Standard modifies Thomistic, it’s not normative as in “this is the standard”, it’s descriptive, as in “this is how the philosophy books and articles on it generally work”.
I use that as a starting point, because it is the one which has discussion of double-effect. I privilege “double-effect” as a concept because it is the term which describes thinking through actions which have both positive and negative consequences, and also takes account of common sense things people care about like intent, means, and circumstances. Unless a person is a moral purist, one needs some account of double effect. Greater good benthamite utilitarianism would be one such account. I find such an account insufficient for guiding or analyzing action, but I’m not a priori beholden to any particular interpretation of what should be contained within an account of double-effect.
I think you misunderstood what is meant by intent. It’s not a statement one makes to oneself about what one is doing. That’d just be self-deception.
There are interesting questions about self-deception, though. As Bryan Caplan(?) recently wrote, “You never see politicians talk about ‘acceptable rates of human tragedy.’” To what extent do we play-act morality in order to generate the feeling of “clean hands?” When is that necessary? When, if ever, is it beneficial?
It seems like you’re defining “double-effect” broadly enough to say that “greater-good Benthamite utilitarianism” gives an account of it (albeit one you find unsatisfactory), but also saying that Thomistic ethics is “the one which has discussion of double-effect” (emphasis mine). This seems odd to me.
It seems to me that what Thomistic ethics distinctly has is a particular way of handling cases where an action has both positive and negative consequences. If what you’re demanding from your starting point is that it has specifically the Thomistic understanding of such cases then indeed you’d better start from Thomism, but only because you’re presupposing it. If what you’re demanding is that it is able to reason about such cases then it seems to me that literally any account of ethics will quality. I’m guessing that you’re looking for something intermediate, but I’m not sure what. E.g., maybe you want a system that has some special-cased way of dealing with such cases but don’t mind much what it is, or something. I don’t feel that I have a good grasp of what your desideratum actually is here.
If you believe I am misunderstanding what you mean by “intent”, or what Thomistic ethics means by “intent”, or something of the sort, perhaps you could clarify what you consider to be the right meaning[1] and/or be more explicit about what you think I am getting wrong and why you think that?
[1] If it’s specifically your meaning of “intent” that you think I’m getting wrong, then of course what you consider to be the right meaning is by definition the right meaning.
(I don’t think it means “a statement one makes to oneself”, and I’m not sure why you’d think I think it means that. But I do think that one can too easily fool oneself about what one intends, in part by making statements to oneself.)
Your action only makes your home safe by means of knocking him out. This is in fact a nice clean example of something that is not permitted by traditional formulations of the doctrine of double effect, at least not if knocking the intruder out is considered bad.
Flashlight clobbering produces the good effect and the bad effect. They are coterminous events, even though one is logically necessary for the other. As you say, “a safe home by means of an unconscious intruder.”
You are also right. I shouldn’t have used “Thomistic” in the first place. But because real discussion of this gets started in Thomas’ work (his account is unclear and too curt), I introduced the term, and thereby introduced a lot more confusion than I intended!
Double-effect is a broad term, not every moral philosophy has discussion of double-effect. Xunzi’s Confucianism, Kant’s Groundwork, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s Republic all of which I have read recently do not have such a discussion. Kant, I guess, kind of does, but for Kant consequences, allegedly, don’t bear on the morality of an action at all.
Of course, you and I whom I presume both hold utilitarianism in at least somewhat high regard expect ethical systems to deal with these questions in detail.
[1] I am not exactly sure what you think I think is meant by intent. Intent means goal. It is debated whether the specific actions taken by the agent should be considered part of intent or not. In the OP, I said it did, especially for epistemic reasons. I argued that specific actions chosen reveal the intent and that is why we should care about “the act itself.”
Am I making any headway here?
I would like to find our cruxes, if we in fact have any.
Like, despite our internet space having a lot antipathy towards these types of discussions. Crafting a better and clearer framework is a worthy project and one I wish to do, at least for my own benefit if not others.
