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Aiming and Intending
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Does it matter morally whether a bomber who kills civilians in a raid intends to do so as a means to weakening the enemy or merely foresees he will do so in his attempt to destroy a munitions factory? Does it matter morally whether a nurse who gives a terminally ill patient a lethal dose of painkiller intends to do so as a means to ending the patient's life or merely foresees she will do so in her attempt to alleviate the patient's pain? Those who answer affirmatively rest moral weight on the notion of intending to do something as a means. But giving an adequate analysis of this notion has proved difficult. In ‘Intending as a Means,’ Kwong-Loi Shun criticizes two attempts at analyzing this notion, one which he attributes to Jonathan Bennett and the other which he attributes to Thomas Nagel. Shun thinks both Bennett's and Nagel's analyses identify intending to bring about S as a means with aiming at S and offers examples which he believes show ‘an agent need not aim at what he intends to bring about.’ In making his objection to Bennett and Nagel, Shun introduces his own criterion for intending as a means.
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References
1 Shun, Kwong-Loi ‘Intending as a Means,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1985) 216–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 My concern in this paper is with the notion of intending as a means as it pertains to moral, as opposed to legal, permissibility.
3 Shun, ‘Intending as a Means,’ 217Google Scholar
4 Bennett, Jonathan ‘Morality and Consequences,’ in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 2 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1981).Google ScholarIn fact, in those lectures Bennett puts forth BC as the most promising criterion of the notion of intending as a means only to argue that even it is problematic and to conclude that we should not rest moral weight on the notion ‘intending as a means.’
5 The Doctrine of Double Effect is the principle that it sometimes matters to the permissibility of an action whether one acts with the intention of bringing about a certain harmful effect, or merely foresees that the harmful effect will come about.
6 Shun, ‘Intending as a Means,’ 218Google Scholar. Shun is basing this on Nagel's, Thomas ‘The Limits of Objectivity,’ in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1980)Google Scholar.
7 ‘Intending as a Means,’ 218
8 ‘Intending as a Means,’ 221; one might argue that the tram driver does not satisfy SC because he does not believe there are other things he can bring about by bringing about the two deaths. The transplants, for example, are too far out of his control. But perhaps the driver could be said to increase the chance of the patients’ lives being saved by bringing about the deaths. In any case, my main focus here will not be on whether SC applies to the driver but on the plausibility of SC itself.
9 Given the driver's lack of control over the transplants, it might be more precise to say he believes he can bring about a greatly increased chance of the patients’ lives being saved.
10 In ‘Intentional Action and Moral Responsibility,’ Mele and Sverdlik make the related (though somewhat more controversial) point that an agent who actively tries to prevent a consequence of her action from occurring, or who strongly desires that an effect not occur and in no way desires or tries to bring that effect about, will not be said to bring that result about intentionally even if it is foreseen (Philosophical Studies [1996], 277-8).
11 This response was suggested to me by an anonymous reviewer.
12 Bennett, Jonathan The Act Itself (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995)Google Scholar. See Chapter 11, especially footnote 29. While Bennett rejects his earlier counterfactual criterion as offering an analysis of the notion of intending as a means, he retains the test question as the best hope of prying apart a terror bomber and a strategic bomber, for example.
13 Al Mele suggested this problem and this sort of case to me.
14 I have not said anything about whether an agent who has a future directed intention to bring about S aims at doing so.
15 Bratman uses this example to argue against what he dubs ‘the Simple View.’ This is the view that an agent who A's intentionally intends to A. This example has generated a fairly extensive literature of its own. See chapter 8 of Bratman, Michael Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press 1987)Google Scholar. For defenses of the Simple View, see Adams, Fred ‘Intention and Intentional Action: The Simple View,’ Mind & Language 1 (1986) 281–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McCann, Hugh ‘Settled Objectives and Rational Constraints,’ American Philosophical Quarterly (1991) 25–36Google Scholar.
16 Bratman, Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason, 113Google Scholar
17 See chapter 8 of Bratman Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason for a defense of this constraint.
18 See Mele's, Al Springs of Action (New York: Oxford University Press 1992), 148Google Scholar, for a very similar case and for further discussion of this point.
19 I am grateful to Michael Bratman, Susan Brison, Eric Gampel, Al Mele, Judith Thomson and two anonymous referees of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.