Practical Knowledge and Double Effect

Practical Knowledge and Double Effect Jennifer A. Frey, University of South Carolina I. Introduction Let us imagine the rule of a wicked tyrant. In order to break any resistance and to guarantee compliance with the new order of things, our tyrant seeks to force select members of the populace to act contrary to their deepest convictions. She wants there to be no doubt in anyone’s mind that “citizens” will either obey the state or be crushed by its coercive power. One day she sends a military officer to the residence of a prominent cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church to give him a choice: either deny Christ and worship a golden calf in a public act of apostasy and idolatry—acts that no Roman Catholic of conviction could ever in good conscience commit—or else all priests in the diocese will be indefinitely imprisoned in the newly formed labor camps. If this example is too pious to pump your intuitions, just think of the murderer at the door. Let us fix it so that, in addition to his insatiable blood thirst, he has a penchant for moral dilemmas. He gives the person who answers a choice: murder the neighbors to save one’s own family or be killed by him. Our imagined agents face a structurally similar practical problem: either perform acts one knows are wrong or refrain from acting knowing full well that horrible consequences will follow. Let us suppose that our agents are typically decent and just people. Here we face not a problem of character but with the world: given the circumstances, it seems as though our agents will be a cause of grave harm no matter which option they choose. Now, let us further suppose that our agents refuse, on principled grounds, to kill the innocent, to commit apostasy, to torture, or to commit any number of other execrable deeds—they refuse to do evil that good may come of it. According to the old morality, which can be traced back to the ancient Greek and Jewish sources (though is not limited to them) and that thrived in the west until the nineteenth century, absolute moral prohibitions form part of the basic structure of right practical reasoning; it follows from such a morality that a just and decent person is one who is not tempted by fear or hope of 1 consequences.1 And yet, one who holds that it is better to suffer wrong rather than inflict it upon others is not merely putting one’s own person at risk.2 For again, it is sometimes because of one’s adherence to a prohibition or to a just cause that harms do befall others, and one may be painfully aware that, in refusing to go to the back of the bus, say, she may be the cause of significant harms. This raises difficult questions about responsibility, blame, and agency: Is such a person responsible for what happens as a result of this refusal? Does one incur guilt or blame? Should we say that one must intend what one knows with certainty will happen as a result of one’s action? The doctrine of double effect is supposed to help us answer these questions. It allows us to say that an agent may knowingly bring about bad effects so long as these effects are not intended but merely foreseen to result from the good that is intended. The doctrine relies upon a critical distinction between intentional action and side effects. And the doctrine seems to respect our intuitions about the cases outlined above.3 But accommodating this intuition is problematic in the present philosophical climate.4 Many moral philosophers see no practically salient distinction between what an agent intends and the foreseen side effects of this intention; indeed, some have gone so far as to deny that intention is central to the moral evaluation of human acts.5 To argue their point, they ask us to reflect upon the following two action scenarios6: 1 This formulation comes from Elizabeth Anscombe in her famous article, “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Reprinted in Mary Geach and Luke Gormally, eds., Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005, p. 182. 2 Certainly, the counsel is a part of traditional Christian and Jewish moral theory, but can also be found in Plato and Aristotle, among other ancient philosophers and moralists. 3 Of course, an appeal to folk intuitions cannot be the final say on the matter, as there is some (although limited) evidence that what the folk say about intentions is tracking their moral judgments rather than any deep sense of a distinction between intention and side effects. See Joshua Knobe’s famous case of CEO harm vs. CEO help in Knobe, J. “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language”. Analysis, 63, 2003, 190-193 and "Intentional Action in Folk Psychology: An Experimental Investigation". Philosophical Psychology, 16, 2003, 309-324. 4 Some examples of influential criticisms of any appeal to any morally salient distinction between intention and foresight include Jonathan Bennett, The Act Itself, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, chapter eleven and T. M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, chapter one. 5 See Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Physician-Assisted Suicide: Two Moral Arguments,” Ethics 109 (3) 1999: pp. 497-518. 