Divine speech acts

Suppose random quantum processes result in deep marks on a stone that spell out:

• Thou shalt not eat goat. – God

What would need to be true for it to be the case that God said (or wrote) that, thereby forbidding us to eat goat?

I assume that God always cooperates with creaturely causation, so divine causation is involved in the above production. However, such divine cooperation with the production of something that looks like an inscription or sounds like an utterance does not suffice to make it be the case that God said the thing. Imagine that a cult leader makes the above inscription. God is still cooperating with the cult leader’s causality, but we don’t want to attribute the inscription to God’s authorship.

One obvious answer is by analogy to our language. A part of what makes a performance a speech act of a particular sort is a certain kind of intention, e.g., that the performance be taken to be that sort of speech act. So maybe it just depends on God’s intentions. If God merely intends cooperation with quantum processes, there is no inscription, just random marks on stone that happen to look like an inscription. But if God intends the marks to be taken to be an inscription, they are an inscription.

This solution, however, is unhelpful given divine simplicity. The intention is a contingent feature of God, and on divine simplicity the contingency of contingent divine features is always grounded in some contingent arrangement of creatures. There cannot be two worlds that are exactly alike in their created aspects but where God has different intentions in the two worlds. So given divine simplicity, there has to be a characterization of what makes the marks a divine command in terms of what creation is like. (My view of divine intentions is, roughly, that God intends F in doing A iff intending F would be a good reason for God to do A. This presupposes divine omnirationality.)

Here is one possibility.

1. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act if and only if it was directly produced by God without secondary causes.

But this seems mistaken. Imagine that in the sight of a tribe, God created a stone and a stylus ex nihilo, and then miraculously moved the stylus in such a way as to inscribe the prohibition on eating goat. Then, surely, the members of the tribe upon seeing the stylus moving through the air and gouging clear text in the stone would be right to attribute the message to God. But the inscription was not directly produced by God: it was produced by means of a stylus.

Perhaps:

2. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act if and only if it was a deterministic result of something done by God without secondary causes.

This still seems a bit too restrictive. Imagine that while God used the stylus to inscribe the stone in our previous story, he nonetheless allowed for ordinary quantum randomness in the interaction between the hard stylus and the softer stone, which randomness ensured that there was a tiny probability that no inscription would result—that, say, stylus atoms would quantum tunnel through the stone atoms.

One might replace “deterministic” with “extremely probable”. But just how probable would it have to be?

Here is a different suggestion that seems to me more promising.

3. Something that looks or sounds like a speech act is a divine speech act to humans if and only if a normal human who knew all the metaphysical and physical facts about the production of this act, as well as the human social context of the production, would reasonably take it to be a divine speech act.

This suggestion allows for the possibility that a normal human would be mistaken about whether something is a divine speech act—but the mistake would then be traced back to a mistake about the relevant metaphysical, physical and social facts.

The applicability of (3) is still difficult. Take the initial example where the apparent divine prohibition on eating goat appears from quantum randomness. Would a reasonable and normal human who knew it to have appeared from quantum randomness with ordinary divine cooperation of the sort found in all creaturely causation think it to be a divine speech act? I don’t know. I don’t know that I am a reasonable and normal human, and I don’t actually know what to think about this.

Divine willing

A correspondent asked me how a simple God can choose. I've thought much about this, never quite happy with what I have to say. I am still not happy (nor is it surprising if "how God functions" is beyond us!) but the following helps me a little.

Suppose I am choosing between making a brownie or a smoothie, and end up making a smoothie. Then there are four stages with each stage causing the next:

1. Deliberation between brownie and smoothie (and any other options).

2. An internal intention for a smoothie.

3. Physical movements.

4. Output: smoothie!

At Stage 1, I am still open between brownie and smoothie. Starting with Stage 2, I am internally set on the smoothie, and at that point I become morally responsible for setting myself on the smoothie.

Now one great thing about God’s power is that God doesn’t need means: he can produce effects directly.

In particular, God will omit stage 3: he doesn’t need moving limbs (nor anything else beyond himself) to produce the smoothie in the way that I need them.

Now suppose we apply perfect being theology to God. It’s a perfection of power not to need means. But stage 3 is not the only means in the above story: stage 2 is also a means. If God really doesn’t need means, then stage 2 will also be omitted in God, and we will have the two (non-temporal) stage production:

1. Deliberation between brownie and smoothie (and infinitely many other options).

2. Output: smoothie!

In particular, nowhere in this account is there an internal intention. It’s not needed: God acts directly on the external world.

We might ask: How does God know that he intends to create a smoothie? I think it’s by direct observation of the output, stage B in the divine case. (And God’s knowledge of contingencies is extrinsically grounded in the contingencies.)

If that sounds wrong, let’s ask how we know what we intend. Sometimes we know what we intend by introspection: by observing the internal intention of stage 2. But not always. Sometimes stage 2 is not conscious—we deliberate, we presumably form an internal intention but we are not directly aware of it, and then we act. When we deliberate whether to do something minor like whether to lift the left or the right hand, sometimes the first thing we are aware of is not an internal intention or specific act of will, but the movement of the hand itself. Thus, even in us, knowledge of our intentions is sometimes read off from stage 3.

Moreover, in some cases, for us, stage 3 is not distinct from stage 4. For we have bodies that we move, and sometimes—as in the hand-lift case—the output is the same as the physical movements. In some such cases, then direct knowledge of the merges stages 3 and 4 is how we know our own intention. There may even be rare cases where stage 3 and stage 4 are distinct, but in our consciousness, the knowledge of stage 4 comes first. Suppose I am deliberating whether to press the space-bar or the enter key in response to the computer saying “Press any key”. I choose to press the space-bar. It may well be that in the order of consciousness, I first feel the impact of my finger on the keyboard, then I discern the subtler kinesthetic sensation of my finger having moved through the air, and then only then do I realize what key I intended to press. I don’t know if this is how it happens—it’s too fast to be confident of phenomenology—but it seems like an intelligible possibility.

In any case, there is nothing absurd about knowing an intention by direct observation of the output.

While writing the above, it occurred to me that perhaps we shouldn’t be all that confident that we always have a stage 2. In the cases where our knowledge of what we intend comes from knowledge of stage 3 or 4, and we do not have direct conscious access to an internal act of intention, the internal act of intention is a mere theoretical posit. Perhaps that theoretical posit is correct, but perhaps it is not. If it is not, then one can intend a specific output without having an internal specified act of intention.

