Wronging others

Alice is about to inherit a large some of money and then she hears that she has a long-lost sibling with whom she’d have to share. So she hires an assassin to kill the sibling. Happily, the “assassin” turns out to be a police officer who promptly arrests Alice for attempted murder. Bob happens to be in exactly the same position and acts the same way. However, Bob actually has a long-lost sibling, while Alice has been misinformed.

Legally, it may be that Alice can get off on the grounds of the doctrine of impossible attempts. But morally speaking, Alice and Bob are both just as guilty as if they had successfully committed murder. And, further, they are equally guilty (barring some other differences between the cases).

However, Bob wronged and violated the rights of his long-lost sibling. This is true even though the assassination failed, because one is wronged and has one’s rights violated by an attempt on one’s life.

Alice did not wrong or violate the rights of any long-lost sibling since she does not have any such sibling.

It is correct, as a matter of the description of the situation, that Bob wronged a sibling, and Alice did not. But this fact does not add to the wrongfulness of Bob’s action. This suggests that the patient-centered concept of wronging someone does not actually carry much ethical weight.

Maybe.

But maybe what we should say is this: Bob’s action was indeed more wrong than Alice’s, but Alice is no less culpable than Bob.

If we say this, then we may want to push the reasoning further. Suppose Carl is subjectively in a situation like Alice and Bob, but (a) like Bob, Carl does have a long-lost sibling, and (b) the assassin is real and actually kills the sibling. I used to think that attempted murder was no less wrong than a successful one. But if we are to mae a distinction between Alice and Bob, perhaps we can make a similar distinction between Bob and Carl. What Carl did was more wrong than what Bob did, even though Bob is just as culpable as Carl.

I am not sure, though. Consider this. Imagine that all three malefactors are in their right minds, acting freely, with no excuses available. In that case, each one of them is fully culpable for each wrong they did. But the following principle seems pretty plausible:

1. If X and Y are fully culpable for wrong actions A and B, respectively, and B is more wrong than A, then Y is more culpable than X in regard to these respective actions.

It follows that if we think that Bob did something more wrong than what Alice did, then Bob is more culpable than Alice.

But maybe (1) is false. Or maybe we can say this. Carl is only culpable for an attempted murder, but isn’t actually culpable for the successful murder, because culpability only attaches to attempts. Neither option seems attractive. So I am back to where I was: Alice’s action is not less wrong than Bob, and Bob’s is no less wrong than Carl’s. The stuff about violating rights and wronging what one owes others, that’s all true, but it doesn’t actually affect the degree of wrongness.

More on attempted murder and attempted theft

In an old post, I observe the curious phenomenon that a typical attempted murder is not an attempt to murder and a typical attempted theft is not not attempt to steal. For one only attempts to do something that one intends to do. But that the killing or the taking in fact constitutes a murder or a theft is, in typical cases, irrelevant to the criminal’s ends. For instance, in typical cases of theft, if it were to turn out that the object is in fact abandoned property, the thief’s ends would be just as well served by taking the object. Hence, the thief’s end is to take the object, and whether the object is owned by someone, and hence whether the taking constitutes theft, is irrelevant to the thief’s ends, and hence is not intended.

I then attempted to come up with an account of “attempted M” for a broad spectrum of misdeeds M. The idea was that “M” is a thick and morally loaded description, such as “murder” or “theft”, while there is thin and morally unloaded description “N”, such as “killing” or “taking”. Then I suggested that:

1. An action is an attempted M if and only if the agent is trying for N in circumstances in which success at N would constitute M.

But I wasn’t happy with (1) in light of a weird counterexample of trying to shoot someone with a smart raygun that, unbeknownst to the shooter, only shoots people whom it is just to kill, and doing so in a case where the killing would in fact be unjust. This seems a clear case of attempted murder (only attempted, because the raygun recognized that the killing would be unjust and refused to fire). I said that the problem with (1) is that in these circumstances success at killing would not constitute murder, since the raygun would only succeed if the killing weren’t a case of murder.

My analysis of the counterexample needs a bit of work to spell out. The actual circumstances include two kinds of facts:

1. the facts in virtue of which killing the victim would be murder (the victim’s innocence, etc.), and

2. the fact that the raygun cannot be used to commit murder.

