Alice, Bob and Carl are triumvirate that unanimously votes for some legislation, for the following reasons:
Alice thinks that hard work and religion are intrinsically bad while entertainment is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation will decrease the prevalence of hard work and religion and increase that of entertainment.
Bob thinks that hard work and entertainment are intrinsically bad while religion is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation will decrease the prevalence of hard work and entertainment and increase that of religion.
Carl thinks that religion and entertainment are intrinsically bad while hard work is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation will decrease the prevalence of religion and entertainment and increase that of hard work.
If groups engage in intentional actions, it seems that passing legislation is a paradigm of such intentional action. But what is the intention behind the action here?
When I first thought about cases like this, I thought they were a strong argument against group intentional action. But then I became less sure. For we can imagine an intrapersonal version. Suppose Debbie the dictator was given a card by a trustworthy expert that she was informed contains a truth, with the expert departing at that point. Before she could read it, however, she accidentally dropped the card in a garbage can. Reaching into the garbage can, she found three cards in the expert’s handwriting, two of them being mere handwriting exercises and one being the advice card:
- Hard work and religion are intrinsically bad while entertainment is intrinsically good, and the legislation will decrease the prevalence of hard work and religion and increase that of entertainment.
- Hard work and entertainment are intrinsically bad while religion is intrinsically good, and the legislation will decrease the prevalence of hard work and entertainment and increase that of religion.
- Religion and entertainment are intrinsically bad while hard work is intrinsically good, and the legislation will decrease the prevalence of religion and entertainment and increase that of hard work.
Oddly, Debbie’s own prior views are so undecided that she just sets her credence to 1/3 for each of these propositions, and enacts the legislation. What is her intention?
But now I think there is a plausible answer: Debbie’s intention is to increase whichever one of the trio of entertainment, religion and hard work is good and decrease whichever two of them are bad.
Could we thus say that that is what the triumvirate intends? I am not sure. Nobody on the triumvirate has such an abstract intention.
So perhaps we still have an argument against group intentional action, of the form:
If there is group intentional action, the triumvirate acts intentionally.
Something only acts intentionally if it has an intention.
The triumvirate has no intention.
So, there is no group intentional action.
You can also have a situation where they vote unanimously for the legislation without all intending for the legislation to pass. I secretly oppose this legislation, and I feel completely confident that this legislation will not pass regardless of my vote, but I want to be able to tell my constituents that I voted for it. Or maybe I hold the belief that if I vote for it, my enemies in the legislature will reflexively vote against it, so I vote in its favor with the intention that my vote will bring about its failure.
ReplyDeleteThey jointly intend to enact the legislation. That the various legislators have their own peculiar motives for wanting to do this with each other doesn't make it not something done together. If I think walking is healthy but burdensome and you think it's health-neutral but pleasant, that doesn't prohibit us from taking a stroll with one another -- we might both want to only go walking if we do it together.
ReplyDeleteDL: When an individual intentionally does A, they either instrumentally intentionally do A or non-instrumentally intentionally do A. And if they instrumentally do A, there is some further intention that they have regarding A. It seems that my three legislators don't enact the legislation non-instrumentally. None of them think the legislation is non-instrumentally valuable. (There might be some legislation that is. For instance, legislation agaisnt murder is non-instrumentally valuable because it constitutes a recognition of human dignity, in addition to being instrumentally valuable by decreasing the prevalence of murder.) But if they as a group enact the legislation instrumentally, then we have a problem, in that the group does not have a further intention about the legislation.
DeleteI’m nervous that, as stated, God is a counter example to 2.
ReplyDeleteI don't think so. To "have an intention" is just a fancy way of saying that one intends something. God intends things. In fact, on my view, he intends all the goods that it is appropriate to intend as the valuable outcomes of any given action: https://www.pdcnet.org/collection/fshow?id=resphilosophica_2013_0090_0001_0001_0021&pdfname=resphilosophica_2013_0090_0001_0001_0021.pdf&file_type=pdf
DeleteMichael, why couldn’t we say that God ‘has’ divine intentions in the same way that God ‘has’ divine ideas? Isaiah 55:11b seems to get pretty close to intention-talk to me: “but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”
ReplyDelete