Against group intentional action

Alice, Bob and Carl are triumvirate that unanimously votes for some legislation, for the following reasons:

1. Alice thinks that hard work and religion are intrinsically bad while entertainment is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation will decrease the prevalence of hard work and religion and increase that of entertainment.

2. Bob thinks that hard work and entertainment are intrinsically bad while religion is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation will decrease the prevalence of hard work and entertainment and increase that of religion.

3. Carl thinks that religion and entertainment are intrinsically bad while hard work is intrinsically good, and believes the legislation will decrease the prevalence of religion and entertainment and increase that of hard work.

If groups engage in intentional actions, it seems that passing legislation is a paradigm of such intentional action. But what is the intention behind the action here?

When I first thought about cases like this, I thought they were a strong argument against group intentional action. But then I became less sure. For we can imagine an intrapersonal version. Suppose Debbie the dictator was given a card by a trustworthy expert that she was informed contains a truth, with the expert departing at that point. Before she could read it, however, she accidentally dropped the card in a garbage can. Reaching into the garbage can, she found three cards in the expert’s handwriting, two of them being mere handwriting exercises and one being the advice card:

1. Hard work and religion are intrinsically bad while entertainment is intrinsically good, and the legislation will decrease the prevalence of hard work and religion and increase that of entertainment.
2. Hard work and entertainment are intrinsically bad while religion is intrinsically good, and the legislation will decrease the prevalence of hard work and entertainment and increase that of religion.
3. Religion and entertainment are intrinsically bad while hard work is intrinsically good, and the legislation will decrease the prevalence of religion and entertainment and increase that of hard work.

Oddly, Debbie’s own prior views are so undecided that she just sets her credence to 1/3 for each of these propositions, and enacts the legislation. What is her intention?

But now I think there is a plausible answer: Debbie’s intention is to increase whichever one of the trio of entertainment, religion and hard work is good and decrease whichever two of them are bad.

Could we thus say that that is what the triumvirate intends? I am not sure. Nobody on the triumvirate has such an abstract intention.

So perhaps we still have an argument against group intentional action, of the form:

1. If there is group intentional action, the triumvirate acts intentionally.

2. Something only acts intentionally if it has an intention.

3. The triumvirate has no intention.

4. So, there is no group intentional action.

Fixing an earlier regress argument about intentions

In an earlier post, I generated a regress from:

1. If you are responsible for x, then x is an outcome of an intentional act with an intention that you are responsible for,

where both responsibility and outcomehood are partial. But I am now sceptical of 1. It is plausible when applied to things that aren’t actions, but there is little reason to think an action I am responsible for has to be the outcome of another action of mine.

Maybe what I should say is this:

2. Any action that I responsible for has an intention I am responsible for.

3. Anything that isn’t an action that I am responsible for is an outcome of an action I am responsible for.

This still seems to generate a regress or circle. By (3), if I am responsible for anything, I am responsible for some action, say A₁. This will have an intention I₁ that I am responsible for. Now either I₁ is itself an action A₂ or an outcome of some action A₂ that I am responsible for. In both cases, I am responsible for A₂. And then A₂ will have an intention I₂ that I am responsible for. And so on.

How can we arrest this? I think there are exactly two ways out:

4. Some action A_n is identical with its intention I_n.

5. Some action A_n has its own intention I_n as an outcome of itself.

More on artifacts and intentions

Yesterday, I showed that an artifact’s function wasn’t defined by the maker’s intention that it be used for that function. For instance, a historical weapons recreationist might make a halberd without intending that it kill anyone, even though killing is the function of the halberd, and we might make a nuclear weapon without intending that it kill, but only for deterrent—and yet, once again, killing is the function of the weapon.

Here is an account that occurred to me this morning:

1. An artifact x has a function F iff x was intentionally made or designed in order to be capable of fulfilling F, and the maker and designer were sufficiently successful.

This takes care of my two above examples. The recreated halberd and the deterrent weapon are both made not to kill, but to be capable of killing.

There is a lot of vagueness in the “sufficiently successful”, and it’s meant to match the vagueness of our usage of artifactual vocabulary. There really is vagueness in how sharp something made to serve the functions of a knife has to be to be a knife. If it’s too far from sharpness, it’s at best a knife blank.

Here is my best attempt at a counterexample to (1). You hire a blacksmith to make a letter opener, but you ask for it to be sharp enough that it could be used as a scalpel (bad idea!). The resulting letter opener is made to be capable of the functions of a scalpel, but perhaps it isn’t a scalpel. Here I don’t know what to say. I think the defender of (1) could bite the bullet and say that you hired a blacksmith to make a dual function letter-opener / scalpel.

Artifacts and intentions

Artifacts have defining functions. It is tempting to think of these functions as coming from their maker’s intention that they be used for those functions. But that is actually incorrect. Modern-day blacksmiths routinely make weapons of war such as swords and halberds (cf. the Forged with Fire TV show), with no intention that the weapons ever be used against anyone. Yet these are real weapons, not mere props. Similarly, it is quite possible to make a nuclear bomb with the intention that it deter war and never explode.

Maybe we could say this: There are two ways in which an artifact can be connected with its function F:

1. By being made to fulfill F

2. By being made to be physically just like something that is would be made to fulfill F.

But that’s not correct. Suppose that upon looking at a fork, I come to realize that something physically indistinguishable from it would make a great backscratcher. I then go to a forge and make a backscratcher that is just like the fork. What I made isn’t a fork but a backscratcher, even though I made it to be physically just like something that would be made to fulfill the functions of a fork.

One can try various other similar definitions. Maybe an artifact with function F is something made such that it could be used for F? But that fails, too. I could order a fork from a blacksmith and explain the desired shape of fork I want by saying that it could be comfortably used as a backscratcher—but it’ll still be a fork.

It now seems very appealing to say:

3. A smith makes a fork if and only if the smith makes something with the intention that it be a fork and is sufficiently successful in the design and execution.

But of course this can’t define what a fork is: there is too much circularity here.