6 The first philosopher to use this as a test case for our intuitions about responsibility was H.L.A. Hart, “Intention and Punishment,” Oxford Review (4), 1967. Reprinted in Hart, Punishment and Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. The difference between this test case and my previous examples is that this case involves an action or performance rather than a refusal to act. I do not think this is a difference that calls into question the analogy I’m drawing here, since I am concerned with the difference 2 Craniotomy: A woman’s life is in danger due to her inability to carry her pregnancy to term. In order to save her life a surgeon crushes the skull of the fetus and removes it from the birth canal, an action that kills the fetus. Hysterectomy: A woman’s life is in danger due to uterine cancer. In order to save her life the surgeon removes her uterus; since she is pregnant, however, this action also kills the fetus. Traditionally, some moral theories have treated these cases differently, on the grounds that in the latter case the doctor merely foresees rather than intends the death of the fetus. Contemporary philosophers often balk at this suggestion, since in both procedures the doctor causes the fetus to die and knows that he does this with certainty. And if this is true, what moral difference could it possibly make whether the killing is direct, as in craniotomy, or indirect, as in hysterectomy? 7 The appeal to “double effect” to differentiate the morality of the two acts has struck many as either a “muddle”8 or “complete sophistry.”9 In the face of such considerations, many philosophers argue that it is sometimes permissible to perform acts that, in normal circumstances, we would prohibit. The thought seems to be that it’s better to give up on a belief in absolute prohibitions rather than to give ourselves over to such dubious scholastic hairsplitting.10 In response to this move, I will note two things. First and foremost, if we give up on the distinction between intention and side effects, then we will have to admit that it is always an open question whether one may, for instance, deliberately plan the death of innocent people as a means to achieving an end, or perform any other act that is generally between intention and foresight, not the difference between doing and allowing, which I am ignoring given the limited purposes of this paper. 7 The first moral philosopher to use this as a test case was H.L.A. Hart, “Intention and Punishment,” Oxford Review (4), 1967. Reprinted in Hart, Punishment and Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. 8 Thomson (1999), p. 510. 9 Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect.” Virtues and Vices, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 10 See Alison MacIntyre, “Doing Away with Double Effect” Ethics 111 (2): 2001, pp. 219-255. Even prominent defenders of double effect want to do away with absolute prohibitions. For a recent example, see William J. FitzPatrick, “Acts, Intentions, and Moral Permissibility: In Defence of the Doctrine of Double Effect” Analysis 63 (4): Oct., 2003, pp. 317-321. 3 thought to be wicked. For the whole point of drawing the distinction was to respect two apparent truths at once: (1) the fact that there are some actions, like deliberately killing the innocent, that a just person will never choose to do, precisely because they are the sort of action that a just person finds repugnant, in opposition to her character; and (2) not everything an agent causes to happen is a matter of her character—of her willing, or rationally desiring, or voluntarily bringing it about.11 Now if the second is not true, if everything that an agent causes to happen falls under the scope of her rational desire just in case it is part of a causal chain of events she can reasonably foresee, then the idea of a general prohibition grounded in something other than weighing up consequences is either incoherent or profoundly unstable. For if any general prohibition is defeasible on the grounds that it cannot hold in cases where more good effects will be brought about from performing it than bad, then it is plain that what really matters, morally speaking, is that an agent bring about more good than bad effects, rather than whatever other measure the general prohibition was meant to reflect in the first place (say, the kind of character necessary to realize a good human life, the moral law, and so on). And if that is the case, then practical deliberation will inevitably become a matter of weighing up good and bad consequences, at least at some level. For without the distinction between intentional/voluntary action and side effects, it becomes difficult to fathom how there could be any ground of a prohibition other than some calculation as to what sorts of acts tend to bring about a preponderance of good effects. Because, again, all that it is to act intentionally is knowingly to bring about a chain of effects in the world. Second, if we deny the practical salience of the intention/side effect distinction, then we suddenly have no way to explain our intuitions about the first two cases. Surely we want to say that the father who refuses to murder his neighbor’s children is not responsible for the fact that his own children are harmed as a direct consequence; nor should we say anything so callous as that he intends for them to die. But this is in fact what we are forced to say if we give up the distinction between intention and side effects. 