Mistaken conscience and failure

Alice is a sniper tasked with stopping Bob the terrorist who is about to set up a bomb that will kill many. Let’s take it for granted that shooting Bob would have been permissible and even praiseworthy. Now, Alice takes all reasonable precautions but she misidentifies Carl the innocent as the terrorist and shoots Carl.

Among the infinitely many ways that we can describe Alice’s action, two are of particular moral relevance:

1. Trying to shoot Bob the terrorist.

2. Shooting an innocent person.

Alice is morally responsible for, and even praiseworthy, for performing (1). She is not responsible for (2), since she did (2) unintentionally and in non-culpable ignorance (remember that she took all reasonable precautions).

Did Alice do a morally impermissible action? It sounds like (2) is impermissible, and Alice indisputably did it. But perhaps this is too quick. For it is not clear to me that Alice’s shooting an innocent person is an action. Suppose that while Alice was sleeping, an evil tinkerer set up a pressure-sensitive switch connected to a gun pointed at David the innocent, and Alice rolled over onto it. Then Alice shot David, but we cannot say that she did anything: shooting David wasn’t an action, but a mere event. And if she didn’t do anything, she didn’t do anything impermissible.

Now, Alice’s trying to shoot Bob the terrorist identical with her shooting an innocent person. And since Alice’s trying to shoot Bob is an action, it follows that her shooting the innocent person is also an action. So it seems that Alice did do something impermissible.

But even this may not be quite right. For it may be that it is not quite right to say that (2) is impermissible. Rather, what are impermissible are actions that are non-accidental cases of shooting an innocent. And both the shooting of Carl and of David are accidental cases (and that of David isn’t even an action).

If this is right, then we can say that Alice did nothing wrong in either the case of Carl or of David.

Now, let’s switch to a harder case. Alice has a reasonable but false belief that she is pursuing a just war, but she is not. She shoots Ella the enemy combatant. Did Alice do anything morally wrong? It seems that she did: she shot Ella. But perhaps we can say something very similar to what we said above. There are two ways to describe Alice’s action;

3. Trying to shoot enemy combatant Ella in pursuit of a just war

4. Shooting enemy combatant Ella not in pursuit of a just war.

Action (1) is permissible, but unbeknownst to Alice was doomed to failure as the war was not just. Now, what is impermissible is non-accidentally shooting enemy combatants not in pursuit of a just war. But Alice did this accidentally: she reasonably thought it was a just war. So perhaps Alice is entirely off the hook for doing something morally wrong. Instead, she accidentally did something that it would be have been wrong to do non-accidentally.

Let’s switch to an even harder case. Alice has a reasonable (given her flawed upbringing and culture) but false belief that in order to save lives in the pursuit of a just war it is permissible to shoot innocent non-combatants, and she shoots Fred the innocent non-combatant. Can we say that Alice didn’t do anything wrong, but merely accidentally did something that it would have been wrong to do non-accidentally? Perhaps. Perhaps we can describe Alice’s action in two ways:

5. Trying to permissibly shoot the innocent non-combatant Fred to save lives

6. Shooting the innocent non-combatant Fred to save lives.

Action (5) is permissible, but doomed to failure. And it is impermissible to non-accidentally do (6). But now it seems that we cannot make the move of saying that Alice only accidentally did (6). For she was trying to do (6), though she was trying to do more than just what is included in (6): she was trying to do (6) permissibly.

But perhaps there is a similar move possible to the one we made before. Perhaps what is impermissible is to do (6) as such, where the “as such” includes both non-accidentality and the assumption that no further relevant factors are involved. And Alice wasn’t trying to do (6) as such: she was trying to do (6) permissibly.

If so, this would give us a nice account of what happens in cases of honestly mistaken conscience. We are intending to do something permissibly, and we fail at this. Instead we accidentally end up performing only a part of our intention. That part would be something that it would be impermissible to attempt as such, but we didn’t attempt it as such, but we intended it only qua permissible.

For this account to work, it has to be the case that if we are to act well, we should positively include permissibility among our intentions. Virtue may help here.