Does It Matter What You Meant To Do?

The Danger and Necessity of Good Intentions

For the next few weeks, I’ll take on some reader questions on Tuesdays, and begin a new series for paid subscribers on Thursdays on how scarcity affects the moral life. This latter part is a question I’ve been asking a lot lately, and one I’ll begin exploring next month as part of a Templeton Foundation grant.

Mashed, Fried, Baked: The Problem of Intentions

Haden asks a question concerning the moral life, and it’s one of the big ones:

Haden, this is a deeply important question, and I’m glad you asked it. The problem with intentions is manifold, and I want to deal with them in turn, but first, a brief definition:

Intentions are those proposed directions for our actions, borne out of our will and knowledge.¹

Culturally, the whole language of “intention” when it comes to the moral life has fallen on hard times because of a focus on outcomes. When discussing physician-assisted suicide with my students, for example, the focus of their questions is on whether or not the intention of the doctor makes a difference: is there a relevant difference between withdrawing care from a dying patient and actively promoting their death, if the patient is foreseeably going to die in either scenario?

At first, the class is usually split: some have a great discomfort with equating the two situations, even if the outcome is the same, and name their dissent with reference to the obligations of physicians to do no harm, or to do good. Some will put on the brakes even harder, and raise the red flag of divine commands: we are to never willingly take a life. But for many, if at the end of the day, the patient in the bed before you is going to be dead, what does it matter what you intended? Why not just take the most effective course of action to get to an end which is happening anyway?

This is a serious question, but I want to try to answer it by using a more frivolous one: “Does it matter how badly I cook a potato?”

Photo by Rodrigo dos Reis on Unsplash

To say that there is no relevant difference between giving my children a raw potato when they ask for french fries, or watery mashed potatoes, is like saying there’s no difference between letting a patient’s death proceed naturally and hastening their death by administering lethal drugs: you get to the same place, but how we get there is very different. My children would be fed at the end of the meal, but in a very different fashion, so much so that it forces me to ask whether or not it’s the same end at all.

If, when asked for french fries, I hand them an unwashed potato, they’re getting all the nutrients they would otherwise (and probably more!), and it’ll pass through their bodies in the same kind of way. The nutritional value will be mostly the same, but the act of eating will be vastly different, as will the skills they need to eat the thing. When asked what they had for dinner, they’ll talk about it differently. Nearly everything about the two experiences will be different, though the outcome will be the same.

The point is this: outcomes are made what they are in no small part by how we get there, and part of how we get to an outcome is by the intention of the moral agent: the end we aim at by our intention. Though a patient dies in either event, the intention to let the patient die as a part of the ordinary process of death, and to hasten the patient’s death through administering drugs, makes for two different actions with the same outcome, with different ramifications in the lives of the participants. And so, intention matters here in at least two ways:

1. What we intend is related to the values we hold visible. Our values are those immovable objects in the soul which guide and direct the way we see the world, and the way we want to interact with it: to act in a certain way has to do with a certain end toward which we are acting. If I call my dog, it's because I want to get my dog's attention, in addition to some other ends: maybe to feed, maybe to scold, maybe to find out where he is. But without intention, values remain closely held ideas, the limits to potential actions but not made visible.

   **

   In the more serious case above, the intent to end a life versus the the intent to be with a patient while their life ends is the difference between saying that life has its own limits and that I know what the limits to a life are.² It is the difference (by one reading) of saying that "reliving suffering" can involve killing someone, and that "relieving suffering" can never involve ending the life of someone. Intent is how we give account for what an action is: me giving a potato to my child who asks for fries could be me being silly or encouraging them to grow in their cooking skills or me being senile, and only intent helps us to see that difference in what value I'm holding dear.

2. What we intend will affect the kind of person we become in the acting. Our actions are never value neutral, nor are they simply “things we do.” Even something banal as pumping gas is an action which we intend because of a value we hold: to go to work, to get to work with the greatest ease and efficiency, to get to work with ease and efficiency and comfort, to engage in a culture war against solar panels. As we intend and act on our intentions, we become people who are at home with our intentions: we learn that it’s okay to intend certain things in certain ways. We are, in other words, changed as we intend.

Legally, the value of intention matters: it is the difference between manslaughter and murder, the difference between an accident and an act of malice. Any attempt to shortcutting our intentions runs the risk of chaining us not only the outcome, which is largely out of our hands. There are foolish and wise ways of intending things, the difference between meaning to comfort a friend and accidentally stepping on an open wound in the process. But this only means that intention isn’t foolproof: it isn’t as if we live in a world where even the closest of intimates don’t misunderstand one another’s actions.

But none of this is a reason to abandon intention: it is all the more reason to embrace mercy, penitence, and mutual forgiveness. Acknowledging our error of intention does not mend a fence, peel a potato, or raise the dead. But it might have the possibility of uniting us in an acknowledgment of error that we might be also united in the exchange of mercy.³

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Reading: Lots of Howard Thurman. If you want three amazing books, check out The Luminous Darkness, Jesus and the Disinherited, and Disciplines of the Spirit. Thurman is a wild one, but very rich. Continuing on through Confederacy of Dunces, and I have to confess that Ignatius is starting to wear on me. Mullainathan and Shafir’s Scarcity, which is such an illuminating work, and which I’ll introduce for paid subscribers next time.

Speaking of which: my paid subscriptions are 20% off until the end of the month. The good old subscribe button will tell you more.

1. If you want to go long on this question, this is a great starting point: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intention/#IntDoi

2. Sometimes my students will say that hastening death is “playing God”, and I hate this language for many reasons. The reason I hate it today is it depicts divine activity as restricted to the act of beginning or ending life, as if what we do between those two points weren’t interesting to God as well. The very act of intervening in any act of medicine would be “playing God” by this measure.

3. In one of the most banger speeches in the New Testament, Peter tells his audience in Acts 3:11-26 that they are all united in having put Jesus to death, but likewise all united in being invited into the forgiveness of sins. It’s a real doozy and rhetorical genius.