When we ask whether success at killing would constitute murder, we are asking a counterfactual question, and we now need to be clear on whether we keep fixed (a) and drop (b) or keep (b) fixed and drop (a). To have a counterexample to (1), we need to ensure that the right way to evaluate the counterfactual about success at killing involves fixing (b) and dropping (a). I think we can ensure this. We can presumably set things up so that the raygun refuses to commit murder at all nearby worlds, but at some nearby world the victim is an aggressor whom it is permissible to kill. But this should have been stated.

So, it does seem we have a counterexample to (1). One might attempt to fully subjectivize (1) as follows instead:

2. An action is an attempted M if and only if the agent is trying for N and believes that success at N would constitute M.

But this is mistaken. An SS officer might have convinced himself that the killing of innocents that he is attempting is not in fact a murder, but that doesn’t make it not be a murder (whether the convincing reduces culpability is a separate question).

I think what we actually want to do is keep the moral standards objective while subjectivizing everything else. Roughly, we want something like this:

3. An action is an attempted M if and only if the agent is trying for N and were the moral standards fixed as they actually are and were the rest of the circumstances as the agent believes them to be, then the success at N would constitute M.

I doubt this captures all the cases, but it makes some progress over (1) I think. I suspect that our concept of an attempted murder or an attempted theft is rather messy and gerrymandered.

Note that (3) does not fit with the legal doctrine of “impossible attempts” on which an attempt that “couldn’t succeed” doesn’t count. Thus, attempting to kill with magic spells does not legally count as attempted murder, even though (3) says it is attempted murder. In this case, I am inclined to just say that the legal doctrine is false to the phrase “attempted murder”, but there is good reason not to prosecute such impossible attempts (say, because doing so leads to prosecution of “thought crimes”). If we want to build in a doctrine of impossible attempts, we can add to (3) the claim that there is an epistemically nearby world where the circumstances other than moral standards are as the agent believes them to be, where the epistemic nearness is measured by the standards of a reasonable person rather than perhaps the agent.

Inquiring as to intentions

Thomson and other opponents of the idea that intention deeply affects moral permissibility like to point to the idea that it is silly to think that when having someone perform some task, we need to figure out what intentions they would have, when the intentions don’t affect how they will act. To use Thomson’s example, it seems silly to think that when you ask a doctor to administer a dose of morphine to a terminally ill patient where you foresee that any dose sufficient to remove the pain is also sufficient to cause death, you need to find out whether the doctor intends death by the dose or intends to play by Double Effect rules and only pursue pain-relief. As long as in both cases the doctor will give the same dose and in the same way, it doesn’t matter what they are intending when we ask them to act.

If this line of argument shows that intentions don’t affect permissibility, it proves too much. For suppose that you need a nurse to give a patient an injection of a small amount of morphine after an operation. You know there are only two nurses around. One of them is a murderer who swapped the vial of morphine in the dispensary for cyanide. Fortunately, you caught the swap, and reversed it. Unfortunately, you don’t yet know which of the two nurses is which. Suppose you know for sure that both nurses will inject the morphine equally well, but one of them will be committing attempted murder with it, thinking that it’s cyanide. It seems to me that if one is impressed by Thomson’s argument in the foreseeably lethal dose of morphine case, one should also think that in this case it doesn’t matter which nurse one chooses (as long as you know that both will do the same task the same way, and that the murderous nurse won’t swap the vial again). But in this case it is clear that it matters: one nurse would be committing attempted murder and the other wouldn’t. And we should avoid bringing it about that someone will commit attempted murder.

What about a more extreme case? Alice deeds an injection to live. Only Bob is qualified to do it. Bob, however, wants Alice dead. But Bob is mistakenly convinced that the vial of life-saving medicine is a vial of cyanide. Is it permissible to ask Bob to perform the injection?

That’s tough. Still, even if we say it’s permissible, I think it’s very plausible that it should be a last resort: if there were another to administer the injection, we should go for the other.

I am inclined to think it’s not permissible. For one’s action plan depends on Bob's attempting murder (that’s why we don’t correct his error about the vial!), and it’s wrong to intend that someone attempt murder.

Attempts at wrongdoing

It is a common intuition, especially among Christians, that attempts at immoral actions—say, attempted murder or attempted adultery—are just as bad as the completion of the actions.

But in practice the situation is rather more complicated. Suppose Samantha is about to murder Fred. She is sitting on the rooftop with her rifle, has measured the windspeed, has made the corrections to her sights, is putting Fred in her cross-hairs and is getting ready to squeeze the trigger at an opportune moment. Then suddenly a police officer comes up and grabs Samantha’s rifle before she can do anything.

