action and intention
Consider the case of Gavrilo Prinzip. He was convicted of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He might have argued in his defence 'all I did was pull a trigger'. Such a defence would have been rightly rejected as being less than the whole story. Even saying that Prinzip killed the Archduke is less than the whole story. We want to say that he committed murder. To say that he murdered him is to say that he killed him illegally and he intended to kill (or, perhaps, cause grievous bodily harm). It is impossible to murder unintentionally. Note how the description of what he did, or what he did itself, is determined in part by his intentions. We cannot work out what he did without taking into account Prinzip's mental states.
Suppose that Prinzip really had just pulled the trigger without even realizing that the gun was loaded. In that case he would still have killed the Archduke but wouldn't have murdered him. Even here it's not the whole story that he 'just pulled the trigger', though it's true that all he meant to do was 'just pull the trigger'; the fact that he didn't mean to murder the Archduke means that he did not murder him.
Imagine things had been very different: imagine that Prinzip had been an anti-anarchist rather than an anarchist, and had spotted an anarchist with a bomb in his hand about to blow up lots of people, and imagine that Prinzip had shot this anarchist in the hand to prevent him detonating the bomb, but the bullet, although it had prevented the anarchist from detonating the bomb, had gone right through the anarchist's hand and hit the Archduke. In this case we shouldn't say that Prinzip had murdered the Archduke because he didn't intend to kill him, even though he did kill him.
Suppose further that Prinzip had realized, in this imaginary situation, that the bullet would go right through the anarchist's hand and kill the Archduke. He still wouldn't have murdered the Archduke even though he would have killed him and known that his action would kill him. This is because, in this imaginary situation, he merely foresaw, and did not intend, the result of the Archduke's death.
It would, of course, have been different had Prinzip intended to kill Franz Ferdinand and the only angle he could get on the Archduke was by way of the hand of the bomb holder. In that case, he would have murdered him after all.
The point of all this is that when we are assessing the morality of people's actions we cannot always do so without knowing their intentions. One's intentions sometimes make a difference to what one does and therefore sometimes to the morality of what one does.
These ideas are one version of the doctrine or principle of double effect. The originator of this idea was propably Aquinas, whose remarks on murder embody this doctrine in embryo.
If you agree please feel free to post below saying why; if you disagree with anything here please feel free to post below saying why.
posted by Daniel Hill at 3:04 pm
11 Comments:
Joseph Shaw said...
Seems a fair account of the DDE to me. (not that there isn't more to say, of course!)
I do think Aquinas was anticipated in this, though not so clearly. See Abelard and even Augustine and other fathers on the notion of 'consent': the martyrs didn't consent to death etc. despite acting so as to bring it about. This is ultimately the same idea.
'Eudemus' said:
>One's intentions sometimes make a difference to what one does and therefore sometimes to the morality of what one does.
>These ideas are one version of the doctrine or principle of double effect.
If this is what the Doctrine of Dobule Effect (DDE) claims, then there is some sense in which I believe in DDE.
But it seems to me that the claim is vague, and once disambiguated, it will turn out that informative claims about permissibility do not depend on agents' intentions. This I take to strike at the guts of DDE, a claim that permissibility can depend on agents' intentions. In this sense I don't believe in DDE.
On the other hand, there is a harmless reading of DDE, which you do not distinguish here, in which our moral assessments of agents in relation to actions (e.g. praise, blame) depends on their intentions - everyone agrees with that, myself included.
>Suppose that Prinzip really had just pulled the trigger without even realizing that the gun was loaded. In that case he would still have killed the Archduke but wouldn't have murdered him.
It seems to me therefore that in this case, Prinzip would have done something impermissible (i.e. killed the Archduke) without intending to do it. Since for an act to be murder, the killing has to be intended, I agree that it is of course not a case of murder.
Adding or subtracting such an intention from the scenario does not seem to me to affect the permissibility of the action. It does affect the blameworthiness of the agent. And it does affect the types that the action falls under - but that is for the uninteresting reason that certain action-types (especially those where we tend to defer to legal definitions of the action-type) have the intentions of the agent as part of their definition.