11 Aristotle tries to account for this in his discussion of the mixed voluntary. For an intriguing argument that Aristotle held something close to the principle of double effect, see Michael Pakaluk, “Mixed Actions and Double Effect” in Michael Pakaluk and Giles Pearson, eds., Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 211-232. 4 Such a large-scale revision of our ordinary language and our moral and legal intuitions should give us pause.12 It seems to me that these troubles arise because moral philosophers and action theorists fail to distinguish the relevant sense of knowledge that is essential to any credible account of intention, moral agency, and responsibility. In this paper, my main goal is to begin to fill this gap. In what follows, I argue that what we do intentionally and voluntarily tracks what we have a peculiar practical sort of knowledge of—a mode of knowledge that is productive of what it cognizes under the general aspect of the good. In spelling this claim out in detail, I think we will get clearer about what sense of ‘cause’ is operative when we speak about moral agency and responsibility in general; on my view, it is to be a voluntary or rational cause, and not simply a moving or efficient cause that initiates a sequence of causal events.13 In my concluding remarks, I will say how I think this can help us think more clearly about the intended/foreseen distinction and its potential applications, as well as the so-called “doctrine of double effect.” Before we get to the theory of practical knowledge that is necessary to ground the distinction between intention and side effects, however, a little more stage setting is in order. II. Two Views of Intention One way to doubt there is a practically salient distinction between intention and side effects is to focus on cases where we do not wish to exonerate someone on the grounds that the bad consequences of their actions had no personal appeal. This is Sidgwick’s line in The Method of Ethics, where he writes: I think, however, that for purposes of exact moral or jural discussion, it is best to include under the term ‘intention’ all the consequences of an act that are foreseen as certain or probable; since it will be admitted that we cannot evade responsibility for any foreseen bad consequences of our acts by the plea that we felt no desire for them, either for their 12 Philip Pettit publicly admitted this at a recent conference in response to a version of the cases I have presented here. Although he acknowledged it is “a harsh bullet to bite,” he thinks that the intention/foresight distinction is too philosophically suspect to do any work in moral theory. He develops this view at some length in his latest book, The Robust Demands of the Good, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 13 Of course, many philosophers think that a reason can be an efficient cause. The locus classicus for this view is Donald Davidson’s “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” Journal of Philosophy 60 (23) 1963: pp. 685700. Reprinted in Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. I will not explicitly take up the arguments for the causal theory of action in this paper, though it follows from what I do say that a rational cause and an efficient cause are distinct types of cause (or types of explanation) and we should not try to reduce the former to the latter. 5 own sake or as a means to ulterior ends: such undesired accompaniments of the desired results of our volitions are clearly chosen or willed by us.14 Sigdwick’s view is that agents intend all the foreseen consequences of their actions. Such a view is radically third personal because it gives no importance to the first person perspective of the deliberating agent. On this account, one can know what an agent intended to do from an entirely third personal perspective grounded in empirical knowledge of cause and effect; after all, what is “reasonably foreseen” is in principle the same from a first personal or a third personal perspective—one only needs to see what happens when some acts and ask oneself whether such events could reasonably be foreseen by the agent who caused them to occur. Sidgewick’s radically third personal account of action is hard to swallow. It violates our common sense intuitions about the scope of human agency and personal responsibility. On this view, an engineer who constructs a highway must intend the deaths that he surely foresees will occur due to its construction, the cardinal must intend the imprisonment of his priests, and, a person taking cancer medication intends to be nauseated and lose her hair. Indeed, on Sidgwick’s view, we may as well say that human beings have a standing intention to move particles about the universe; after all, we know with certainty that we bring about this effect all the time, no matter what we do. But that’s absurd. What motivates Sidgwick to accept such counter-intuitive results? I take it he is motivated by a core insight any action theory ought to account for: the foreseen consequences of what you rationally desire to do, here and now, do matter to whether you ought to do it, here and now. For instance, if I know that driving to work this morning will likely cause an accident and endanger lives (say, because of icy road conditions) then, all things considered, I ought not drive to work. It does no good to say that I didn’t intend an accident or find it rationally desirable, since driving on a road that has, for all intents and purposes, become an ice rink, is impermissible precisely because it is likely to have gravely harmful consequences. So, if I callously drive in conditions in which I am 14 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981 (seventh edition), p. 202, emphasis added. 