I also find it appealing to say that really there are no forks, just particles arranged forkwise. But that doesn’t solve the problem. For we still want to know what it is for the particles to be arranged forkwise rather than backscratcherwise, and this seems to depend on something about how the item is thought of or what it is intended for. Maybe it makes the problem seem less urgent, though?

Logically complex intentions

In a paper that was very important to me when I wrote it, I argue that the Principle of Double Effect should deal with accomplishment rather than intention. In particular, I consider cases of logically complex intentions: “I am a peanut farmer and I hate people with severe peanut allergies…. I secretly slip peanuts into Jones’ food in order that she should die if she has a severe peanut allergies. I do not intend Jones’ death—I only intend the logically complex state of Jones dying if she has a severe peanut allergy.” I then say that what is wrong with this action is that if Jones has an allergy, then I have accomplished her death, though I did not intend her death. What was wrong with my action is that my plan of action was open to a possibility that included my accomplishing her death.

But now consider a different case. A killer robot is loose in the building and all the doors are locked. The robot will stop precisely when it kills someone: it has a gun with practically unlimited ammunition and a kill detector that turns it off when it kills someone. It’s heading for Bob’s office, and Alice bravely runs in front of it to save his life. And my intuition is that Alice did not commit suicide. Yet it seems that Alice intended her death as a means to saving Bob’s life.

But perhaps it is not right to say that you intended your death at all. Instead, it seems plausible that Alice intention is:

1. If the robot will kill someone, it will kill Alice.

An additional reason to think that (1) is a better interpretation of Alice’s intentions than just her unconditionally intending to die is that if the robot breaks down before killing Alice, we wouldn’t say that Alice’s action failed. Rather, we would say that it was made moot.

But according to what I say in the accomplishment paper, if in fact the robot does not break down, then Alice accomplishes her own death. And that’s wrong. (I take it that suicide is wrong.)

Perhaps what we want to say is this. In conditional intention cases, when one intends:

2. If p, then q

and p happens and one’s action is successful, then what one has contrastively accomplished is:

3. its being the case that p and q rather than p and not q.

To contrastively accomplish A rather than B is not the same as to accomplish A simply. And there is nothing evil about contrastively accomplishing its being the case that the robot kills someone and kills Alice rather than the robot killing someone and not killing Alice. On the other hand, if we apply this analysis to the peanut allergy case, what the crazy peanut farmer contrastively accomplishes is:

4. Jones having a peanut allergy and dying rather than having a peanut allergy and not dying.

And this is an evil thing to contrastively accomplish. Roughly, it is evil to accomplish A rather than B just in case A is not insignificantly more evil than B.

But what about a variant case? The robot is so programmed that it stops as soon as someone in the building dies. The robot is heading for Bob and it’s too late for Alice to jump in front of it. So instead Alice shoots herself. Can’t we say that she shot herself rather than have Bob die, and the contrastive accomplishment of her death rather than Bob’s is laudable? I don’t think so. For her contrastive accomplishment was accomplished by simply accomplishing her death, which while in a sense brave, was a suicide and hence wrong.

A difficult but important task someone should do: Work out the logic of accomplishment and contrastive accomplishment for logically complex intentions.

Intentions and reasons

An interesting question is whether one’s intentions in an action supervene on facts about one’s reasons and desires in the action. I don’t know the answer, but I also don’t know of a good way to account for intentions in terms of reasons and desires.

Judith Jarvis Thomson suggests this:

• for a person to X, intending an event E, is for him to X because he thinks his doing so will cause E, and he wants E.

This is false. The standard (at least for me) method of generating counterexamples to conjunctive principles is to find cases where the conjuncts are coincidentally satisfied in ways other than what one had in mind in formulating the principles.

So, here is the counterexample. I am alone in an eccentric friend’s house, and I want to take an ibuprofen. I look in the medicine cabinet, and I see a jar full of pills of different sizes, colors and shapes all jumbled together. I call up my friend asking where the ibuprofen is. My friend says: “Ah, ibuprofen. That’s the pill that will hurt your throat when you swallow them.” I look in the jar, and indeed there is exactly one pill that is large enough to hurt the throat upon swallowing. I swallow the pill because I think doing this will hurt my throat. But I don’t intend my throat to get hurt. So far I don’t have a counterexample: I have failed to satisfy the “he wants E” conjunct. But now just throw that conjunct into the story in a motivationally irrelevant way. Perhaps I want my throat to be hurt, due to my being a masochist. But I promised my accountability partner that I would refrain from intentionally hurting myself, and I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping this promise, so I don’t intend to get hurt.

One could add to Thomson’s conditions:

• and his wanting E is a cause of his action.

But we can just multiply the the coincidental satisfaction of conditions. For instance, perhaps my psychiatrist informed me that my masochistic desires are caused by headaches, and so if I get rid of my headache, my masochistic desires will disappear. Thus, my desire to hurt my throat is a cause of my relieving my headache. But I don’t relieve my headache in order to hurt my throat.

All this makes me think that it’s not unlikely that having a particular intention in an action is a primitive datum about the action: perhaps actions are teleological entities, and the intentions are their telê.

Divine speech acts and classical theism

Here is a question I have wondered about and have never heard or seen much discussion of:

1. What does it mean to say that God engaged in some speech act, such as commanding or asserting?

The more anthropomorphic one’s theism, the easier the question can be answered, because the closer the analogy between divine speech acts and ours. But the setting that interests me here is classical theism (both because it’s the truth theory of God and because it’s more challenging). In particular, let’s take on board divine immutability and simplicity.

Let’s think about the human case first. We’re going to have to pay close attention to such factors as intention and context. Thus, the same words in the same tone are an assertion in an ordinary conversation but not an assertion when spoken on a stage. The same handwritten sentence can be a command in one case and in another can be a handwriting exercise. Theorists will differ as to the balance between intention and context in the correct theory. But I think it is easy to argue that an important part of the distinction between assertion and play-acting or between command and handwriting exercise will be constituted by intentions. For instance, it is not simply being on a stage that makes one’s words not be assertions. The actor on stage can yell “Fire!” upon seeing the flames licking the back of the room, and that will be an assertion—even if that word happens to be exactly what the script calls for at this time. (It may be an assertion that is not taken up, though, much as an assertion might not be heard in a loud rooom.)

