Playing to win in order to lose

Let’s say I have a friend who needs cheering up as she has had a lot of things not go her way. I know that she is definitely a better badminton player than I. So I propose a badminton match. My goal in doing so is to have her win the game, so as to cheer her up. But when I play, I will of course be playing to win. She may notice if I am not, plus in any case her victory will be the more satisfying the better my performance.

What is going on rationally? I am trying to win in order that she may win a closely contested game. In other words, I am pursuing two logically incompatible goals in the same course of action. Yet the story makes perfect rational sense: I achieve one end by pursuing an incompatible end.

The case is interesting in multiple ways. It is a direct counterexample to the plausible thesis that it is not rational to be simultaneously pursuing each of two logically incompatible goals. It’s not the only counterexample to that thesis. A perhaps more straightforward one is where you are pursuing a disjunction between two incompatible goods, and some actions are rationally justified by being means to each good. (E.g., imagine a more straightforward case where you reason: If I win, that’ll cheer me up, and if she wins, that’ll cheer her up, so either way someone gets cheered up, so let’s play.)

The case very vividly illustrates the distinction between:

1. Instrumentally pursuing a goal, and

2. Pursuing an instrumental goal.

My pursuit of victory is instrumental to cheering up my friend, but victory is not itself instrumental to my further goals. On the contrary, victory would be incompatible with my further goal. Again, this is not the only case like that. A case I’ve discussed multiple times is of follow-through in racquet sports, where after hitting the ball or shuttle, you intentionally continue moving the racquet, because the hit will be smoother if you intend to follow-through even though the continuation of movement has no physical effect on the ball or shuttle. You are instrumentally pursuing follow-through, but the follow-through is not instrumental.

Similarly, the case also shows that it is false that every end you have you either pursue for its own sake or it is your means to something else. For neither are you pursuing victory for its own sake nor is victory a means to something else—though your pursuit of victory is a means to something else.

Given the above remarks, here is an interesting ethics question. Is it permissible to pursue the death of an innocent person in order to save that innocent person’s life? The cases are, of course, going to be weird. For instance, your best friend Alice is a master fencer, and has been unjustly sentenced to death by a tyrant. The tyrant gives you one chance to save her life: you can fence Alice for ten minutes, with you having a sharpened sword and her having a foil with a safety tip, and you must sincerely try to kill her—the tyrant can tell if you are not trying to kill. If she survives the ten minutes, she goes free. If you fence Alice, the structure of your intention is just as in my badminton case: You are trying to kill Alice in order to save her life. Alice’s death would be pursued by you, but her death is not a means nor something pursued for its own sake.

If the story is set up as above, I think the answer is that, sadly, it is wrong for you to try to kill Alice, even though that is the only way to save her life.

All that said, I still wonder a bit. In the badminton case, are you really striving for victory? Or are you striving to act as if you were striving for victory? Maybe that is the better way to describe the case. If so, then this may be a counterexample to my main thesis here.

In any case, if there is a good chance the tyrant can’t tell the difference between your trying to kill Alice and your intentionally performing the same motions that you would be performing if you were trying to kill Alice, it seems to me that it might be permissible to do the latter. This puts a lot of pressure on some thoughts about the closeness problem for Double Effect. For it seems pretty plausible to me that it would be wrong for you to intentionally perform the same motions that you would be performing if you were trying to kill Alice in order to save people other than Alice.

Closeness and Double Effect

The Principle of Double Effect (PDE) is traditionally a defense against a charge of bringing about an effect that is absolutely wrong to intentionally bring about, a defense that holds that although one foresaw the effect, one did not intend it.

One of the main difficulties for PDE is the closeness problem. Typical examples of the closeness problem are things like dropping bombs on an enemy city in order to make the civilians look dead (Bennett), blowing up the fat man in the mouth of the cave when there is no other way out (Anscombe), etc.

If we think of intentions as arrows and the wrong-to-intend act as a target, one strategy for handling closeness problems is to “broaden intentions”, so that they hit the target more easily. Thus, if you intend something “close enough” to an effect you count as intending (or something similar to intending, say accomplishing) that effect. There are interesting general theories of this (e.g., O’Brien and Koons), but I do not think any of them cover all the cases well.

Another strategy, however, is to broaden the target. This strategy keeps intention very sharp and hyperintensional, but insists that what is forbidden to intend is broader. A number of people have done that (e.g., Quinn). What I want to do in this post is to offer a way of looking at a version of this strategy.

The PDE is correlative to absolute wrongs. There aren’t that many absolute wrongs. For instance, Judaism lists only three kinds of acts as absolute wrongs, things that may not be done no matter the benefits:

• idolatry

• murder

• certain sexual sins (e.g., adultery and incest).

