The Act Itself: Exceptionless Moral Norms
[Confidence 50%, this is speculative and good counterarguments will improve my view of these matters.]
I.
When I do moral philosophy, I am looking for a usable repeatable framework for analyzing moral decision-making in a very broad range of cases. I accept that moral philosophy is an inexact science and cannot be made into a machine that mechanically outputs the right answer. There are simply too many parameters that go into real decision-making to make a moral philosophy complete in the way that an account of electro-magnetism is.
But I would like for something that doesn’t fall flat on its face at the first objection. The standard Thomistic framework is a great starting point but is locked in intractable controversies. Perhaps chief among them is how to identify what an act is.
You see, ‘action’ is one of the three key metaphysical categories by which we judge praiseworthiness or acceptability of an action in the Thomistic system.
You know the rhyme:
With Intentions Good, the mind is right.
An act acceptable gives hand its might.
And should an evil too befall
Let pain be healing, evil forestall.
Or if lists are your preference:
Your intention must be toward the good ends, not the bad ones which may result from the action. Cause a stinging pain in your child’s knee to clean the wound, not see him bleed.
The act must be acceptable in itself. That is, it cannot be one of things that “we just don’t do” no matter what.
There must be proportionally good outcome that is not caused by the bad outcomes. You can kill to protect your home, but you cannot kill to collect better data on death rattles. Generally, we group all the considerations that include causal chains, uncertainty, consequences, and proportionality into one bucket called “Circumstances.”
I have always been troubled by step 2. For many years, I denied the existence of the “act itself” for moral analysis. What is the act, I thought, but the marriage of intentions with the mechanical actions to make them happen. The twitching of fingers, the vibrating of vocal cords, the speaking of vows, the motions of homework these are not meaningful at all in themselves. The circumstances and intentions give them meaning. A philosopher might say abortion is unacceptable in itself, because “the whole life is sacred from conception to natural death” belief commitment.
I would respond in two ways: One abortion is a noun not a verb. The acts that make it up vary a lot and so there is not one act called “an abortion.” And then, since this is a bit obtuse to most, I would point out that there are actions that have the same effect which are acceptable in some circumstances, i.e. removing an ectopic pregnancy. What matters in the moral analysis are not the actions but the intentions and circumstances, even for the person categorically against abortion.
Another thing that I have trouble with is how to identify an act. We might say that playing baseball is an act. But is it? Isn’t playing baseball made of swinging, catching, throwing, running, shouting. Those are the acts, no? Or maybe swinging isn’t an action. Swinging is composed all sorts of subparts that make up the reified action of swinging?
Is vowing an act distinct from speaking? Isn’t it the circumstances of the words that make a speech act a vow as opposed to the words themselves? Aren’t words themselves social conventions anyway? And thus, identifying an act is just abiding by a specific social convention. A vow is an act. Marriage is an act. Life itself is one great deed.
I am revising this view. My motivation is that I think we should have a category of actions that we do categorically rule out. Yes, the category will be fuzzy, but a good life requires being the type of person who can draw a hardline at times to say, “This I simply will not do, and no argument or circumstance will make me do it.” I am talking about exceptionless moral norms. We should live by rules which over many iterations will lead to a better society and protect us from our worst habits of casuistry to justify viciousness. Exceptionless moral norms do this by saying that there are some powers of judgment we cannot trust ourselves to exercise. None of us can wield unfiltered moral reasoning, and if we coordinate around some universalized principles, we will save ourselves from self-destruction.
Are there circumstances where torture may be justified? Perhaps there are. But whom do we trust to correctly identify those circumstances when they have power? No, we want the dark powers chained, buried in the sea, or set beyond our grasp.
I don’t know what the exceptionless moral norms are. But I do want a way to preserve them. They are important Schelling points for behavior, guide action, and decrease the frequency of the worst offenses.
II.
Before continuing, I would like to revisit our terms.
Intention: A person’s intention is to complete all the acts and cause all the effects which lead to their desired end. Some of the effects might be necessary (or probabilistic) consequences of their actions but are not necessary to the end. These effects are foreseen, but not intended.
For example, hitting a home intruder with my home defense flashlight causes his unconsciousness and my safe home, but his unconscious state, while foreseen, is not strictly speaking intended. The intended state is the safety of my home. You should think of this as a standard Pearlian causal inference diagram. One action leads to two states. Those states are causally conjoined by the action, and the logic of language says the unconscious person causes the safety of the home. But ignore the logic of language: states do not cause states. Actions cause states. The action causes both consequences.