6 likely to risk the lives of others, I am responsible for those lives if and when they are lost, even when the loss of those lives held no appeal for me. But we can acknowledge cases of negligence without being forced to accept Sidgwick’s ridiculous definition of intention. For we clearly needn’t assume, as Sidgwick does, that the concept ‘intention’ exhausts the realm of personal responsibility. We can accommodate the fact that foreseen side effects are not irrelevant to right practical reasoning without defining right practical reasoning solely in terms of calculating the good and bad consequences of what is done. The choice between thinking that consequences never matter and that consequences are all that matter is a false dichotomy. In response to the problems with the third person view, some have suggested a radically first personal alternative. The exemplar here would be the Boyle, Finnis, Grisez theory.15 I will rely on the account of this view so nicely summarized by one of its principle adherents, Christopher Tollefsen, who describes the “basics” of the first person account of action this way: I seek some benefit by bringing about some state of affairs in which the benefit is to be achieved. My intention encompasses the ultimately desired state of affairs, the benefit I seek in that state of affairs, and any subordinate states of affairs that I choose as instrumental towards achieving the ultimately desired state of affairs[…] it is only from the perspective of the choosing and acting agent that the nature of the act itself is determined[…] There is, as far as human action is concerned, no natural class of actions on which my intentions supervene. Rather, what I did, precisely, is entirely a function of my intention: the end and the means I have settled on.16 Let us set aside for now whether or not the object of intention is a set of states of affairs, as Tollefsen assumes.17 What is of interest in the account for our purposes is the radically first personal nature of what counts as an object of intention. On this account, it is only from the first person perspective of the agent who chooses a “proposal for action” that the nature of the act in question (the thing done or performed) can be given a determinate species (that is, can be called an act of Φ-ing rather than ψ-ing.). What we 15 The definitive account is their influential article, ““Direct and Indirect”: A Reply to Critics of our Action Theory” in The Thomist, pp. 1-44. 16 Christopher Tollefsen, “Is A Purely First Person Account of Human Action Defensible?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (9), 2006: p. 444 17 For arguments to the contrary, see Anselm Mueller, “Radical Subjectivity” Ratio 19, 1979: 115-132, Michael Thompson, Life and Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 120-146, and Matthew Boyle and Douglas Lavin, “Goodness and Desire” in Sergio Tenenbaum, ed., Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 161-201. 7 say one does, on the first person account, is entirely a function of one’s rational choices or plans—what one has chosen as one’s end, as well as the means one has chosen in order to attain that end. Because what an agent intends is entirely a function of what he rationally desires and nothing else, there could be no third person test or criterion that could undermine an agent’s sincere report of what he intends—intentions are the provenance of the first personal perspective alone.18 But this too has counter-intuitive implications. Consider again the classic case of craniotomy. Even though this procedure involves the doctor directly crushing the skull of the human fetus, the first personal account claims that in so doing the doctor may not intend the death of the fetus, despite the fact that crushing a human skull is causally inseparable from the death of the fetus. By Tollefsen’s lights, a good Roman Catholic doctor can merely intend to save the mother’s life and act under the intentional description ‘changing the shape of the baby’s head’ rather than ‘crushing its skull’; thus, while he intentionally ‘changes the shape of the head’, this doctor merely foresees that what he does—a ‘shape altering act’—will kill the fetus but does not intend it.19 It is a crucial part of the radically first personal account that natural necessities are not factored into practical reasoning and willing, a realm of freedom that is not determined by nature. Thus, the fact that human beings die when their skulls are crushed is of no importance to the determination of whether a doctor intended to kill his patient. For the doctor needn’t intend to ‘crush the skull’ while crushing the skull of the fetus, through a practical judgment he can merely intend to alter the shape of the head. Like its radically third personal counterpart, the radically first personal account also violates our pre-theoretical, common sense intuitions, though in the opposite direction. Whereas the third personal account lets in too much third personal data, the first person account lets in far too little—in fact, none! On this view, an agent will always be able to describe what she does—perhaps sincerely—in a way that is radically 18 Tollefsen writes, “[I]f the purely first person account is correct, there can be no [third personal] criteria: there is nothing against which to test the agent’s action to determine what intention the agent had, or must have had, for it is the agent herself who is the sole determinant of what her intention is. This is not to say that whatever the agent says about her intention is true, even whatever the agent might say to herself; nor is it to make the formation of an intention a separate performance inside the agent’s mind. But a first person account cannot accept any third person test—criteria—as providing a sufficient account of an agent’s intention on any given occasion.” See Tollefsen (2006), p. 453. 