Thanks, Joseph, for this. Sorry -- I messed up your comment and had to post it myself, but don't give up commenting, as next time the post should be published in your own name (perhaps after some delay).
Interestingly, Bennett says that Aquinas isn't a double-effect theorist as we now commonly understand such. I got onto him from references from you.
Consent to death is tricky: if I am being murdered I cannot consent to being murdered as murder is wrong and it's wrong to consent to something wrong. (It's not to the point that if I consented the murderer would be killing a willing victim: the activity is at the very least still illegal.)
Thanks, Eudemus, for your post -- sorry to have messed up and to have had to post it myself. If you wish to post again it should come out in your own name this time.
You say:
Prinzip would have done something impermissible (i.e. killed the Archduke).
But killing the Archduke isn't necessarily impermissible. The final thought experiment was designed to show this: if Prinzip had shot an anarchist to prevent the anarchist from detonating a bomb, but knowing that the bullet would pass through the anarchist's hand and kill the Archduke, then he would have done something permissible even though he would have killed the Archduke.
On the other hand, if you consider the last variation on this thought experiment when we add in the intention to kill the Archduke via firing through the hand of the anarchist then Prinzip would have done something impermissible.
There are only two differences between these two variants: the different intentions of Prinzip and the consequent different moral statuses of the actions. I don't think you can say that what he did was permissible in both or impermissible in both; what he did seems to me impermissible in the first variant and permissible in the second.
Thanks for this, Eudemus.
Yes, you have the final two variants right, except that I didn't say that the anarchist was killed (it was in order to prevent an objection from the 'doctrine of transferred malice' that I omitted to say this).
But the point of the basic thought experiment (in which we were imagining that Prinzip had shot an anarchist to prevent the anarchist from detonating a bomb, but knowing that the bullet would pass through the anarchist's hand and kill the Archduke), was that the shooting of the Archduke was *not* a means to the end of saving innocents, since the innocents were saved before the bullet hit the Archduke. So I don't think your explanation of (b) is right, I'm afraid.
Here's my preferred way of looking at it: if Prinzip intends to kill the Archduke he performs another action, apart from the permissible action of firing the gun, an action that he doesn't perform if he merely foresees the Archduke's death. This other action is murder, all examples of which are impermissible. What makes the difference here? Answer: Prinzip's intentions. So intentions make a difference to what one does -- if one intends to kill, one performs an extra action, viz. murder.
Here's another way of looking at it: one cannot assess actions independently of knowing a bit about under what types (or descriptions) they fall. The most important thing to know is under what intentional types/descriptions they fall. Does the shooting fall under the type/description of murder or not? If it does it is impermissible. If it does not it may yet be permissible. But we cannot know whether it falls under the type/description of murder without knowing what the agent intended.
What do you think?
Thanks for another great post, Eudemus!
I'm afraid, however, that your revised formulation on (b) still doesn't satisfy me. You say:
If (b) is impermissible - which I'm not sure it is - then it is because this same action would be killing the archduke which is not permissible even when performing that action is the only way to save these innocents.
But the point of the example was that killing the archduke was not a 'way to save these innocents', it was a *consequence of* saving these innocents.
You're right that my account of murder omits something, but I don't think your analysis of it is correct, I'm afraid. You say:
Murdering the Archduke requires at least (1) killing him, (2) intending to kill him, (3) this killing being impermissible/unjustified.
I think this is putting the cart before the horse -- a killing is impermissible because it's murder not the other way round. Murder can never be justified.
What I omitted was to state that Prinzip wasn't acting within the law (i.e. in self-defence or judicially or in war combat), nor did he think he was. The definition of murder is:
x murders y if and only if x kills y illegally (i.e. outside combat, self-defence, and judicial execution), and intends to kill y (or, perhaps, cause y grievous bodily harm), and, perhaps, knows that he acts outside the law. Let's take this qualification as read from now on -- I omitted it first time because I didn't think it crucial. In sum, I claim that illegally killing someone while intending to kill them *is* sufficient for murder.
The case of Prinzip intending to shoot the anarchist through the hand and foreknowing that the bullet would carry on and hit the Archduke was intended to be a counter-example to your principle:
Take any case of murder, subtract the intention to kill but keep all other features the same, and you have an impermissible killing.