An intention is known by external actions chosen. If a person claims that they intend to learn, but instead cheats on their assignments, then they haven’t learned, nor was the cheating part of that intention. How we judge a person’s intention is by what acts they chose to do. This is both how legal system works and how common sense operates. If you plan to assassinate someone, but do so in a way that causes a lot of unnecessary collateral damage as well, then your intention should rightly be inferred from the specific actions you took. This is essential for understanding the act itself discussion.An act is acceptable in itself, if it upholds exceptionless moral norms. That is, it preserves the essential character of the good intention.
My go to example is taken from Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars. In 1998, Osama bin-Laden was being tracked. The US was 50% sure he was in a compound in Kandahar and special ballistics and mapping experts were busy calculating how the compound could be bombed in such a way as to collapse as few as possible of the surrounding domiciles. In the end the president, decided against bombing on such a probability of success, given the number of civilian casualties that would likely result, some around 60. What catches my eye about this story is that the ballistics experts are not only supposed to measure how to destroy the target, but also how to minimize collateral damage and unnecessary loss of life. If you want to act morally your actions need to show that you don’t intend the evil effects of a bombing.
Everything that occurs between two end states in a causal diagram is the act.Circumstances. These are the relative weights of the good and bad effects of the action, the uncertainty around these, relationships between people and institutions, the norms and obligations that are affected by the action. These all have some bearing that allow for judgements of proportionality, acceptability, and blameworthiness/ praiseworthiness of an action.
III.
With these redefinitions, we have a reason to think about exceptionless moral norms for actions, but then we suddenly have an issue about how to identify whether an action is within the bounds or not? A standard retort is to make the indirect/direct distinction and either argue, prohibition breaking must be either indirectly voluntary or indirectly caused by the agent.
What does it mean to indirectly vs directly to cause a harm? It is this distinction that I primarily object to and think needs reframing.
Is it how many mechanistic events intervene between your action and the effect? If I cut someone’s hand with an axe, that is more direct than if I cut their hand with a Rube Goldberg machine.
But would you call killing with gun which has a series of intervening events(trigger, hammer, gunpowder, combustion, propulsion) less direct than killing with a sword? All else held equal we wouldn’t consider these different moral acts at all. In a causal diagram necessary/inexorable effects do not need to be modelled.
Maybe the difference between indirect and direct is probabilistic?
If your action contributed to an effect, but was not sufficient to cause it then it is indirect.
But would all doctor’s prescriptions and most medical interventions then be considered indirect? That’s crazy talk, I think, for we would hold doctors responsible for unnecessary risk-taking and foreseeable harms even if they are only probabilistically going to occur. The probabilities matter for the intended effect, but the direct vs indirect distinction does not add anything.
Possible scenarios in this causal diagram.
| A | Home intruder | Sick patient | Not feeding prisoner -omission |
| D | Attack intruder with heavy flashlight | Medical prescription | Torturing prisoner- commission |
| B | Safe home | Healing | Important information |
| C | Unconscious intruder | Side effects | Harmed prisoner |
The claim of the indirect/direct distinction is that if Action D leads to both a good effect and the bad effect. Action A leads to the good effect and bad effect just as well, but makes our voluntary actions more distant the bad effect it is, all else being equal, it is the more praiseworthy action. I am not exactly sure how this could be.
In the final column, I posited an commission-omission distinction. I have a problem with that distinction, but perhaps in light of the above argument...
Maybe it works like this? Action D is an exceptionless moral norm, but Action A, which causes state D is not. So we should prefer A, even if it seems like a fiction since D is caused anyway? Maybe avoiding dirtying our hands is an aspect of morality worth upholding.
This is all a response to SEP 4.4. The whole article is very good! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
I look forward to your thoughts on how you would think through the idea of direct/indirect distinction mattering.
Talk of “the standard Thomistic framework” is something of a red flag for me: for whom is the Thomistic framework standard? For some subset of the Roman Catholic Church, I guess, though my understanding is that the RCC itself explicitly doesn’t endorse Thomism as such. Does anyone outside the RCC have good reason to think of Thomism as a natural starting point?
The whole “double effect” thing has always seemed to me to be a big pile of confusion. I’m not sure it’s necessarily confused itself, but it encourages confused thinking.