19 Tollefsen (2006), p. 450. 8 out of joint from the facts on the ground. Surely this gives the agent too much authority over what we can say an agent does intentionally, and surely we want to respect the common sense idea that an observer can walk into a room and straightaway tell what someone is doing intentionally. If intentions are purely a matter of the heart, then it is unclear why the reports of witnesses to an event play a credible evidentiary role in trials, for instance. For that practice plainly rests on the assumption that intentions in actions are observable. If someone observes you crushing someone’s skull with instruments carefully laid out, it’s going to be very hard to argue that you were not observed to be killing a human being. What motivates Tollefsen to accept such counter-intuitive results? He too is motivated by a core insight any action theory ought to account for: the first person perspective of the deliberating practical agent plays an essential specifying role in action explanation: we have first person authority over which action descriptions count as intentional. Sidgwick’s account of action cannot accommodate this basic truth, and should be rejected on those grounds. Tollefsen is incorrect to presume, however, that practical reasoning is somehow hermetically sealed off from the world in which its objects are realized, such that a third person perspective is irrelevant to the determination of intentions in action. Practical reason and will are principles of living human bodies that operate in a natural and social world with its own independently specifiable structures, and it takes as its objects naturalsocial things in that world. It is, for that reason, no realm of pure freedom untainted by natural and social realities.20 Any sensible theory of practical reason and intentional action must account for the fact that the social and material human world in which we live restricts our practical reasoning and what we can credibly say are the objects of our intentions and the intentionalness of one’s action.21 I agree with Elizabeth Anscombe that one can’t “simply bring it about that you intend this and not that by an inner act of ‘directing your intention.’ Circumstances, and the immediate facts about the means you 20 See Tollefsen (2006) for this language, p. 458. Tollefsen does argue that “agent rationality is of course sensitive to natural causal relations” but he does not spell out what this means. And given the craniotomy case, we can surely wonder whether it is sensitive enough! 21 9 are choosing to your ends, dictate what descriptions of your intention you must admit.”22 Anscombe, in response to the question how we can know another person’s intentions, points to the fact that, we can simply say ‘Look at a man and say what he is doing’—i.e. say what would immediately come to your mind as a report to give someone who could not see him and who wanted to know what was to be seen in that place. In most cases what you will say is what the man himself knows; and again in most, though indeed in fewer, cases you will be reporting not merely what he is doing, but an intention of his—namely, to do that thing. What is more, if it is not an intention of his, this will for the most part be clear without asking him.23 Anscombe concludes from these reflections that if we want to know what a man intends, we ought to consider first what we observe him doing. The opposite is the case on the radically first personal account. I have been arguing that neither the radically third personal nor the radically first personal accounts of intentions in action match our common sense intuitions about the specification of what an agent does intentionally. Each of these extremes is grounded in an insight that any sensible theory of action must respect. We need a theory of action that can bring these two perspectives together, such that the first person perspective of practical reason and will and the third person perspective of an observer are fundamentally united. We find the materials for such an account in Elizabeth Anscombe’s groundbreaking monograph on action, Intention. So let us now turn to that account, and in particular, to her claim that an agent has a special practical form of knowledge of what she does when she acts intentionally and voluntarily, such that intentional and voluntary descriptions of actions are always objects of practical knowledge. III. Knowledge and Intentional Action In order to motivate an account of intention grounded in practical knowledge, let us begin with a point about which most action theorists agree: when we act intentionally, we act under intentional descriptions. This is because whenever we act intentionally, we cause many things to happen, and not everything we cause to happen is under our rational control. 