the ideas I threw out there.
Wanting to be good is a human behavior, and I'd like to argue that ideas like religion and government are stemmed from this.  If you perform goodness to be gooder, you're doing it wrong.  Decide that you want to do goodness because you want to do goodness, and hold yourself accountable for your own awesome.

I'd like to finish by saying -  sure, being gooder isn't a bad thing to strive for.  Just do it because you want to, not because you think you should.  Though you should.