Perhaps your flashlight-clobbering story is permissible according to Aquinas (though I find his account of things insufficiently precise to tell), but it is definitely not permissible according to the accounts described in the SEP entry you linked to. You are protecting your house by means of injuring the intruder, and those accounts say explicitly that the DDE says that if you’re forbidden to make bad thing X happen then you are likewise forbidden to make bad thing X happen in order to achieve good consequence Y of X. What you’re allowed to do is to do something that produces both Y and X for the sake of Y, but Y has to happen in a way that isn’t a consequence of X.
Perhaps you can claim that actually the protection of your house isn’t happening by means of injuring the intruder. (You’re just trying to scare him off and cause him some pain, and it’s just too bad that in the process you fractured his skull[1].) And maybe in that case your action is in fact permissible according to the DDE. But, once again, I say: if so, so much the worse for the DDE. The permissibility of clobbering an intruder with a flashlight and predictably injuring him should not depend on whether there’s some other mechanism by which your action might have protected your house, when you know that in fact that’s not how it’s going to play out.
[1] I’m tweaking the scenario a little in order to make the harm done something that’s more plausibly Something Not Allowed.
If your intention was just to scare him off and cause him some pain, and you weren’t at all expecting to end up fracturing his skull, then I don’t think you need the fancy double-effect stuff: you can just say that you’re not morally liable for unexpected, unpredicted consequences of your actions, provided your expectations and predictions were arrived at in good faith.
It is very possible that I’m missing something here. I have the impression that you have studied this stuff quite a lot more than I have, so if I think you’re completely wrong about something fairly basic then I should take very seriously the possibility that the error is actually mine. But I don’t see what my error might be here. Do you disagree that in your scenario you’re getting the good effect (safe home) by means of the bad one (injured intruder)? Or do you disagree that the analyses of the DDE in the SEP say you’re not allowed to do that? Or what?
I think it’s worth distinguishing “has an explicit discussion of double-effect” from “has a special way of handling double-effect cases”. As you say, standard-issue Benthamite utilitarianism has a way of dealing with such cases (i.e., just put them through the same machinery as all other cases and turn the handle) even though it doesn’t do anything special about them. Isn’t that likewise true for Aristotle, Kant, et al?
I am not an expert on either Aristotelian or Kantian ethics. But my crude model of Aristotle says: ethics is about being a person of good character, and what you should do about this sort of puzzle is to become a person of good character and then act in whatever way that leads you to act. And my crude model of Kant says: ethics is about obeying moral laws whose universal application you endorse, and what you should do about this sort of puzzle is to find moral laws whose universal application you endorse and then do what they say. Neither of these in itself resolves the puzzle, but then the same is true for Bentham’s principle of utility (you should take whichever action leads to the greatest net excess of pleasure over pain). All of them provide tools you can use to pick an answer. None of them says that you need some sort of special-case rule just for these situations. Benthamite utilitarianism arguably has the merit of giving (in principle) a more specific and well-defined answer.
As for what exactly should be considered part of a person’s “intent”, I think I prefer not to think of things in those terms; I am not convinced that the difference between “I intended to knock the intruder out and thereby protect my home” and, say, “I intended to hit the intruder in a way that would stop him further invading my home, and correctly anticipated that the way this would happen is that I would knock him out, but I didn’t intend that specific consequence” is very clear-cut, nor that it should be morally significant. I would prefer a different analysis: as you contemplate what you might do about the intruder, you anticipate various consequences and have whatever attitudes toward them you have, and I think those attitudes can be morally significant. Did you know you were going to knock him out or not? Were you hoping to hurt him, or hoping to cause him as little pain as possible? How did these predictions and attitudes influence your choice? Etc. If, say, you predicted that your action would knock him out and possibly cause lasting brain damage, and you tried to strike him in a way that would maximize the chance of unconsciousness and subject to that minimize the chance of permanent damage, then all of that is relevant, but whether we classify your action as “intended to knock him out” or “intended to protect your home” is not.
Upon further reflection my example was ill-chosen. The flashlight clobbering example doesn’t trigger double-effect considerations, because there is only one immediate effect of the action—an unconscious intruder.
I wanted to use a simple example that had two effects , but I think you rightly point out that claiming the home-owner didn’t intend to make the guy unconscious is specious sophistry. His unconsciousness and the safety of the home are two aspects of the same effect. The unconscious intruder entails the safety of the home.
If we claim they are different effects, then we would have to imagine that can be separated, but the safety of the home in the example requires the incapacitation of the intruder. There is no significant difference between claiming “I intended to knock the intruder out” and “I intended to do actions that make my home safe.”
But do notice that if we use the definition of intention from OP, which I will stick to, that our intention was to achieve a safe home by using force to incapacitate the intruder with the attitudes appropriate, no gleeful pleasure-taking in finally getting the chance to clobber someone. I think everything in your final paragraph is correct about attitude and steps taken minimize unnecessary harm.
Our intention is the goal and will (which includes attitudes) to perform the acts to achieve that goal.
If we go to the terrorist compound case, then there are multiple effects: the deaths of the civilians and the death of the terrorist. These are separable in that the death of the civilians does not cause the death of terrorists nor vice versa. The same missile launch causes both. Because they are separable effects, it is possible to intend/will one effect, without willing the other effect.
My original example of the home intruder failed to identify two separable effects, but only a logical entailment of the clobbering. In that case, the considerations are simple proportionality, not DDE. Obviously, if I knock someone unconscious, I can’t then beat him to death. I have already achieved the goal. If I shoot him, he might die. But that may still be proportional. If I shoot him and then unload two magazine rounds into him, that would be disproportional.
What the SEP article means by “the good effect is not achieved through the bad effect” is not well-defined. But generally people in the lit interpret it to be the abstraction of “No capturing civilians to perform useful medical experiments.” I might rephrase the abstraction to, “No doing an action that has bad effects, in order to do a separate action that has good effects.” (But that’s tentative).
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).