22 23 Anscombe, 2005, p. 223. Anscombe rightly calls such an account Cartesian. See Anscombe (2000), p. 8-9. 10 For example, imagine that Jones ‘flips a light switch’ as he walks into his room. At the same time he performs this act, many other descriptions of what he causes to happen are equally true from a third person point of view: a bunch of Jones’s neurons fire, particles are moved about, Jones’s pupils dilate, shadows are cast across the room, suchand such amount of energy is expended, a clicking sound is made, the room is illuminated, the dog is awoken, and a prowler is alerted to the owner’s presence in the house. Suppose all of these descriptions of what happens when Jones acts are perfectly true. But not all the descriptions are thereby intentional. Clearly a theory of action will need to be able to draw a principled distinction between intentional descriptions and non-intentional descriptions of action, between what a person does as a matter of will and what a person merely effects or produces. In order to evaluate an action, we must first know what is done intentionally; further, once we have identified those descriptions, we must still ask which of these descriptions is the most formally defining—which description picks out what kind of action took place. For example, we need answers to questions like the following: In signing those papers, is the President of the United States commanding his pilots to commit acts of mass murder upon innocent civilians, or is the more appropriate description that he is simply commanding them to end the war in order to save American lives and resources, since these are his ultimate purpose in dropping the atomic bombs?24 We need an account that can specify his actions into a kind—an account by which we can say, this is what the man essentially did. Anscombe herself proposes that a “special sense of the question ‘Why?” will reveal “the order there is in this chaos,”25 and that the sense of the question is “that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting.”26 The ‘Why?’ question is meant to elicit the agent’s ends or purposes in the causal flux of nature; it reveals the presence of rational agency at work in the natural world and helps us to determine which action descriptions will count as intentional. 24 It is quite clear that Anscombe took up questions in action theory because she was upset by the rhetoric in defense of Harry Truman. See her discussions in “War and Murder” and “Mr. Truman’s Degree” in Ethics, Religion, and Politics, Collected Philosophical Papers Volume III, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981, pp. 51-62. 25 G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 80. 26 Anscombe (2000), p. 9. 11 Anscombe further argues that this ‘Why?’ question is always refused application if the agent doesn’t know that his action falls under the description with which it is posed. For instance, if someone were to ask Jones, “Why did you wake up poor Fido?” and his answer indicates a lack of knowledge that Fido was in the room in the first place, then ‘waking up Fido’ could not have been something Jones did intentionally. There is a knowledge requirement on action descriptions. It’s not enough, however, to say that one must know the intentional description of what one does, for Jones’s can know that he is waking up Fido as soon as he flips the switch and lights up the room—he discovers it. But knowledge of intentional action, Anscombe insists, cannot be a matter of observing what happens as one acts. The knowledge that concerns her is possessed without observation, inference, or any evidential grounds.27 But what does the claim that an agent must know “the description under which” he acts if he acts intentionally mean? If all that Anscombe’s knowledge requirement amounts to is the anodyne claim that an agent must know what he intends to do—i.e., he must know his own mind—then it would hardly merit special attention. But Anscombe’s requirement is much stronger and far more controversial. Anscombe claims that intentional descriptions are descriptions of what the agent really does—the act itself the agent performs—and not merely descriptions of the agent’s inner volitional and intellectual states. The intentional descriptions are the descriptions of “what happens,” since when I act intentionally, “I do what happens.”28 And “what happens” extends well beyond mere movements of the agent’s body: it extends to what we can say happens to objects in the world: a wall is painted, a window is opened, and paper on action is completed. After all, if it is true to say that I am painting a wall (intentionally), then it must also be true to say that the wall is being painted (intentionally) by me. It is part of my performance that I produce specific changes in the world—changes to paint, brush, wall, etc.—and these changes are known not by observation or through some evidence but, as Anscombe says, “in intention.” 27 Of course, evidential grounds are not the only rational grounds of knowledge. So to say that the knowledge does not rest on evidence is not to say that it’s groundless. Otherwise it couldn’t possibly be knowledge. 28 Anscombe (2000), p 52. 