From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jul 04 2005 - 20:58:54 BST
Erin, Mark,
Mark said:
I remember, back in the day at UCLA, sitting in Ethics 101 and hearing about
Kant and his focus on intentions. The questions I asked at the time were
these: What does it mean to say an intention is immoral? Aren't we really
saying that we would be immoral if we ACTED upon the intention? How is Kant
or anyone else able to know another's intentions? If intentions other than
our own are unknowable, what systemic ethical mileage is achieved by
focusing on intentions at all?
Matt:
Yeah, there are problems with intentions. The Enlightenment folks tried
treating intentions like mental objects. When the “mind” as a Cartesian
Theatre started to break down, though, they had to go somewhere else, which
was towards the intentions-as-potentials that you curved it towards.
However, you’re next question about how we are supposed to know someone’s
intentions swings back to Cartesian problems. I think the first step
towards retaining some of the force of intentions in ethics, which Erin
would like to still do, is to stop treating them epistemologically. I think
we need to start treating morality in a more pedestrian manner. For
instance, think of the charge of “conspiracy.” They didn’t commit the act,
but they intended to. Perhaps, though, to be charged with conspiracy you
still need some sort of actualized events to take place to get it to stick.
But what about conspiracy to murder the president? All you need is to
express the intent to get in a whole mess of trouble. Or the different
legal versions of murder. Should what passes for manslaughter be the same
as what passes for murder one? But, on the other hand, the idea of starting
a riot. It is almost impossible to tag somebody with inciting a riot
because of the problem of intention. Because of the way our legal system is
set up, flowing from our legal philosophy, there is sharp dichotomy between
words and actions. So, somebody giving a hate-inspired speech is
horrendously difficult to pin responsibility on for even actions happening
right afterwards because the person didn’t _do_ anything and can always
argue that he didn’t intend it.
Those are just a few things off the top of my head, but I hope they show how
I think we should be thinking about them, getting away from the
epistemological problem to more practical areas. We can never “know” the
contents of other people’s “minds,” but I don’t think that should stop us
from making a moral distinction between accidental murder and pre-meditated
murder.
The first time I tangled with morality and its conditions was like you,
Mark. I enrolled in a Free Will class (though it wasn’t “some years ago”
for me). The first thing I did was actually what Pirsig always tells us to
do: figure out your answer to the problem. Well, turns out, just as I would
predict (contra Pirsig), my “answer” to the problem was no answer at all.
It was an attempt to side-step the whole problem itself. I bring it up
because I think it both illustrates the pedestrian direction I want to go
and it brings us around to thinking of intention as a _modifier_, not a
necessary condition for moral action.
The problem is simple: if we aren’t free, how can any of our actions carry
moral weight? Isn’t it a condition of moral action that we do it out of our
own free will? So, goes the line of the class, we have to solve the problem
of free will to get our ethics in line. I dodged the whole damn thing.
Through a series of (contestable and debateable) lines of inference, I said
that the _first_ condition of moral approbation isn’t free will, but causal
connection. First, you have to be connected to the action to be praised or
damned for it. The paper, of course, was filled with pedestrian examples
like the differences between dogs, insane people, people with guns to their
heads, etc. It was obvious that I could give two shits about the
metaphysical problem of free will, and my paper was designed to alleviate
everyone else’s concern with it. We should instead be focusing on how our
actual moral thinking works.
Well, I’m still quite taken with the analysis. It wasn’t long, it wasn’t
comprehensive, it wasn’t terribly conclusive, but I still do find it
suggestive. First comes causal connection. That’s what Mark is arguing for
and what Susan Neiman suggests we need to come back to terms with in our
moral and legal thinking. I think what Erin and I would still like are the
modifiers that occur afterwards and I think are still possible after
Neiman’s astute analysis. It can’t simply be causal connection because it
loses all the moral gradations we’d like to allow for. But what about the
epistemological-like problem Mark still wants: how are we supposed to know
if we’ve “witnessed a selfless act, or the act of an individual eager to get
his name in the papers?” Well, I think we’d try and decide the answer to
that question by all the usual pedestrian ways we do everyday: we look at
their behavior. But, Mark presses, “more important, does it matter?” Well,
would you rather be out in the trenches during a war with someone who’d only
watch your back if there were newspaper reporters around or with someone who
had a history of doing what was needed no matter who was looking? That
question is stacked in my favor, but I want to emphasize this pedestrian way
of looking at things. Notice, for instance, that it is entirely
utilitarian, which is entirely anti-Kantian. After Nietzsche and Freud,
we’ve learned how to redescribe any act as selfish. To act selflessly is
selfish because acting selflessly is a desire that the selfless selfishly
want to satisfy. But who would you rather have around you: people out for
selfish glory or people out for the equally selfish duty towards others?
The greatest problem of all, though, is that even good intentions don’t
amount to a good predictor of moral behavior. The more general an
intention, the less likely it is to be fulfilled. Be good to others. Oh
yeah, I intend that all the time, but all the time fail it. I think what we
need to be is more particular and attentive to contextual detail. I don’t
think there are many general things to be said about morality, intention,
free will, or any of the others. Sometimes what counts is the act of
heroism, no matter where it came from. Sometimes what counts, I still
think, is where it came from. Not all the time; it just depends. For
instance, it depends on scale. The Holocaust was on such an unprecedented
scale that intention seems to flee the scene in the face of such a high
demand for any heroism, any heroism at all. The greater the scale of the
problem, the less likely intention will matter as much as actual _acts_.
But on smaller scales, intentions would seem to matter more. The smallest
scale of all, of course, is the way we think of ourselves: what kind of
human being should we be? Michel Foucault was probably the greatest
excavator of systemic evil of our time, practically creating the category
single-handedly, but what he called “ethics” was entirely personal: “the
kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself, _rapport a soi_, which
I call ethics, and which determines how the individual is supposed to
constitute himself as a moral subject of his own action.” How should we
comport ourselves towards others? Are there better or worse ways? I think
there are and I think part of this complex of attitudes includes intentions.
Matt
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