Perhaps your flashlight-clobbering story is permissible according to Aquinas (though I find his account of things insufficiently precise to tell), but it is definitely not permissible according to the accounts described in the SEP entry you linked to. You are protecting your house by means of injuring the intruder, and those accounts say explicitly that the DDE says that if you’re forbidden to make bad thing X happen then you are likewise forbidden to make bad thing X happen in order to achieve good consequence Y of X. What you’re allowed to do is to do something that produces both Y and X for the sake of Y, but Y has to happen in a way that isn’t a consequence of X.
Perhaps you can claim that actually the protection of your house isn’t happening by means of injuring the intruder. (You’re just trying to scare him off and cause him some pain, and it’s just too bad that in the process you fractured his skull[1].) And maybe in that case your action is in fact permissible according to the DDE. But, once again, I say: if so, so much the worse for the DDE. The permissibility of clobbering an intruder with a flashlight and predictably injuring him should not depend on whether there’s some other mechanism by which your action might have protected your house, when you know that in fact that’s not how it’s going to play out.
[1] I’m tweaking the scenario a little in order to make the harm done something that’s more plausibly Something Not Allowed.
If your intention was just to scare him off and cause him some pain, and you weren’t at all expecting to end up fracturing his skull, then I don’t think you need the fancy double-effect stuff: you can just say that you’re not morally liable for unexpected, unpredicted consequences of your actions, provided your expectations and predictions were arrived at in good faith.
It is very possible that I’m missing something here. I have the impression that you have studied this stuff quite a lot more than I have, so if I think you’re completely wrong about something fairly basic then I should take very seriously the possibility that the error is actually mine. But I don’t see what my error might be here. Do you disagree that in your scenario you’re getting the good effect (safe home) by means of the bad one (injured intruder)? Or do you disagree that the analyses of the DDE in the SEP say you’re not allowed to do that? Or what?
I think it’s worth distinguishing “has an explicit discussion of double-effect” from “has a special way of handling double-effect cases”. As you say, standard-issue Benthamite utilitarianism has a way of dealing with such cases (i.e., just put them through the same machinery as all other cases and turn the handle) even though it doesn’t do anything special about them. Isn’t that likewise true for Aristotle, Kant, et al?
I am not an expert on either Aristotelian or Kantian ethics. But my crude model of Aristotle says: ethics is about being a person of good character, and what you should do about this sort of puzzle is to become a person of good character and then act in whatever way that leads you to act. And my crude model of Kant says: ethics is about obeying moral laws whose universal application you endorse, and what you should do about this sort of puzzle is to find moral laws whose universal application you endorse and then do what they say. Neither of these in itself resolves the puzzle, but then the same is true for Bentham’s principle of utility (you should take whichever action leads to the greatest net excess of pleasure over pain). All of them provide tools you can use to pick an answer. None of them says that you need some sort of special-case rule just for these situations. Benthamite utilitarianism arguably has the merit of giving (in principle) a more specific and well-defined answer.
As for what exactly should be considered part of a person’s “intent”, I think I prefer not to think of things in those terms; I am not convinced that the difference between “I intended to knock the intruder out and thereby protect my home” and, say, “I intended to hit the intruder in a way that would stop him further invading my home, and correctly anticipated that the way this would happen is that I would knock him out, but I didn’t intend that specific consequence” is very clear-cut, nor that it should be morally significant. I would prefer a different analysis: as you contemplate what you might do about the intruder, you anticipate various consequences and have whatever attitudes toward them you have, and I think those attitudes can be morally significant. Did you know you were going to knock him out or not? Were you hoping to hurt him, or hoping to cause him as little pain as possible? How did these predictions and attitudes influence your choice? Etc. If, say, you predicted that your action would knock him out and possibly cause lasting brain damage, and you tried to strike him in a way that would maximize the chance of unconsciousness and subject to that minimize the chance of permanent damage, then all of that is relevant, but whether we classify your action as “intended to knock him out” or “intended to protect your home” is not.