12 Anscombe admits that her view strikes most everyone as “extremely paradoxical and obscure.”29 Surely we know “what happens” in the world through observation and discovery, and not through our intentions and practical reasoning.30 That is, surely I know what I intend in one sort of way (say, by making up my mind and choosing on rational grounds), and I know what happens in the world (or with my body) in an altogether different sort of way (by observation or inference). In the former case it is often said that I have first-personal, self-knowledge—knowledge of my own agency in operation. In the latter case, I have third personal, other-knowledge: knowledge of the world, of what happens as a result of the exercise of my agency. The two kinds of knowledge seem irreconcilably different to many philosophers, because they correspond to what seems to them to be metaphysically distinct kinds of events or happenings: intending to do X (first personal, non-observable mental event) and doing X (third personal, observable, physical event). Once this metaphysical separation between the mental and physical is in place, it is natural to say, as many philosophers do, that although we may necessarily know with first person authority what we intend to do, we do not necessarily know what we actually do. For what we actually do is largely a matter of things and causal forces that are not under our rational control.31 Consequently, it is argued that the source of our knowledge of what we intend to do and the source of our knowledge of what actually happens must be distinct. Anscombe denies that intentional descriptions pick out a primarily inner reality, because she denies that the source of the knowledge of what we intend is distinct from the source of our knowledge of what we do or make happen, since what we do or make 29 Ibid. Well known proponents of such a view include: Keith Donnellan, “Knowing What I am Doing,” Journal of Philosophy 60 (14), 1963: 401-409; Donald Davidson, “Agency,” Essays on Actions and Events, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, p. 50; John R. Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p. 90; Michael Bratman, Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987. Reissued by CSLI Publications, 1999, pp. 37-8; and Sarah K. Paul, “How We Know What We’re Doing,” Philosopher’s Imprint 9 (11) 2009: pp. 1-23. 31 As Davidson memorably puts the conventional, purportedly non-paradoxical view: “We never do more than move our bodies: the rest is up to nature.” “Agency” in Essays on Action and Events, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 59. It is interesting, but perhaps unsurprising, that Tollefsen renders our agency even more impotent. He writes, “agents cannot…be held responsible on their own for bringing into being the particular states of affairs that they will and intend; no agent can bring it about, all by herself, that she even wiggles her finger; the variety of concurrent causes necessary for this to happen are well beyond any agent’s capacity.” Op cit., p. 458. The Anscombian view I endorse is radically opposed to such Cartesian hand wringing, because it is radically opposed to the Cartesian conception of mind that motivates it. 30 13 happen intentionally is not primarily a matter of natural causes but a matter of the will realizing its objects through the voluntary exercise of our powers in and upon objects in the world. The source in each case is the same: the knowledge is ultimately grounded in the agent’s capacities for practical reason and will, because performing an intentional act is fundamentally an exercise of these capacities, not merely the natural effects of a prior exercise of them. And so knowledge of the intentional descriptions of action is a kind of self-knowledge: knowledge of the agent’s intention in acting. But it is also knowledge of a material reality, because an agent realizes her intentions by moving her body in a material world and upon some matter outside herself. And so practical knowledge, or “knowledge in intention,” is a kind of self-knowledge of what happens to things in the world. Anscombe calls it practical knowledge, precisely because the knower produces the object it cognizes. And so in that sense it is, as Aquinas so aptly puts it, “the cause of what it understands.”32 This practical knowledge is formally distinct from the speculative model of knowledge. On the latter model, some reality is taken to be prior to the knowledge, and dictates what is to count as known. Speculative knowledge is a matter of the mind conforming to the world, to how things already are. For instance, suppose I judge that the cat is on the mat. This is true, if and only if, prior to my judgment, there is a cat on a mat. Obviously, this cannot be how an agent knows his own action. For again, Jones knows that he has awoken poor Fido in flipping the switch. But this is a matter of discovery, and thereby ruled out as an intentional description. But doesn’t this show that the two perspectives—inner/mind and outer/world— stand in tension and conflict and that I might simply fail to have the kind of knowledge Anscombe suggests? Herein lies the paradoxical nature of the view. Anscombe writes: For if there are two knowledges—one by observation, the other in intention— then it looks as if there must be two objects of knowledge; but if one says the objects are the same, one looks hopelessly for the different mode of contemplative knowledge in acting, as if there were a very queer and special sort of seeing eye in the middle of acting.33 32 33 Anscombe (2000), p. 87. 2000, p. 57. 