More on attempted murder and attempted theft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promising to try

Here’s a natural thing to say. The sentence

1. “I promise to try to ϕ”

should be analyzed as straightforwardly an instance of the schema:

2. “I promise to ψ”

for an action ψ, in the special case where ψing is the action of trying to ϕ.

I am now fairly convinced that this is wrong: that (1) is not a mere special case of (2).

Here are two cases to make one more friendly to this.

• I promised you to try to call you tomorrow. Come tomorrow, I called you accidentally, i.e., without trying to. If the content of my promise was literally to try to call you, then I haven’t fulfilled that, and I have reason to call you, this time intentionally. But that’s silly.

• I promised to try to email you a paper tonight. Come tonight, I try, but my email software puts up the dialog: “Your email did not go through due to a temporary problem. The problemm is now resolved. Should I send it? Yes/No.” I press “No” on the grounds that my promise has been fulfilled: I already tried. That’s vicious, surely.

There are easy ways out of the two cases that are compatible with the straightforward analysis of promising-to-try. But the cases are nonetheless suggestive of the fact that “I promise to try to ϕ” should not be read too literally.

My promise to you to ψ typically accomplishes three things:

• It creates a reason for me to ψ

• It tells you that I will ψ

• It creates an obligation of apology or compensation if I do not ψ (regardless of whether I am culpable).

In particular, because it tells you that I will ψ, it normally creates an expectation in you that I will ψ, which is apt to lead to your organizing your life around my ψing.

I suggest that a promise to try to ϕ instead accomplishes these three things:

• It creates a reason for me to ϕ

• It tells you that I will make a reasonable effort to ϕ

• It creates an obligation of apology or compensation if I do not make a reasonable effort to ϕ.

In other words, I think that my promising to try to ϕ gives rise to exactly the same reason in me as promising to ϕ would. However, it holds back the assurance that I will ϕ, replacing it with an assurance that I will try. Now whether you expect me to ϕ will depend on your judgment of how likely my attempts are to succeed. And by using the weaker wording, I am typically implicating to you an uncertainty about success which should give you some evidence of my unreliability. Finally, my promising to try to ϕ weakens the duties of apology or compensation to only apply when I didn’t make a reasonable effort.

In other words, to promise and to promise-to-try are two different kinds of speech acts, and it is obviously useful to have both.

Conscience and the deontic logic of attempts

When people talk of the value of obedience to conscience, it often makes it sound like there is some sort of a relationship to a mysterious faculty with a mysterious authority.

And that may all be true. But there is also a rather simple and deflationary but still, I think, useful way to think of obedience to conscience.

When I obey my conscience I am just trying to do what I ought thing. There is nothing particularly mysterious about what is right about that. If I ought to do A, I ought to try to do A. I ought to honor my parents. So, I also ought to try to honor them. Similarly, I ought to do what I ought, so I ought to try to do what I ought.

And with respect to the duty to try to do what I ought, it doesn’t matter that due to a mistake on my part I will be unable to do what I ought. That I have wrongly written down my mother’s phone number does not excuse me from trying to call her on her birthday. I ought to dial that number, because not dialing that number would be constitute a failure to try to call her, given my belief that it’s her number. Similarly, even if I am mistaken in thinking that I ought to do B, I still ought to do B, because a failure to do B would be constitutive of a failure to try to do what I ought, given my belief that B is what I ought to do.

(This is all a little less trivial when we realize that the duty to do one’s duty is actually a bit controversial. One might think that one only has first order duties, and lacks the second order duty to see to it that one fulfills the first order duties. But that would, I think, be mistaken. If I know that partaking of alcohol would cause me to neglect my first order duties, I thereby have a second order duty to avoid such partaking.)

Trying and intending

Suppose I have a sore knee and a doctor asks me to try to lift my leg to see if I can do so. So I try, and let's say I succeed. Did I intend to lift my leg? It seems not. It seems that I intended to lift my leg if and only if I could, as a means to the doctor's being able to diagnose my knee. But this is very strange. I tried and I succeeded, but I didn't intend my success!

Maybe I didn't really try to lift my leg? Maybe I only tried to lift it if and only if I could. But that doesn't seem right. The doctor didn't want to see the effects of my trying to "lift my leg if and only if I could", but wanted to see the effects of my trying to lift my leg.

I am not sure what to make of this kind of case.

Trying to do what one knows is impossible

I know that angles can't be trisected. But suppose that I know for sure that unless I manage to find a way to trisect angles in the next ten years, the human race will be destroyed. What should I do? Surely I should try to trisect, hoping that there are mistakes in the impossibility proofs. And surely here at least is a place where I can do what I should. So it is possible to try to do what one knows to be impossible.

Compatibilism, trying and trying hard

Some compatibilists—e.g., Vihvelin and Fara—think that something that merely blocks the possibility of your trying to do A but doesn't block your disposition to do A when trying to do A does not take away your present power to do A. Two examples of such blocks are (a) Frankfurt cases where you'd be counterfactually prevented from doing A and (b) being determined not to do A.

But there is an interesting family of cases where you can only do something when you try hard enough. For instance, you can run distance D in time T when you try really hard, and you can only try that hard when you know a bear is chasing you. In a case like that, even though you are disposed to do A when you try hard enough, anything that blocks you from the possibility of trying hard enough also blocks you from being able to do A. Thus the absence of a bear, or even just ignorance of the presence of the bear, blocks you from being able to running D in T.