Upon further reflection my example was ill-chosen. The flashlight clobbering example doesn’t trigger double-effect considerations, because there is only one immediate effect of the action—an unconscious intruder.
I wanted to use a simple example that had two effects , but I think you rightly point out that claiming the home-owner didn’t intend to make the guy unconscious is specious sophistry. His unconsciousness and the safety of the home are two aspects of the same effect. The unconscious intruder entails the safety of the home.
If we claim they are different effects, then we would have to imagine that can be separated, but the safety of the home in the example requires the incapacitation of the intruder. There is no significant difference between claiming “I intended to knock the intruder out” and “I intended to do actions that make my home safe.”
But do notice that if we use the definition of intention from OP, which I will stick to, that our intention was to achieve a safe home by using force to incapacitate the intruder with the attitudes appropriate, no gleeful pleasure-taking in finally getting the chance to clobber someone. I think everything in your final paragraph is correct about attitude and steps taken minimize unnecessary harm.
Our intention is the goal and will (which includes attitudes) to perform the acts to achieve that goal.
If we go to the terrorist compound case, then there are multiple effects: the deaths of the civilians and the death of the terrorist. These are separable in that the death of the civilians does not cause the death of terrorists nor vice versa. The same missile launch causes both. Because they are separable effects, it is possible to intend/will one effect, without willing the other effect.
My original example of the home intruder failed to identify two separable effects, but only a logical entailment of the clobbering. In that case, the considerations are simple proportionality, not DDE. Obviously, if I knock someone unconscious, I can’t then beat him to death. I have already achieved the goal. If I shoot him, he might die. But that may still be proportional. If I shoot him and then unload two magazine rounds into him, that would be disproportional.
What the SEP article means by “the good effect is not achieved through the bad effect” is not well-defined. But generally people in the lit interpret it to be the abstraction of “No capturing civilians to perform useful medical experiments.” I might rephrase the abstraction to, “No doing an action that has bad effects, in order to do a separate action that has good effects.” (But that’s tentative).
Standard modifies Thomistic, it’s not normative as in “this is the standard”, it’s descriptive, as in “this is how the philosophy books and articles on it generally work”.
I use that as a starting point, because it is the one which has discussion of double-effect. I privilege “double-effect” as a concept because it is the term which describes thinking through actions which have both positive and negative consequences, and also takes account of common sense things people care about like intent, means, and circumstances. Unless a person is a moral purist, one needs some account of double effect. Greater good benthamite utilitarianism would be one such account. I find such an account insufficient for guiding or analyzing action, but I’m not a priori beholden to any particular interpretation of what should be contained within an account of double-effect.
I think you misunderstood what is meant by intent. It’s not a statement one makes to oneself about what one is doing. That’d just be self-deception.
There are interesting questions about self-deception, though. As Bryan Caplan(?) recently wrote, “You never see politicians talk about ‘acceptable rates of human tragedy.’” To what extent do we play-act morality in order to generate the feeling of “clean hands?” When is that necessary? When, if ever, is it beneficial?
It seems like you’re defining “double-effect” broadly enough to say that “greater-good Benthamite utilitarianism” gives an account of it (albeit one you find unsatisfactory), but also saying that Thomistic ethics is “the one which has discussion of double-effect” (emphasis mine). This seems odd to me.
It seems to me that what Thomistic ethics distinctly has is a particular way of handling cases where an action has both positive and negative consequences. If what you’re demanding from your starting point is that it has specifically the Thomistic understanding of such cases then indeed you’d better start from Thomism, but only because you’re presupposing it. If what you’re demanding is that it is able to reason about such cases then it seems to me that literally any account of ethics will quality. I’m guessing that you’re looking for something intermediate, but I’m not sure what. E.g., maybe you want a system that has some special-cased way of dealing with such cases but don’t mind much what it is, or something. I don’t feel that I have a good grasp of what your desideratum actually is here.
If you believe I am misunderstanding what you mean by “intent”, or what Thomistic ethics means by “intent”, or something of the sort, perhaps you could clarify what you consider to be the right meaning[1] and/or be more explicit about what you think I am getting wrong and why you think that?