Now, intention enters differently into the definitions of these acts. Arguably, idolatry is very much defined by intentions. The very same physical bending of one’s midriff in the very same physical circumstances (e.g., standing facing an idol) can very easily be an act of idolatry or a back exercise, precisely depending on what one is intending by this bow. Such pairs of cases can be manufactured in the case of murder, but they will involve very odd assumptions. We can imagine a surgeon or an assassin cutting someone’s chest with the same movement, but it is in fact very unlikely that the movement will be the same. In the case of idolatry, we might say that more work is being done by intention and in the case of murder more work is being done by the physical act. And sexual wrongdoing is a very complex topic, but it is likely that intention enters in yet different ways, and differently in the case of different sexual wrongs.

We can think of an absolute prohibition as having the following structure:

1. For all x₁, ..., x_n, when U(x₁, ..., x_n), it is absolutely wrong to intentionally bring it about that I(x₁, ..., x_n).

Here, U(x₁, ..., x_n) is a contextual description which needs to obtain but need not be intended to have a wrong of the given type, and I(x₁, ..., x_n) is a contextual description which needs to be intended. For instance, for murder, prima facie U(x₁, x₂) might specify that x₁ is an act whose patient is known to be a juridically innocent person x₂, while I(x₁, x₂) will specify that, say, x₁ is the killing of x₂. It’s enough that the murderer should know that the victim is an innocent person—the murderer does not need to intend to kill them qua innocent. But the murderer does need to intend something like the killing.

Note that in ordinary speech, when we give absolute prohibitions we speak with scope ambiguity. Thus, we are apt to say things like “It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent person”, without making clear whether “intentionally” applies just to “kill” or also to “innocent person”, i.e., without making it clear what is in the U part of the prohibition and what is in the I part.

Observe also that in the case of idolatry, more work is being done by I than by U, while in the case of murder, the work done by the two parts of the structure is the same.

So, now, here is a general strategy for handling closeness. We keep intention sharp, but we broaden (i.e., logically weaken) I by shifting some things that we might have thought are in I into U, perhaps introducing “known” or “believed” operators. For instance, in the case of murder, we might say something like this:

2. When x₁ is known to be the imposition of an arrangement x₂ on the parts or aspects of an innocent person that normally and in this particular case precludes life, it is absolutely wrong to bring about x₁ with the intention that it be an imposition of arrangement x₂ on parts or aspects of reality.

And in the case of idolatry, perhaps we keep more in I, only moving the difference between God and the false god to the nonintentional portion of the prohibition:

3. When x is known to be a god other than God, it is absolutely wrong to intentionally bring it about that one worships x.

And here is an important point. How we do this—how we shuffle requirements between I and U—will differ from absolute prohibition to absolute prohibition. What we are doing is not a refinement of Double Effect, but a refinement of the (hopefully small) number of absolute prohibitions in our deontological theory. We do not need to have any general things to say across absolute prohibitions how we do this broadening of the intentional target.

There might even be further complexities. It could, for instance, be that we have role-specific absolute prohibitions, coming with other ways for aspects of the action to be apportioned between U and I.

Quinn, Double Effect and closeness

In a famous paper, Warren Quinn suggests replacing the distinction between intending evil and foreseeing evil in the Principle of Double Effect (PDE) with a distinction between directly and indirectly harmful action. For concreteness, let’s talk about the death of innocents. Classical PDE reasoning says that it’s wrong to intend the death of an innocent, but it is permissible to accept it as a side-effect for a proportionate reason. Quinn thinks that this has the implausible consequence that craniotomy is permissible: that it is permissible to crush the skull of a fetus to get it through birth canal, because one is not intending the fetus’s death, but only the reduction in head size. This is a special case of the closeness problem: intending to crush the skull is too close to death for a moral distinction, but yet technically one can intend the crushing without intending the death, and so Double Effect makes a moral distinction where there is none.

Quinn suggests that what is instead wrong is to intentionally cause an effect on an innocent that has the following two properties:

1. the effect is a harm, and

2. this harm is foreseen to result in death.

The doctor is intending to crush the fetus’s skull: that is an intended effect on the fetus. This effect is a harm, and it is foreseen to result in death. So craniotomy is ruled out. Similarly, blowing up the fat man blocking the entrance of the cave in which other spelunkers are trapped is ruled out, because even though it is possible to blow someone up without intending that they die, being blow up is a clear case of harm, and it is foreseen to lead to death.