Samantha has performed actions whose end was Fred’s death. She is an attempted murderer. But I think there is an immoral act that she has been saved from. For imagine three versions of how the story could end:

1. The police officer comes up and grabs her rifle at time t₁ before she squeezes the trigger.

2. At time t₁, Samantha decides not to squeeze the trigger and not commit the murder.

3. At time t₁, Samantha decides to squeeze the trigger.

In all three cases, by the time of t₁, Samantha is already an attempted murderer. But in version 2, Samantha has done at least one less bad thing than in version 3. As of t₁, Samantha still has a decision to make: to go through with the action or not. In case 3, she decides that wrongly. In case 2, she decides that rightly.

In case 1, the police officer prevents her from making that decision. It seems clear that Samantha’s moral state in case 1 is less bad in than in case 3. For in case 3, Samantha makes a morally wrong decision that has no parallel in case 1. So the police officer has not only saved Fred’s life, but he has decreased the number of wrongs done by Samantha.

Of course, timing and details matter here. Suppose that the police officer grabs Samantha’s rifle at a moment when the bullet is already traveling through the barrel, making the shot go wide. Then Samantha is an attempted murderer, but the amount of wickedness on her conscience is the same as in case 3.

So there is a moral distinction to be made between Samantha in cases 1 and 3, but the distinction isn’t the distinction between attempt and success. Rather, the issue is that a typical wrong action involves multiple acts of will, many of which may well come with the possibility of stopping. Each time one does not will to stop, while being capable of willing to stop, one does another wrong. If one is prevented from completion of the act after the last of these acts of will, then one is not better off in terms of one’s moral guilt state. (Though one is better off in terms of how much restitution one owes and similar considerations.) But if one is stopped earlier, then one is better off.

This means that counting counts of sin is tricky. Suppose Fred had decided on committing adultery with Samantha’s sister Patricia. He texted Patricia offering to meet with her in a hotel room. He is already an attempted adulterer. But then he makes a number of decisions each of which could be a stopping point. He decides to get in his car. To drive to the hotel. To enter the room. Etc. At each of these points, Fred could have stopped, I assume. But at each point he chose adultery instead. So by the time he is in the room, he has committed adultery in his will many times.

But when we count wrongs, we don’t count like that. We count the number of murders, the number of adulteries or the number of thefts—not the number of times that one could have stopped along the way. We act as if the person who murdered five is worse than the person who murdered one, even if the person who murdered the one had to drive ten times as far.

Maybe the reason we count as we do is just a pragmatic matter. We don’t know just how many times one’s will is capable of stopping one, and how much a person just acts on auto-pilot, having set a course of action.

Or maybe the responsibility for the choose-not-to-stop decisions is much lower than for the initial decision?

I don’t know.

Yet another odd double effect case

Alice has just fed a poison to Bob. Bob hasn’t died yet. He is standing, by coincidence, on the edge of a cliff, and soon will die of the poison, unless he gets an antidote. Carl is there and has a syringe full of the antidote. Carl injects Bob with the antidote, but this startles Bob and Bob falls off the cliff to his death.

Question 1: Did Alice murder Bob?

Answer: I think not. Here’s an argument. Bob dies as a side-effect of injection with the antidote. But it could just as well have been Carl who slipped and fell while injecting Bob instead of Bob falling. And surely then we shouldn’t say that Alice murdered Carl—though she did wrongfully cause his death.

Question 2: Suppose that Carl was Alice’s friend and foresaw that Bob would fall off the cliff to his death if injected with the antidote, but reasoned: “I am saving Alice from being a murderer.” Could one legitimately make this double-effect analysis? “Carl is intending that Alice not be a murderer. His means to that is giving Bob an antidote to the poison. A foreseen side-effect of Carl’s action is Bob’s death, but this side-effect is not intended either as an end or as a means. And given that Bob would have died anyway, the side-effect is not disproportionate to the good of saving Alice from being a murderer.”

Answer: I think the proportionality condition is not met. Sure, Carl makes Alice not be a murderer. But Alice is still an attempted murderer—which is just as culpable as being an actual murderer—and her malfeasance still causes Bob’s death, so she still has that death on her conscience. Granted, she isn’t a murderer any more (if I am right about Question 1), but the bad of Carl’s accidentally killing Bob seems disproportionate to the relatively minor good achieved here.