[1] If it’s specifically your meaning of “intent” that you think I’m getting wrong, then of course what you consider to be the right meaning is by definition the right meaning.
(I don’t think it means “a statement one makes to oneself”, and I’m not sure why you’d think I think it means that. But I do think that one can too easily fool oneself about what one intends, in part by making statements to oneself.)
It is precisely this instance for which DDE was formulated: to explain why it is permitted! https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q64.A7.SC
Flashlight clobbering produces the good effect and the bad effect. They are coterminous events, even though one is logically necessary for the other. As you say, “a safe home by means of an unconscious intruder.”
You are also right. I shouldn’t have used “Thomistic” in the first place. But because real discussion of this gets started in Thomas’ work (his account is unclear and too curt), I introduced the term, and thereby introduced a lot more confusion than I intended!
Double-effect is a broad term, not every moral philosophy has discussion of double-effect. Xunzi’s Confucianism, Kant’s Groundwork, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s Republic all of which I have read recently do not have such a discussion. Kant, I guess, kind of does, but for Kant consequences, allegedly, don’t bear on the morality of an action at all.
Of course, you and I whom I presume both hold utilitarianism in at least somewhat high regard expect ethical systems to deal with these questions in detail.
[1] I am not exactly sure what you think I think is meant by intent. Intent means goal. It is debated whether the specific actions taken by the agent should be considered part of intent or not. In the OP, I said it did, especially for epistemic reasons. I argued that specific actions chosen reveal the intent and that is why we should care about “the act itself.”
Am I making any headway here?
I would like to find our cruxes, if we in fact have any.
BTW: double-effect discussion is not an RCC thing. It is used in hospital system decision-making, reformulated by professors at Harvard School of Medicine, and used as a framework by military professionals and international law courts.
Like, despite our internet space having a lot antipathy towards these types of discussions. Crafting a better and clearer framework is a worthy project and one I wish to do, at least for my own benefit if not others.
Perhaps your flashlight-clobbering story is permissible according to Aquinas (though I find his account of things insufficiently precise to tell), but it is definitely not permissible according to the accounts described in the SEP entry you linked to. You are protecting your house by means of injuring the intruder, and those accounts say explicitly that the DDE says that if you’re forbidden to make bad thing X happen then you are likewise forbidden to make bad thing X happen in order to achieve good consequence Y of X. What you’re allowed to do is to do something that produces both Y and X for the sake of Y, but Y has to happen in a way that isn’t a consequence of X.
Perhaps you can claim that actually the protection of your house isn’t happening by means of injuring the intruder. (You’re just trying to scare him off and cause him some pain, and it’s just too bad that in the process you fractured his skull[1].) And maybe in that case your action is in fact permissible according to the DDE. But, once again, I say: if so, so much the worse for the DDE. The permissibility of clobbering an intruder with a flashlight and predictably injuring him should not depend on whether there’s some other mechanism by which your action might have protected your house, when you know that in fact that’s not how it’s going to play out.
[1] I’m tweaking the scenario a little in order to make the harm done something that’s more plausibly Something Not Allowed.
If your intention was just to scare him off and cause him some pain, and you weren’t at all expecting to end up fracturing his skull, then I don’t think you need the fancy double-effect stuff: you can just say that you’re not morally liable for unexpected, unpredicted consequences of your actions, provided your expectations and predictions were arrived at in good faith.
It is very possible that I’m missing something here. I have the impression that you have studied this stuff quite a lot more than I have, so if I think you’re completely wrong about something fairly basic then I should take very seriously the possibility that the error is actually mine. But I don’t see what my error might be here. Do you disagree that in your scenario you’re getting the good effect (safe home) by means of the bad one (injured intruder)? Or do you disagree that the analyses of the DDE in the SEP say you’re not allowed to do that? Or what?