This is clever, but I think it fails. For we can imagine that a callous doctor does not intend any effect to the fetus. All he intends is the change in arrangement of a certain set of molecules in order to facilitate their removal from the uterus. These molecules happen to be the ones that the fetus is made of. But that they make up the body of the fetus need not be relevant to the doctor’s intention. If instead there were something other than a fetus present that for health reasons needed to be removed (not at all a remote possibility: consider the body of an already deceased fetus), and the molecules there were similarly arranged, our callous doctor would take exactly the same course of action. Similarly, the spelunkers need not be intending to break up the fat man’s body, but simply to disperse a cloud of molecules.

Now, we could say that the molecules constitute or even are the body of the fetus or of the fat man, and we could say that if you intend A and you know that A is or constitutes B, then you intend B. But if you say that, then you don’t need the Quinn view to get out of craniotomy. For you can then take Fitzpatrick’s solution to the problem of closeness that crushing the skull constitutes death, and hence that the doctor intends death. In fact, though, the constitution principle is false: intention is hyperintensional, and not only doesn’t transfer along constitution lines but we can intend the identical object under one description but not under another. Anyway, the point here is that the molecule problem shows that we need some other solution to the problem of closeness to make Quinn’s story work: the Quinn solution might help with some cases, but it cannot be taken to be the solution.

Baptism of desire and closeness of description

Baptism is, in New Testament times, necessary for salvation. Scripture is clear on this. However, from the early centuries, the Church has recognized that baptism need not involve water--the martyr is baptized by blood even if she has not been baptized with water. This idea has been generalized into the notion of a baptism of desire. Someone who wants to be baptized but has been unable to receive the sacrament (e.g., because she is imprisoned apart from anybody willing to baptize her) is incorporated into the mystical body of Christ through her desire (when? at the hour of death? at the time when she desires it? I don't know).

A later development is that of an implicit desire for baptism (see this article by Cardinal Dulles). One philosophical difficulty, however, is in making precise sense of an "implicit" desire. One approach is to use counterfactuals. George implicitly desires baptism if it is the case that were George fully informed, he would desire baptism. This approach, however, seems to require Molinism to work if what we desire is in part dependent on our free choices. Besides, this suffers from many of the standard problems that come up in the case of hypothetical desire satisfaction accounts of welfare.

The better approach is to say that George implicitly desires baptism provided that he actually desires baptism but under some relevantly close other description. If memory serves, me this is the approach Msgr. Van Noort uses to account for the possibility of the salvation of the heathen in his superb Dogmatic Theology, though I do not recall his developing it with sufficient theoretical detail.

The problem now is of what counts as a "relevantly close" description. Van Noort's example, if memory serves, was of the non-Christian who concludes that there is a God and that he is a sinner, who is sorry for his sins and who desires God's means of forgiveness, trusting that God has such means. Unbeknownst to him, baptism is God's means of forgiveness, and so he desires baptism.

"God's means of forgiveness" is a sufficiently relevantly close description of baptism. But it does not seem true that any description will do. Suppose George, on a whim, desires to have happen to him the events described on page 113 of some random book he sees on a shelf but has never opened, so he has no idea of what is on page 113. That book happens to describe a baptism on page 113. Plausibly, that description doesn't count as relevantly close (though we could also imagine George having a religious experience that tells him that what is on page 113 is desirable, and then there might be relevant closeness, though the description will shift: what he really wants to have happen to him are "the events described on page 113 as recommended to him by God"). One reason, maybe the reason, that that description doesn't count as relevantly close is that no element of faith, hope or love need be involved if that is the description. It is just an accident--at least as regards his will (Providence can never be discounted)--that the object of desire is identical with baptism. As far as his will goes, he might as well have whimsically desired to have happen to him what is described on page 187, which let us suppose is a Satanic ritual.

So on this account, the problem of implicit desire for baptism is the problem of closeness of description. This is a problem that comes up in other contexts--it comes up in the context of love (do I really love Patrick if I "theoretically" love the smartest person in New York and Patrick is the smartest person in New York) and of double effect (if I intend to kill the first mammal I see in the zoo, and the first mammal I see and kill in the zoo is the zookeeper, did I intentionally kill a human being?) The problem of closeness of description is difficult in all of these contexts. But the fact that the problem comes up in other contexts suggests that we should not abandon the implicit desire account just because of this problem.

My earlier mention of faith, hope and love is suggestive. Desiring baptism under some descriptions is tied to faith, hope and love. Desiring it under others is not. Maybe it's not so much a question of the content of the description as of the spirit in which one desires. What makes a description relevantly close may be that it is a description of desire such that one is desiring under the description in faith, hope and love. It is necessary that the description in fact be a true description of baptism (or maybe something close enough?), but closeness is measured not in terms of content. Can such a solution be given to the other two closeness problems?