Very roughly speaking, to engage in a speech act of kind K, one has to form the intention to be taken by one’s audience as engaging in a speech act of kind K.

Now, there are natural rock formations that look like faces. Suppose that somewhere in the solar system there is a natural rock formation that spells out “God exists”, and one day an English speaking astronaut comes across it. Is it an assertion by God?

It is certainly something made by God. For God made everything other than himself. But did God make it with the intention that it be taken as an assertion? Or is it just a formation of rocks intended for some other purpose than to be taken as an assertion? (Presumably, it’s not a handwriting exercise, since God doesn’t need to practice being already perfect.)

On more anthropomorphic theisms, there is no special problem here about the God case. God can form the intention to make an assertion just as a human being can or, just as a human being, he can fail to form that intention. But if divine simplicity is correct, then there are no contingent intrinsic divine properties. There is just God. Any contingency is on the side of creation. In particular, there cannot be two worlds that are exactly alike except with respect to divine intentions intrinsic to God. Divine intentions must supervene on creation and on necessary truths about God. But what contingent facts about creation and necessary truths about God can make it be that the rock formation is or is not a divine assertion?

One might try to make use of divine reasons. I have argued that divine simplicity entails divine omnirationality: whenever God does something, he does it for all the good reasons there are for doing it, rather than choosing which of the good reasons to act on. Now, suppose that in fact the astronaut’s faith in God is strengthened by the rock formation. That’s a good thing. Goods provide reasons. So, God has a good reason to make the rock formation in order to strengthen the astronaut’s faith. But the astronaut’s faith is presumably strengthened by her taking the formation as a divine assertion. So, God has a reason to have the astronaut take the formation as a divine assertion. And, thus, by omnirationality, God is acting on that reason, and the rock formation is an assertion.

But take a variant case. Our astronaut lands on a planet with a rock formation that says “Kneel!” But, now, kneeling is both good and bad for the astronaut. Perhaps it is spiritually good but physically bad, because our astronaut has bad knees. The astronaut takes it as a command. That’s a good and a bad thing: she kneels, hurts her knees, and the mission is in jeopardy. But she spent a few minutes in prayer, and that was good for her. And, in fact, in a complex world there will generally be pluses and minuses of anything. Even in the case of the “God exists!” rock formation, there is some benefit to believing without such overt signs, perhaps a greater maturity of faith.

We could try to make the intention condition work something like this: God counts as intending that something assertion-like or command-like (structured symbolically in the right way) be taken as an assertion or command provided it’s good in some way that it be taken as such. But that seems overbroad. Or we could say it’s an assertion or command provided it’s good on balance that it be taken as such. But when we are dealing with incommensurable values, there may be no “on balance”. These objections aren’t fatal: but they point to a need to do serious philosophical work here.

Here is a possible different solution. We don’t need to advert to speaker intentions in every case to figure out whether something is a speech act of the right sort. When yelled from the stage, we may need to know whether “Fire!” is intended as a warning or as part of the script. But when yelled from the seats, there is no reasonable doubt. There are contexts where no reasonable person in the relevant audience would fail to take something as a certain kind of speech act. You come across the Summa Theologica in a heath. Of course, it’s a speech act, of whatever sort a theological discourse is (a series of arguments and assertions). Every reasonable person who knew the language (that’s perhaps the relevant audience component) would take it as such.

Perhaps we can now say this:

2. In contexts where every reasonable person in the relevant audience who knew the relevant context sufficiently well would take something to be a divine speech act of a certain kind, it is a primary case of a divine speech act of that kind.

For primary divine speech acts, we need some kind of reasonable luminosity: they need to be the sort of thing that one couldn’t reasonably doubt to be divine speech acts if one knew the relevant circumstances. Perhaps God builds into our nature an ability to recognize divine speech acts.

And then we have derivative cases of divine speech acts, which are when the initial audience is enlarged by means of the members of the initial audience becoming heralds of the message, and the process continues. When the herald is being faithful to the message, what the herald says counts as a speech act of the original speaker. So, the heralds pass on the word of God. And since the heralds are human, their intentions are relevant and raise no deep ontological concerns.

This story would lead to a rather restrictive view of divine speech acts. The rock formations, in a vast universe, could be reasonably doubted. So they aren’t primary divine speech acts. The primary divine speech acts may, rather, be more like cases of prophecy, where God makes it reasonably impossible for the prophet to doubt what kind of a speech act it is.

I am not very happy with any of the stories above. This is just a vague and inchoate start. I don’t really want to finish off this task. It would make a really interesting philosophical theology dissertation, though.

Conditional vs. means-limited intentions

This morning, I set out to walk to the Philosophy Department. If asked my intention, I might have said that it was to reach the Department. And in actual fact I did reach it. Suppose, however, that as I was walking, my wife phoned me to inform me of a serious family emergency that required me to turn back, and that I did in fact turn back.

Here’s a puzzle. The family emergency in this (fortunately) hypothetical scenario seems to have frustrated my intention to reach the Department. On the other hand, surely I did not intend to reach the Department no matter what. That would have been quite wicked (imagine that I could only reach the Department by murdering someone). If I did not intend to reach the Department no matter what, it seems that my intention was conditional, such as to reach the Department barring the unforeseen. But the unforeseen happened, so my conditional intention wasn’t frustrated—it was mooted. If I intend to fail a student if he doesn’t turn in his homework, and he turns in his homework, my intention is not frustrated. So my intention was frustrated and not frustrated, it seems.

Perhaps rather than my intention being frustrated, it was my desire to reach the Department that was frustrated. But that need not be the case. Suppose, contrary to fact, that I was dreading my logic class today and would have appreciated any good excuse to bail on it. Then either I had no desire to reach the Department or my desire was conditional again: to reach the Department unless I can get out of my logic class. In neither case was my desire frustrated.

Let me try a different solution. I intended to reach the Department by morally licit means. The phone call made it impossible for me to reach the Department by morally licit means—reaching the Department would have required me to neglect my family. My intention wasn’t relevantly conditional, but included a stipulation as to the means. Thus my intention was frustrated when it became impossible for me to reach the Department by morally licit means.

The above suggests that our intentions should generally be thus limited in respect of means, unless the means are explicitly specified all the way down (and they probably never are). Otherwise, our intention wickedly commits us to wicked courses of action in some possible circumstances. Of course, the limitation, just as the intention itself, will typically be implicit.