(I composed the examples with your view in mind!)
My conviction is that one cannot blamelessly intend to do something impermissible. This gives me an easy theory of praise and blame.
I have been puzzling over your final thought experiment for some time, but my considered view is this: suppose Prinzip's mental state was initially merely the intention to save the lives of the innocent. But then someone flicked a switch and he conceived a hatred of the Archduke and a desire to kill him, meaning that he fired with the intention of killing him. That would mean that he actually performed a different action -- murder -- from the one he would have performed otherwise. (Or, if you prefer, his action would have fallen under a different type/description.) So it seems to me that what he intends does make a difference to what he does, and that makes a difference to the morality of what he does.
Another thought on your final paragraph, Eudemus. You say:
'surely this would not transform an impermissible action into a permissible one'.
I agree, but DDE isn't committed to this. I'd say that the change in intention would rather mean that one performed a permissible action instead of an impermissible one.
You also said:
'On this view, suppose I have (or someone else has) sufficient control over my mental states, I/they seem thereby to have control over what it is permissible for me to do.'
I don't think this follows. They have control over what you do, not what it is permissible for you to do. They can make you murder and they can make you kill without intending to kill; the former is impermissible, the latter is permissible.
I agree with Daniel. Hence Aquians's point: the species of an action is determined by its intention.
The idea of self-manipulation is interesting. In most cases of course one would cease to want to do the action in question: thus, if you switched off your intention to murder to get revenge, you'd not want to pull the trigger any more.
But if, say, you wanted to murder for revenge, and you realised that if you weren't careful you'd run your enemy over in your car, and you switched your intentions - deliberately - from an intention to murder to an intention to be totally reckless in your driving, what then?
First, in this case it would still be a wrong intended action.
Second, you'd be pressing the buttons on your intention-changing machine in order to - with the intention that - you would still be able to kill your enemy, and you want to do this out of revenge. So looking at the whole sequence, pressing the buttons to killing, it remains an action with the intention to kill.
There's a variant on this problem in Bennett The Act Itself, on the naval captain driving through ship-wreck survivors with the intention of pursuing a submarine, but then noticing his personal enemy in the water. I'll post my reply to this on my blog.
www.casuistycentral.blogspot.com
Thanks for your post, Joseph.
Do you agree with me that, in the hypothesized situation of Prinzip's firing a bullet that passes through the anarchist's hand (preventing him from detonating the bomb) and then hits the Archduke, that if Prinzip's intention were changed from being merely to save the innocents to being to kill the Archduke, he would be performing a different action?
It's Eudemus here . . .
Daniel wrote:
I'd say that the change in intention would rather mean that one performed a permissible action instead of an impermissible one.
I reply:
Yes, and that sounds no less implausible to me, given that the only difference between the actions is the intention with which they are performed. By manipulation of nothing other than my own mental states I can make it that I perform a permissible action instead of an impermissible one, while all other features of what I do remain unchanged.
Daniel also said:
They have control over what you do, not what it is permissible for you to do. They can make you murder and they can make you kill without intending to kill; the former is impermissible, the latter is permissible.
I reply:
Suppose that they are unable to change the bodily movements that I make, only the intentions with which I make them. It would seem to me that there is some very very significant sense in which they do not have control over what I do. I grant that on your way of individuating actions, they have control over what i do. On mine, they have control over some of the action-types under which what I do falls. I am claiming that (aside special cases) they do not have control over whether what I do falls under a permissible type or not. As you know I happily allow that they do have control over whether my actions have blame-relevant features.
Eudemus
Eudemus, I think your last post (as anonymous) was too strong. You surely have to admit that others have the power to make us do permissible actions rather than impermissible actions without altering our bodily movements. An example would be if someone had unloaded Prinzip's revolver. Prinzip would then have gone through the same bodily movements but wouldn't have committed murder, or even homicide, and the actions he did (if we follow you and exclude intention) are all permissible -- pointing a gun at someone, pulling a trigger, etc. Of course *I* say that he still performed the impermissible action of *attempted murder*, but that brings intention back into it, which you won't allow . . . .
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