It’s interesting when it is the proportionality condition in double effect that ends up being crucial.

Attempted murder is not an attempt to murder

Alice falsely believes that killing her husband Bob would be morally right (say, because Bob committed adultery). She shoots Bob, trying to hit him in the head, but misses completely and Bob escapes. Alice has committed attempted murder. But while she attempted to kill Bob, she did not attempt to murder Bob. For it was her intention to rightfully kill Bob rather than to murder him.

Therefore, attempted murder is not an attempt to murder. Speaking very carefully, we should say that Alice committed an attempted murder but did not attempt a murder. What she attempted was a killing, a killing that would have been a murder had she succeeded.

While the point is particularly clear in the case where the attempted murderer believes the killing to be right, the point also goes through in cases where the attempted murderer knows the killing would be a murder. Suppose Chuck wants to inherit an estate from his uncle Dave. Chuck knows full well that killing Dave would be a murder, and he attempts to kill Dave to gain the estate. Unless Chuck is especially malevolent, Chuck's intention is that Dave should die rather than that Dave should wrongfully die. After all, whether Dave's death is wrongful or not does not affect Chuck's inheritance (as long as Chuck doesn't get caught, that is). Thus Chuck did not intend that Dave be murdered, but only that he be killed.

It seems likely, thus, that in typical cases of attempted murder there was no attempt at murder, but only an attempt at a killing, a killing that the malefactor did or did not know to be a murder.

The point goes through for other misdeeds. An attempt at theft is typically an attempt to take something, but not typically an attempt to thieve. An attempt to lie is typically an attempt to convince of p, but not typically an attempt to convince of a (subjective or objective) falsehood (the crooked car dealer attempts to convince you that the car runs well, and that's all--she isn't trying to convince you of a falsehood as such).

Roughly, it seems that we call an action "an attempt at M", where "M" is a morally loaded description, provided that the agent is attempting to N, where "N" is a morally unloaded description, and where the N would be an M were the agent to succeed. But that's only a rough characterization. Here's a weird case. Erin has just picked up an alien weapon and is attempting to kill Frank, an innocent person, with that weapon. Unbeknownst to Erin, the weapon is a smart raygun that only fires at people whom it is just to kill (e.g., it checks whether the killing would be a part of a just war). Then Erin has committed attempted murder, even though had her attempt to kill succeeded, she would have been engaging in a just killing rather than a murder. I don't know how to characterize attempted murder to get out of counterexamples like this. An interesting ethics project for a graduate student!

Wrongness due to self-harm

It is tempting to use harm to self as an explanation for the wrongness of various things. Kant infamously did this in trying to explain why it's wrong to be cruel to animals, namely because it dehumanizes us. And two commenters did so when I argued from the wrongness of attempted murder, in a case where the intended victim doesn't exist, to the existence of a necessary being.

Now, I agree with Socrates that every wrong action harms the agent. And I even think that sometimes the harm to self is the primary reason why an action is wrong--for instance, harm to self is the primary reason why it's wrong to use heroin. But in both the attempted murder case and Kant's case, the invocation of self-harm fails. Let's see why.

Normally when I do wrong, two main harms result to me:

1. The action constitutes me as a wrongdoer, makes me be guilty.
2. I develop morally bad habits.

(There are also further harms in many cases: other people's opinion of me is liable to go down, I may become liable to punishment in this life or thereafter, etc.)

Let's now think about the two main harms. To say that an action is wrong because it constitutes me as a wrongdoer, makes me be guilty, at best simply shifts the burden of explanation into the equally difficult question of why this action constitutes me as a wrongdoer (why does kicking a dog make one a wrongdoer while feeding it does not?). But actually it's even worse than that: it simply gets things the wrong way around, since an action constitutes me as a wrongdoer because it is wrong. So (1) won't be the explanation of the wrongness of the action. Though of course it is true that wrong actions constitute me as a wrongdoer, and I guess that multiplies the amount of wrong in any wrong action.

On the other hand, the second harm, that of developing morally bad habits, is a merely contingent matter. It would be wrong to be cruel to an animal or attempt murder even in the last moment of one's existence, when no bad habit were developed. Further, cruelty and attempted murder are wrong even if one's character is already so calloused that the action does not make it any worse. We can even imagine outlandish cases where cruelty and attempted murder end up improving one's character, say because a renowned neurosurgeon credibly promises to eradicate all one's tendencies to cruelty as soon as one kicks her neighbor's cat.