More on competitive sports and other games

I wonder how psychologically feasible it would be to generally engage in competitive sports or other games with one's intention being that the one's competitor win against as strong an opposition as possible. This is not all that difficult to achieve when competing with one's child: one may want the child to beat one, and to beat one when one is playing at one's best. The psychological difficulty is that one's intention that one's competitor win may well weaken one's playing. If one could play excellently with such an intention, wouldn't it be a laudable way to play?

To be as strong an opposition as possible, it would help to have the intention to win. I wonder if it would be possible to have two clearly logically incompatible ends at the same time: (a) that my competitor win against as strong an opposition as possible and (b) that I win. This isn't as problematic as intending p and not p at the same time. Maybe you can't do that, because any action that furthers not p impedes p. But actions that promote (b) can promote (a) by making the opposition as strong as possible, and vice versa. So it might be that incompatible ends like (a) and (b) can be both held together, though it is uncomfortable to do so.

Causation in the right way and actualization of causal powers

Consider William James' murderous mountaineer. His buddy is hanging on a rope that our antihero is holding, and our antihero decides to murder him by letting go. The thought of what he's about to do makes him so nervous that his hands start shaking and let go of the rope. The intention, and by extension the reasons behind the intention, caused the murderous mountaineer to let go, just as he intended to. But although the reasons and the intention cause the letting go, he didn't intentionally let go and his letting go wasn't done for a reason, though it was because of a reason.

This is a famous example where we need the idea of "causation in the right way". Not every intention that causes an action according with intention causes it in the right way, in the way that makes the action intentional. The problem of having to add a "non-aberrancy" or "in the right way" condition plagues a lot of philosophy. A usual thought about such cases is that there is a messy story, beyond our ability to specify all the details. Perhaps that story includes various messy exceptions for various kinds of accidentality, or perhaps it has fairly onerous conditions on the details of the causal chain.

But what if in some--it's too much to hope that in all--cases instead of a long and messy story, we just have a bit of irreducible (or relatively so?) metaphysics. It's just a metaphysical feature of some instances of causation that they are intrinsically non-aberrant.

How could that be? Think of a causal power for an effect as something that can be actualized partially or completely. When a causal power is actualized completely, that causal power automatically causes its actualization, and everything constitutive of that actualization, in the right way. When it fails to actualize completely, it falls short of causing in the right way, though perhaps we can say something more (here's one place serious work would need to be done) about the degree of aberrancy in its partial causes.

It's a medieval dictum that causes contain their effects. But that needs qualification. Causes in a sense contain their proper effects. They contain those proper effects as telê, and then some aspect of the effect--perhaps with cooperation or thwarting from other causes--just is an actualization of the cause with that telos. When all goes well, the whole of the teleologically specified effect is an actualization of the cause, but in aberrant cases, very little is. For instance, in the case of the murderous mountaineer, thinking about how to drop the buddy is an actualization of the intention, but the dropping of the rope is not. There is no further messy reductive story. The one event just is an actualization of the causal power and the other just is not.

But there is something incredible about this story. Sam leaves money for her grandchildren invested wisely in some investments locked up for twenty years after her death. All goes according to plan: the investments rise in value and eventually enrich her grandchildren. But how could the enriching of her grandchildren twenty years after her death somehow have as an irreducible feature its being the actualization of her intention? (Quick thought: It'd be very hard to get a presentist story about this. But presentism is false.) By the time the enrichment happens, her intention is long past. (Does it matter that it's long past? Probably not, but the story is more vivid then.)

There are, I think, three things I can say about the incredulity objection. First, I could bite the bullet. Her intention in some sense lives on in the effects. Yes, these intended effects in the future really just are actualizations of her intention. That's just a metaphysical feature of them. This isn't all that crazy if one believes in the essentiality of origins. For if one believes in the essentiality of origins, then the enrichment's having this cause is an essential feature of the enrichment. Somehow this makes it less surprising if in fact the enrichment is an actualization (or part of the actualization) of the intention. We could even think that the very being of an effect is its having-been-caused.

Second, we could say that when x causes y in the right way, then being-an-actualization-of-x is an intrinsic feature of y, a feature that is causally involved in everything y does, and so when y causes z in the right way, z has the intrinsic feature of being-an-actualization-of-y, and we can go back down the chain to x. Perhaps this is what Aquinas means by per se ordered causal series.

Third, I could go the road of caution. I could say that this metaphysical "actualized by x" feature only is found in immediate effects. Thus, we would in the first instance only have a story about causation-in-the-right way for immediate effects. And then we would use this feature to help construct messier account of causation in the right way for remote effects.

All of this, though, requires a fairly non-reductive metaphysics of human beings.

Choices and intentions

Start with this situation:

• Six innocents are drowning: A, B, C, D, E, F.
• One innocent is in no antecedent danger: G.
• Sam, who is truthful but evil, tells me that if I do anything that kills G, he will rescue D, E and F, and only then.

I cannot reach the innocents except by activing remote drones with rescue equipment. There are two buttons in front of me that activate the drones.

• If I press the green button, A, B and C are rescued.
• If I press the red button, A, B and C are rescued and G is killed along the way (maybe G is standing so close to the relevant drone that he will be killed by the drone when it launches; his death is not a means to the rescue of A, B and C, however).

So, if I press the green button, then four (A, B, C, G) live and three die (D, E, F). If I press red button, then six (A, B, C, D, E and F) live and one dies (G).

Suppose first that my choice is between the green button and nothing. (Maybe the red button is covered beneath an unbreakable dome.) Then I should press the green button.

Suppose instead that my choice is between the red button and nothing. Then I should press the red button. My intention would be to rescue A, B and C. The death of G is an unintended side-effect of rescuing A, B and C. The rescue of D, E and F by Sam is welcome but not intended (since if it were intended, then the death of G would have to be intended as a means thereto, and it is wrong to intend G's death).

