Some philosophers (Thomson and Rachels, for instance) think that intention does not affect the rightness or wrongness of an act.
This view is quite implausible in the special case of speech acts, where the existence, type and content of a speech act is determined in part by intentions. If I enter a password into a computer by voice, I am not engaging in a speech act, even if I know there is a person near me who may think that I am speaking to them. Whether I am promising or predicting a future action depends in part on my intentions (“If you give me a paper outside of class time, I will lose it” could be a promise when said by a mean professor, but ordinarily is just a prediction). Who “you” refers to depends on the speaker’s intention to address a particular person.
And of course whether a speech act of a particular type and content is being engaged in can be quite relevant to the moral status of what one is doing. For a police officer to assert a racist proposition is wrong, but it need not be wrong for them quote a racist proposition asserted by a suspect or to enter a racist sentence by voice as a password into a suspect’s computer, and in ambiguous contexts the difference can simply be intention.
One might say that speech acts are not a counterexample to the moral irrelevance of intention thesis because here the intention determines the type of act, and the irrelevance of intention thesis only applies when we fix the type of act:
- Two acts of the same type in the same circumstances have the same moral status, even if the intentions behind them are different.
If this is right, then the moral irrelevance of intention thesis is one that typical action theorists who think intention is morally important can agree with. For they think that intention is crucial to determining the type of act—an intentional killing, for instance, being a different kind of act from a the causing of a foreseen but unintended death.
Perhaps what the advocates of the irrelevance of intention need to do is to combine the moral irrelevance of intention thesis, for acts of fixed type, with the thesis:
- Many acts other than speech acts do not depend on intention for the identification of their type.
It’s hard to criticize such a squishy thesis. But it’s worth noting that most acts the interact with another person have an expressive component, and expressive acts are like speech acts in having intention as a crucial component. One respects, disrespects, regards or disregards other people in typical interactions, and these things depend in part on intention. This is compatible with (2), but it makes the moral irrelevance of intention thesis much less powerful.
Alex, I think this is really interesting. Scanlon says something in Moral Dimensions along these lines. He thinks intentions can feature in permissibility judgements for expressive actions but not for other kinds of actions. But your observation that many of our actions beyond speech acts can be expressive seems to open the door wide open to the relevance of intention for permissibility. It might be, for example, that there is an expressive element to any human action insofar as every human action in one way or another represents (whether truly or not) to others a moral view about how to act.
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