For instance, consider your example of clobbering an intruder with your flashlight. You say you don’t intend to knock him out, but you do intend to make your home safe, and 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. (E.g., in the first two formulations of the doctrine the SEP page gives, the first says “the good effect must be produced directly by the action, not by the bad effect”—but if clobbering the intruder with the flashlight makes your home safe, it does so by means of knocking him out. The second lists four conditions of which the third is “that the good effect not be produced by means of the evil effect”; same again.)
My understanding is that if you hit the intruder with the intention that you’ll knock him out and thereby render your home safe, this is forbidden according to the DDE; but if you are able to convince yourself that what you’re doing is hitting him in order to encourage him to run away, then even if in fact you know that you will knock him out and that this is how the blow will actually keep your home safe then you are OK. And this seems to me like (1) mere sophistry and (2) a positive encouragement to self-deception.
(I’m not sure whether traditional RC thought would consider knocking the intruder out to be the sort of harm that you need to do this kind of reasoning about. But if not, we can just tweak our hypothetical a bit and suppose that a blow hard enough to knock him out has a non-negligible probability of actually killing him.)
The inclusion of this sort of thing in “the standard Thomistic framework” seems to me a strong reason for not starting from that framework, unless you have some sort of prior commitment to it.
I think it’s entirely plausible that we’d do well to adopt some exceptionless moral norms for essentially the reasons you describe, but I don’t see any good reason to think that if we do so we should try to fit them into the Thomistic framework, “double effect” and all.
I might, of course, be wrong about “double effect”. Maybe it makes more sense than I think it does. Maybe it’s less an incentive to self-deception and other bad thinking than I think it is. But I suggest that (1) if there isn’t a particular reason to think that that specific idea is key to thinking straight about the question of exceptionless moral norms, then you’d do better to separate them, so that people who don’t embrace the “double effect” idea may still be able to offer some insight, and (2) if there is a particular reason to think that, then you should say what it is, so that the rest of us can respond appropriately.
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).
I don’t, and neither does Google. I can’t make much sense of it either. What is its origin?
I think you’re greatly underestimating the degree to which the fuzziness in category boundaries is inherent in reality and in the distance between fundamental reality and human perception, as opposed to being something social that we can address with better word definitions.
I’m glad you’re acknowledge that it’s a person drawing the lines. It sounds like, at least implicitly, you’re acknowledging that those lines need not, and should not, be in the same place for all people. The lines are not the same for me as they would be for a president, a general, a doctor, a starving orphan, a medieval peasant, or a hunter-gatherer. They also are not the same for a child as they are for an adult, in ways that the child is not yet capable of understanding or predicting. So, then, there must be times and ways for a person to reassess themselves and their lines over the course of their lives. In other words, the “I” and “me” in that paragraph is one that only exists at a moment in time, and has only a quantitative rather than binary identity with the entities before and after that go by the same name. There are choices I’ve made and things I’ve done that Anthony-2008, Anthony-2013, and Anthony-2018 would all have very confidently drawn some very stark lines prohibiting. I see no contradiction in this, because I’m no longer those people. I’ve grown, learned, and changed, and I consider the relevant changes positive.
Long-time reader, totally new commenter here. A grain of salt is advised as I’m not sure I even respect the basic rules of posting (moderators feel free to rewrite, delete). That said .. This is pre-uni memories but may really be of help to this topic
Last year before uni, Philosophy class, we were taught that (maybe surprisingly), very few “moral” norms are absolutely universal. There is one that stands : No r*ping or any s*xual activity with the young(est) generation. Even the (very few) civilizations or tribes that tried “educating” the young before marriage age stopped (a few early maoris if I remember correctly). Verifiability : probably in a standard philosophy course.
This is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative . The specificity I can’t see in your thinking is that the act must be acceptable by the actor. It may seem completely unacceptable to the rest of the world without affecting the good intention (think Galileo declaring that orbits are not perfect circles)
2cents—a newcomer
Thanks for commenting. Welcome.
You right on both accounts.
There are some agreed upon universal principles that societies do develop. “No ****ing the young. No randomly killing people.”
Categorical imperative is exactly what I what I had in mind. However, the CI is not based upon what’s acceptable to the actor or to the society at large, but rather according to reason. “Act only on the maxim which you can at the same time will that it should be universal law.”