I think it’s worth distinguishing “has an explicit discussion of double-effect” from “has a special way of handling double-effect cases”. As you say, standard-issue Benthamite utilitarianism has a way of dealing with such cases (i.e., just put them through the same machinery as all other cases and turn the handle) even though it doesn’t do anything special about them. Isn’t that likewise true for Aristotle, Kant, et al?
I am not an expert on either Aristotelian or Kantian ethics. But my crude model of Aristotle says: ethics is about being a person of good character, and what you should do about this sort of puzzle is to become a person of good character and then act in whatever way that leads you to act. And my crude model of Kant says: ethics is about obeying moral laws whose universal application you endorse, and what you should do about this sort of puzzle is to find moral laws whose universal application you endorse and then do what they say. Neither of these in itself resolves the puzzle, but then the same is true for Bentham’s principle of utility (you should take whichever action leads to the greatest net excess of pleasure over pain). All of them provide tools you can use to pick an answer. None of them says that you need some sort of special-case rule just for these situations. Benthamite utilitarianism arguably has the merit of giving (in principle) a more specific and well-defined answer.
As for what exactly should be considered part of a person’s “intent”, I think I prefer not to think of things in those terms; I am not convinced that the difference between “I intended to knock the intruder out and thereby protect my home” and, say, “I intended to hit the intruder in a way that would stop him further invading my home, and correctly anticipated that the way this would happen is that I would knock him out, but I didn’t intend that specific consequence” is very clear-cut, nor that it should be morally significant. I would prefer a different analysis: as you contemplate what you might do about the intruder, you anticipate various consequences and have whatever attitudes toward them you have, and I think those attitudes can be morally significant. Did you know you were going to knock him out or not? Were you hoping to hurt him, or hoping to cause him as little pain as possible? How did these predictions and attitudes influence your choice? Etc. If, say, you predicted that your action would knock him out and possibly cause lasting brain damage, and you tried to strike him in a way that would maximize the chance of unconsciousness and subject to that minimize the chance of permanent damage, then all of that is relevant, but whether we classify your action as “intended to knock him out” or “intended to protect your home” is not.
Very helpful comment!
Upon further reflection my example was ill-chosen. The flashlight clobbering example doesn’t trigger double-effect considerations, because there is only one immediate effect of the action—an unconscious intruder.
I wanted to use a simple example that had two effects , but I think you rightly point out that claiming the home-owner didn’t intend to make the guy unconscious is specious sophistry. His unconsciousness and the safety of the home are two aspects of the same effect. The unconscious intruder entails the safety of the home.
If we claim they are different effects, then we would have to imagine that can be separated, but the safety of the home in the example requires the incapacitation of the intruder. There is no significant difference between claiming “I intended to knock the intruder out” and “I intended to do actions that make my home safe.”
But do notice that if we use the definition of intention from OP, which I will stick to, that our intention was to achieve a safe home by using force to incapacitate the intruder with the attitudes appropriate, no gleeful pleasure-taking in finally getting the chance to clobber someone. I think everything in your final paragraph is correct about attitude and steps taken minimize unnecessary harm.
Our intention is the goal and will (which includes attitudes) to perform the acts to achieve that goal.
If we go to the terrorist compound case, then there are multiple effects: the deaths of the civilians and the death of the terrorist. These are separable in that the death of the civilians does not cause the death of terrorists nor vice versa. The same missile launch causes both. Because they are separable effects, it is possible to intend/will one effect, without willing the other effect.
My original example of the home intruder failed to identify two separable effects, but only a logical entailment of the clobbering. In that case, the considerations are simple proportionality, not DDE. Obviously, if I knock someone unconscious, I can’t then beat him to death. I have already achieved the goal. If I shoot him, he might die. But that may still be proportional. If I shoot him and then unload two magazine rounds into him, that would be disproportional.
What the SEP article means by “the good effect is not achieved through the bad effect” is not well-defined. But generally people in the lit interpret it to be the abstraction of “No capturing civilians to perform useful medical experiments.” I might rephrase the abstraction to, “No doing an action that has bad effects, in order to do a separate action that has good effects.” (But that’s tentative).