But now suppose that my choice is between the green button, the red button and nothing. The red button has the best consequences, because two more innocents live. But if I choose the red button over the green button because of this fact, then I am intending the rescue of D, E and F, and therefore I am intending the means to that rescue, namely G's death. To make the point clearer, suppose that the way things work, when I press the green button, a signal gets sent to the drone to go rescue A, B and C, and when I press the red button, that happens and an additional signal is sent to the drone to activate a powerful booster that kills G. To choose the red over the green button seems to involve a choice to activate the booster, since otherwise there is no reason for that choice. Imagine, after all, that one could directly control the two signals without pressing the buttons. It would be wrong to send both the launch signal and the booster signal if one was capable of only sending the launch signal.

So it seems that although the red button is one that it is permissible to press in a binary choice between pressing it and doing nothing, it is not permissible to press the red button in preference to pressing the green button, even though pressing the red button has better consequences than pressing the green button.

If this line of reasoning is correct then to figure out what someone intends one needs to look not just at what they chose, but also at what alternative they chose it against. This fits neatly with my view of our choice and responsibility as essentially contrastive.

But I am not so confident of this line of reasoning.

Reasons, intentions and explanation

The following seems prima facie quite plausible:

1. You intend that p in doing A if and only if it is a part of your reason for doing A that p might result from your doing A.

Until just about now, I was thinking that there were decisive counterexamples to this principle. Consider for instance the case of the strategic bomber who does not intend there to be civilian casualties, but chooses the time of her bombing raid in such a way as to maximize the availability of hospital space for the civilian wounded. Then that her action might result in civilian casualties is a part of her reason for performing the action at the time at which she performs it. But the time of an action is a part of what identifies the action. So that her action might result in civilian casualties is a part of her reason for performing the action she does. Yet she plainly does not intend the civilian casualties.

If this example does not convince simply because one thinks that strategic bombers really doe intend civilian casualties, consider a different example. I choose to undergo a simple operation at an excellent hospital, rather than a low-end hospital, because the operation might result in complications that are better treated at the excellent hospital. It seems to be a part of the my reasons for acting as I do—having the operation at that hospital—that the operation may result in complications.

Or so I thought. But now I think I was confused, and these counterexamples to (1) don't work. This doesn't show that (1) holds. But it would be really nice if (1) did hold—we would then have a neat reduction of intentions to reasons.

Here's why I was confused. Take the hospital example, where things are clearer. Let A be the action of asking the surgeon at the excellent hospital to perform the operation. Then the objection to (1) goes as follows: it is a part of my reason for performing A (specifically, the "at the excellent hospital" part of A) that complications may result from A. But I think not.

The problem is related to a mistake that is sometimes made in explanation, which is to make it insufficiently general. Here is a case of that. "Why did Smith eat chocolate ice cream?" "Because the choice was between chocolate and mint, and he slightly preferred chocolate." While we speak in this way, that is in fact not the right way to speak. As Wes Salmon said, irrelevance is harmless in arguments but fatal in explanations. The "he slightly preferred chocolate" implicitly contains an irrelevant claim. That he slightly preferred chocolate is equivalent to the conjunction of two claims: "he at least slightly preferred chocolate" and "he at most slightly preferred chocolate". Of these two claims, the second does nothing for the explanation of why Smith ate chocolate ice cream. It is quite irrelevant. It is only the first claim that enters into the explanation. Thus the correct explanation is that the choice was between chocolate and mint, and he at least slightly preferred chocolate. This explanation leaves out the irrelevant fact that he at most slightly preferred chocolate, a fact that makes the explanandum more puzzling if anything (explanation removes puzzlement).

We can now formulate my reason for choosing to have the operation in the better hospital more precisely. Let's say the less good hospital is the Sextus Hospital and the better is the Harvey Hospital. Then my reason for opting for the Harvey Hospital should be put as follows:

2. The chance of complications is no greater at Harvey than at Sextus, and the chance of poorly treated complications is greater at Sextus than at Harvey.

The fact that there still is a chance of complications if I have the operation at Harvey is not, then, a part of my reason for choosing to have the operation at Harvey—it is rather like the fact that the man in my example at most slightly prefers chocolate—and hence I do not have a counterexample to (1).

Now go back to the strategic bomber case. The correct way to render the bomber's reason for choosing the time of the raid is:

3. The number of civilian casualties at this time is no greater than at the other time, but the number of casualties receiving inadequate hospital treatment is smaller than at the other time.

Again, that the bombing results in the casualties is not among the reasons.

Now, since in fact it is unlikely that the bomber actually thinks the complex thought (3), we shouldn't identify reasons with actual thinkings of the listed contents.

In an earlier post I said that intentions supervene on reasons, and that an important task is to give an account of how reasons determine intentions. I currently have no counterexample to the claim that (1) is such an account. But I am also very suspicious in general of attempts at necessary and sufficient conditions, so I am sceptical that I've succeeded in (1).

It occurs to me that Kamm's triple effect cases might be counterexamples to (1), depending on how one understands reasons for action. I read Kamm's cases as cases of defeater-defeaters. If we don't count a defeater to a defeater as a reason-in-favor, then (1) survives Kamm's cases.

A sufficient condition for not intending

Suppose that I do A, foreseeing that p.  Here is a sufficient condition for my action not to have p among its intentions:

• All my active reasons in favor of my acting as I did in doing A could have been operative for me, and to at least as great a degree, had I not foreseen that p.

(A reason is active provided that it not only favors my acting a certain way, but that acting in this way comes from the reason in the right way.)  This logically follows from the general thesis, which I am inclined to accept, that my intentions supervene on my active reasons in favor of my acting as I did.

Consider two standard cases.  Terror bombing: bomb is dropped on civilian-occupied area to terrify enemy civilians into forcing their government to surrender.  Strategic bombing: bomb is dropped on civilian-occupied area to hit a military target.  In strategic bombing, one could act as one did, and for exactly the same reasons as one did, even if one did not foresee the deaths of the civilians.  But in terror bombing, one couldn't.  If one did not foresee the deaths of a civilians, one of the active reasons for dropping the bomb where one dropped it would not have been available: that dropping it there will terrify civilians by killing them.  

Notice that reasons in favor of my acting as I do in doing A include reasons that concern the value of the end but also include reasons that concern how the means leads up to the end.  Why did you act as you did?  "Because it would save the patient's life" gives the one kind of reason, and "Because it would remove the tumor" gives the other kind of reason.  