So where trying hard to do A is needed for you to do A, anything that blocks your possibility of trying hard blocks your ability to do A.

Now, anything that blocks you from the possibility of trying also blocks you from trying hard. So in cases where trying hard to do A is needed to do A, determinism and Frankfurt cases block you from being able to do A.

So in cases where success requires trying hard, blocks to trying remove the ability to succeed. But why should this only be true where success requires trying hard? So in cases where success requires trying, blocks to trying remove the ability to succeed, too.

Some conjectures on intention, success and trying

Here are some conjectures:

1. x As out of a proximate intention to A if and only if x succeeds at trying to A.
2. x proximately intends to A if and only if x tries to A.
3. x proximately intends that s if and only if x proximately intends to bring it about that s.
4. x distantly intends to A if and only if x tries to bring it about that she* [quasi-indicator] As
5. x distantly intends that s if and only if x distantly intends to bring it about that s.

Proximate intentions are the intentions that normally directly result in action, as distinguished from distant intentions which are plans for future action that still require a proximate intention before the action. I am rather less confident of the theses on distant intention than those on proximate intention. But even the theses on proximate intention only have something like the following epistemic status: "They sound right and I can't think of a counterexample."

If (2) is right, then the intention condition in the Principle of Double Effect can be reformulated as saying that the agent isn't trying to bring about an evil. And indeed the following sounds exactly right to me:

6. You are never permitted to try to bring about an evil.

Of course, there are some difficult de re / de dicto issues in regard to (6).

Intending and acting

This will be a rather dogmatic post, summarizing a bunch of my thinking about intention and action.

I think the fundamental concept in regard to intention isn't the binary relation of x's intending that p (or x's intending to G), but the ternary relation of x's Aing with the intention that p. In other words, intentions qualify actions: "The surgeon is cutting the heart with the intention of healing, while the assassin is cutting the heart with the intention of killing."

But isn't it possible just to intend? Maybe, but that's a defective case. Moreover, when you just intend that p, you are still acting—you are trying with the intention that p. Intending in the sense I am after—the sense that occurs in the Principle of Double Effect and that Anscombe is elucidating in Intention—is not the same as wishing, hoping, resolving or planning. We do use the word "intend" in cases of resolve or plan, and I think I can explain that. Start with resolve. When I resolve to A, I am trying to produce a future action. My resolving is an action done with the intention to A later. And so I can be literally said to intend to A. However, sometimes we have something weaker, like a plan. In those cases, I think we are simply extending the word "intend" from the stronger sense to the weaker.

This dovetails with Nietzsche's remark that making promises is tied to the great power of controlling our future actions. Plausibly, when I promise to A, I ought to be intending that I will A—a sincere promise, then, is also an attempt to bring about, or at least probabilify, a future action of one's own.

But isn't an action caused by its intention? Yes and no. The problem with a simply affirmative answer is that as soon as the intention has occurred, one has already begun to try. Since to begin to try is already to act, on pain of vicious regress it cannot be that every action is caused by an intention. Moreover, when the action goes on to successful fruition, there aren't two actions, a beginning-to-try and the full action. There is just one action which began when one began to try and went on to fruition. But we can temporally subdivide the action, and the temporally later parts of it are caused by the beginning of it. We can, if we like, use "intending" as a stage term, akin to "embryo", for that first part of the action—the beginning-to-try. But just as we should not say that the embryo causes the organism—the embryo, after all, is the organism.[note 1] But of course we can say that the embryo is a cause of the later stages of development, and likewise we can say that the intention is a cause of the later stages of the action. So while the action is not caused by its intention, much of the action is caused by its intention. The intention is an essential part of the action—the rest of the action is not necessary for the action's occurrence though usually necessary for the action's success. This is just as the embryo stage of life is essential to the organism's existence (any horse that came into existence fully-formed, skipping the embryonic stage, would not be Bucephalus), and later stages of life are unnecessary for the organism to have existed, but are necessary for the organism to have successfully matured.

This matters ethically. For it lets one hold on to the intuitions that (a) primary moral evaluation is of the intention, (b) the subject matter of moral evaluation is the action, and (c) the success or failure of an action can be morally relevant features. The intention is the essential core of the action, and the primary question whether a person has acted rightly is a question of the evaluation of the intention. But at the same time the success or failure matters morally. One is no better as a person if one's attempt to commit a crime fails, but one is better off morally speaking (for instance, one typically owes less to the prospective victim if one has completely failed).

Finally consider Knobe cases. We have the case of the CEO who is told of a possible new programme which will make the company oodles of money. There is one catch—the programme will also harm the environment. The CEO says he doesn't care about the environment, but will go for the program. Most people say that the CEO intentionally harms the environment.

Consider, however, this variant question which is tied more closely to what I think is the fundamental ternary nature of intention: Did the CEO go for the programme with the intention of harming the environment? Surely the answer is negative. We can, after all, paraphrase as: Did the CEO go for the programme in order to harm the environment? This suggests (but see also this paper by Wasserman) that we want to distinguish between intentionally Aing and doing something with the intention to A. The concept I am after is that of doing with the intention to A.