The condition I offer is sufficient but not necessary.  Frances Kamm's triple-effect cases, if they work as she thinks they do, show that the condition is not necessary, unless one distinguishes between reasons directly favoring the action, and includes only those in the sufficient condition, from reasons that act as defeater-defeaters.  Another kind of case is given by Neil Delaney's targeting cases, where the presence of civilians is evidence that the military target is there.  Or consider a case where I modify the manner in which I act in light of my foresight that p.  For instance, I expect that there will be civilian casualties, and so I drop the bomb early enough in the raid that I will have time to do a second pass once the smoke clears and drop medical supplies.  My actual active reasons for acting as I did, namely bombing at the time I did, couldn't have existed had I not believed that there would be civilian casualties.  (I could have had another similar reason still, such as that there might be civilian casualties.)

It would be nice if the sufficient condition could be made into a necessary one.  But even without being so made, I think the condition helps with a wide range of cases.  Moreover, sometimes one may be able to handle a recalcitrant case by the following strategem.  Modify the case in such a way that intuitively if the original case had an intention that p, so does the modified one, and then show that the modified case doesn't have an intention that p by using the condition. 

Reasons and intentions

1. If an action has an intention, that intention is always a part of the full rational explanation of the action.
2. Only facts that are identical with or grounded in the agent's reasons are found in a rational explanation of an action.
3. Therefore, the intentions in an action are identical with or grounded in the agent's reasons for the action. ("The Grounding Claim")

Here, grounding is a relation stronger than supervenience. I think the Grounding Claim is very plausible even apart from the little argument for it. One nice thing about the Grounding Claim is that it helps demystify intentions. Once we get clear on the reasons for an action, there is nothing more to intentions.

The Grounding Claim is very abstract, but it has a concrete and controversial consequence:

4. It is possible to have two agents who differ in the foreseen consequences of an action but who do not differ in intentions.

This follows from the fact that a foreseen consequence only affect the reasons for an action when the agent cares about the consequences in some sense, and mere foresight does not entail care. When one agent finds out about a consequence of an action that she doesn't care about—either because the consequence is morally irrelevant or because the agent is morally insensitive—this does not by itself affect her reasons. Thus, two agents can have the same reasons but foresee different things, at least if they are things they do not care about. This, in turn, shows:

5. Foresight is not the same as intention.

The challenge for a theory of intention, then, is to figure out in what way an agent's intentions are grounded in (or identical with) her reasons—how to read her intentions off from her reasons.

I don't know how to do that.

Tough double effect cases

I think the distinction between the foreseen and the intended is central to a lot of our moral thinking, and that some form of the Principle of Double Effect is correct.

Here is a pair of cases that I find particularly difficult, however.  This post owes things to a discussion I've been having with Daniel Hill.

Case 1: Matilda knows that a house contains two people, one an innocent and the other a terrorist.  Matilda is flying over the house and can drop a bomb on it, and if she does so, both people will die.  However, the terrorist will then be unable to detonate a bomb that would kill hundreds.  Matilda has no other way of preventing the detonation of the bomb.  Is it permissible for her to drop the bomb?

Case 2: This time Matilda is on the ground, and has a gun.  The two residents of the house are in front of her.  One of them is the innocent and the other is the terrorist.  She can't tell which is which.  The only way to prevent the detonation of the bomb is by killing the terrorist.  (Why is wounding not good enough?  Maybe from her position, she can only aim for the head, and so she'll either kill or miss.)  Is it permissible for her to shoot both?

The first case seems to be just like the standard double effect case of tactical bombing where if you drop the bomb on the enemy HQ, innocent visitors to the HQ (e.g., spouses of officers), will also die.  It is hard to distinguish Case 2 from Case 1, since it doesn't seem like it should morally matter whether one drops one bomb or takes two shots.  But the action in Case 2 seems wrong if you have strong deontological intuitions.  It sure seems like you're intentionally killing two people, where you know that one of them (but you do not know which--and that may change things) is an innocent.

So the challenge for the defender of double effect reasoning is to either show in a morally compelling way how Case 2 differs from Case 1, or show that the intuitions that the shooting in Case 2 is wrong are mistaken.

I will try for the first, but I don't know how morally compelling my story will be.  I think it will only be compelling to those who find double effect reasoning compelling.  Still I hope the story will have some plausibility.  Let the two people in the house be Susan and Tricia.  Matilda's intention in Case 1 is that the terrorist in the house die.  By what means?  By means of the place where the terrorist is being seared by an explosion.  Matilda need have no intention in Case 1 regarding the non-terrorist, or regarding Susan qua Susan or Tricia qua Tricia.  Her intention is explicitly about the terrorist as such.

Now consider Case 2.  Suppose Matilda has Susan in her gunsights and squeezes the trigger.  What are Matilda's reasons for so doing?  The most plausible account seems to be something like this: "Susan may be a terrorist, and if so, then many lives will be saved by her death, so I will shoot her."  In other words, the plan of action seems to be: "Shoot Susan dead, so that if she is the terrorist, the terrorist is dead."  If that's the plan of action, then Matilda is (literally) aiming to kill Susan.  And by the same token, Matilda is aiming to kill Tricia. Therefore, Matilda is intending the death of two persons, one of whom she knows to be an innocent.  She knows, thus, that in her overall action plan there is an innocent whose death she is aiming at.  And that is wrong.

Elsewhere, I have speculated that there are some actions that are only permissible with certain intentions.  For instance, perhaps it is only permissible to assert with the intention of avoiding the assertion of a falsehood and perhaps sexual relations are only permissible with the intention of uniting maritally.  It now seems quite plausible to me that intentional killing is like that.  To kill someone intentionally and permissibly it is not enough that one believe that the person is an aggressor (or is probably an aggressor?) that one is duly authorized to kill, or however exactly the exceptions on the prohibition of killing should be put.  The soldier or police officer needs to kill because the person is an aggressor that one is duly authorized to kill.  The Allied soldier who justly kills a German soldier must do so because the German soldier is an aggressor.  If the Allied soldier, instead, solely kills Helmut because Helmut is German or because Helmut has a long nose or because target practice is fun, the Allied soldier is morally corrupt.  (What if the Allied soldier kills Helmut both because Helmut is an aggressor and because Helmut is German?  I think more detail will be needed about the deliberative structure here, and I want to bracket this case.)

Now, let us suppose that in fact Susan is the terrorist.  Then Matilda in intentionally killing Susan is not killing Susan because Susan is a terrorist.  Rather, Matilda is killing Susan because Susan might be a terrorist.  And that is not good enough.  The intention to kill someone because she is a terrorist is compatible with love of that person, since doing justice to someone is compatible with love, and sometimes required by love.  But that is not Matilda's intention.

This has an interesting implication for military ethics.  It is often said to be necessary for soldiers to dehumanize their enemy in order to kill, to see them as enemies rather than as people, and this is often seen as a criticism of the military enterprise.  But if I am right, it is morally required that the soldier kill Helmut under a description that includes something like "enemy aggressor" rather than simply under the description "Helmut" or "that man over there, who no doubt has a family who are awaiting his return."  Perhaps in the ideal the humanity of the enemy, and the fact that he has a family who are awaiting his return, does enter into how the action is done--with compassion, sadness and only as necessary for due defense of the innocent.  But Helmut's aggressor status needs to be in the soldier's intentions.

But let us go back to Case 2.  One might cleverly object that it need not in fact be Matilda's intention that Susan die (Daniel Hill queried me about such an idea).  It could perhaps be Matilda's intention that Susan die if she is a terrorist.  Now, it is certainly possible to have such intentions.  If one has, or thinks one has, a magic bullet that kills only terrorists, one could shoot Susan intending that she die if she is a terrorist.  In that case, one's means to the conditional end that Susan die if she is a terrorist is shooting a bullet that discriminates between terrorists and non-terrorists.  But in the actual Case 2, one brings it about that Susan dies if she is a terrorist by bringing it about that Susan dies: the conditional end is brought about, in this case, by the unconditional means.  So one still intends that Susan die, as a means to the conditional end that Susan die if she is a terrorist.

But what if Matilda is a clever double effect casuist, and says: "My intention is that a bullet should go through such and such a location in space, and that if there be the head of a terrorist in that location, that terrorist should die"?   However, I think this is an incorrect statement of Susan's intentions.  Intentions aren't inner speeches.  They embody our actual reasons for acting.  Matilda's reason for sending the bullet to that location in space is that she can see Susan's head there.  Her plan for making sure that the terrorist in that location should die seems to be that Susan should die, and hence if the terrorist is there, the terrorist should die.  Susan's death still seems to be a means to the death of the terrorist in that location, if there be one there.  And likewise for Tricia's death.  I am not completely happy about this story, but it has some plausibility.

In Case 1, however, the aim is less personal, and that does actually matter: the only death aimed at is the death of "the terrorist", under that definite description.  Certainly, we would expect Matilda to be much more traumatized by Case 2 than by Case 1 (and if she weren't, we would think there is something wrong with her), and we should take such trauma to be defeasible evidence for a morally relevant difference between the two cases.

[Typo fixed.]

Metaphysically light existence

In the previous post, I argued that artefacts do not exist in a "metaphysically serious way". The notion of metaphysically serious existence is a foggy one. But I think I can give two sufficient conditions for it. The trivial one is that Fs don't exist in a metaphysically serious way if there just are no Fs. The non-trivial one is that Fs don't exist in a metaphysically serious way provided that whenever "x" is the name of an existent F, the proposition that x exists is a proposition that holds in virtue of the truth of some proposition that does not make reference to the x.

For instance, if x is a particular hole in a wall, the claim "x exists" holds in virtue of a proposition reporting a certain area's being surrounded by the wall but not itself containing any parts of the wall. Likewise, if x is a waltz that George and Sally are dancing, then the claim "x exists" holds in virtue of George and Sally waltzing at a certain time in a certain way (the "certain" encode the amount of precision to ensure that we're talking of this waltz rather than another waltz). Thus, holes and waltzes don't exist in a metaphysically serious way.

Note that the "in virtue of" relation here is more than just "being entailed by."

On my view claims like "This table exists" may be true in virtue of facts about arrangements of particles and/or fields as well as the intentions and/or practices of agents and/or communities. Or, alternately, such claims are false as they stand, but they are close approximations to true claims which hold in virtue of facts about arrangements of particles and/or fields as well as the intentions and/or practices of agents and/or communities.

Lying

Consider some moral claims (they might be prima facie or ultima facie--it does not matter for what I am doing here):

1. It is wrong to intentionally kill innocent people.
2. It is wrong to intentionally go against the terms of one's promises.
3. It is wrong to intentionally appropriate things that belong to someone else.
4. It is wrong to intentionally engage in sexual relations with someone one is not married to. (Some will want to say that this prohibition only applies to one if one is married, but I think it applies in general. But this won't matter)
5. It is wrong to intentionally say what one believes is not true.

Here, item (5) stands out as not quite parallel to the others. In all the others, the subjective state of the agent enters in through the term "intentionally". But in (5), subjectivity enters twice, once through the "intentionally" and a second time through the "does not believe". I want to suggest that things would be neater if instead of (5), we took the basic form of the moral prohibition in question to be:

6. It is wrong to intentionally say what is not true.

This seems more closely parallel to the form of (1)-(4).

I think one can derive (5) from (6). If one is intentionally saying what one believes not to be true, then one is acting in a way that one believes will accomplish the intentional saying of what is not true. But it is wrong to act in a way that one believes will accomplish a forbidden thing if one succeeds. Hence, if (6) is true, one is acting wrongly in intentionally saying what one believes not to be true.

Observe that for (1)-(4) there are doubly subjectivized variants. It is wrong to kill innocent people, but it is also wrong to kill those that one believes to be innocent people (it is wrong to shoot at a deer if one mistakes it for an innocent person). And so on. But the doubly subjectivized variants are secondary, derivative from (1)-(4) and a principle about the wrongness of doing what one believes will accomplish a forbidden thing if one succeeds.

Suppose we take (6) to be the basic form of the moral prohibition, and (5) to be derivative. Then we can say that in the primary case--the case of the liar who not only says what she thinks is false, but what is actually false--what we have is an offense primarily against truth, and only secondarily against sincerity. And I think it is right to see lying as primarily opposed to the value of truth. This, I think, also fits well with the examples (especially the first) in this post.

Seeing the duty to avoid false speech as grounded in an obligation of truth also makes it plausible that we should not speak if we do not have good reason to think that what we are saying is true.