14 Anscombe seeks an account of practical knowledge that shows how one and the same reality—an agent’s intentional action—can be known in two fundamentally different but ultimately compatible ways: “in intention”, from the first person perspective of the agent who performs the action for practical reasons, and “contemplatively”, from the third person perspective of an observer. The demand for a unified account of the two perspectives comes from her conviction that the will is not a power to intend and hope for the best from step-motherly nature; rather, the will is a power to execute or realize intentions through the voluntary exercise of the agent’s powers other than the will. Thus, when Anscombe speaks of a “form of description of events” to which particular intentional descriptions conform, she is clear these are given by “the agent’s knowledge of what he is doing” and that these should be characterized in a general way as “the execution of intentions.”34 What can fall under such a general form (or be an intentional description) is not merely an inner intending but an outward execution or realization of what is rationally desired. In the next section, I will argue that our understanding of this general “form of description of events” just is our general schematic representation of intentional action, and that such actions are essentially objects of practical knowledge. The key idea here is that intentional actions are inscribed with an order of practical reason. This order, which Anscombe calls the A-D order, is a practical, teleological order—the order of practical goodness that defines the unity of an action as the unity of a series of means to an end specified through acts of practical reason and desired by acts of will. Although an order of reason, it is not simply an inner order of reason and decision, but an external order of execution and realization as well. And so knowledge of this order is not simply knowledge of some inner mental states, but actual performances (or, executions of intentions) through the use of one’s body to manipulate objects and bring about changes in the world. IV. Practical Knowledge and Intentional Objects Frege famously argued that thoughts are formally structured unities;35 it is less often recognized that Anscombe’s central idea in Intention is to extend the same sort of 34 Anscombe (2000), p. 87. Gottlob Frege, “On Concept and Object” and “Thought” in Michael Beaney, ed., The Frege Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 181-193 and 325-345. 35 15 analysis to intentional actions.36 She argues that the performance of an intentional action just is the realization or execution of a practical order of reason—an order that is just as internal to and constitutive of the action itself as the rational order is internal to and constitutive of thought according to Frege. It is because actions are constituted by an order of practical reason that they are necessarily intentional objects and, as such, must be known practically by the agents who conceive of and realize them through their own activity. Intentional Descriptions and the Order of Action Anscombe’s famous example of the murderous pumper in section 23 of Intention is supposed to demonstrate that the order internal to action is an order of practical reason and will. She asks us to imagine a man who is performing the following actions: moving his arm up and down repeatedly (A-ing), in order to operate a pump (B-ing), in order to replenish the house water supply (C-ing) in order to poison the inhabitants of the house (D-ing). These four actions (each intentional) form a series of nested practical rationalizations, and so the ‘Why?’ question applies to each action as we move through the series: “Why are you moving your arm up and down on that pump?” “In order to pump water.” “Why are you pumping water?” “In order to replenish the house supply.” “Why are you replenishing the house supply? “In order to poison the Nazis inside.” What the example shows is that the ‘Why?’ question is typically a solicitation of what one’s end or goal is in doing whatever one is presently up to. And, as we’ve seen, the end is itself always a part of what is done at any stage. For pumping his arms up and down, here and now, just is poisoning the inhabitants, because it is the means by which 36 For a detailed analysis of the similarities between Frege and Anscombe on this point, see Christopher Frey and Jennifer A. Frey, “Anscombe on the Analogical Unity of Intention in Perception and Action, unpublished manuscript, available for download at https://www.academia.edu/16545077/GEM_Anscombe_on_the_Analogical_Unity_of_Intention_in_Percep tion_and_Action. 16 the man who pumps is currently attaining that specified end.37 But the “just is” here is not a matter of natural law—there is no natural connection between these elements. Rather, it is the agent’s intention that grounds this identity. The claim that pumping the water just is poisoning the inhabitants is further supported by the fact that the series of ‘Why?’ questions running from A-D is the mirror image of a series of ‘How?’ questions, from D-A. So looked at the other way around, we might have asked our pumper: “How are you poisoning the inhabitants?” “By replenishing the house supply with poisoned water.” “How are you replenishing the house supply?” “By pumping water from the cistern.” “How are you pumping the water? “By operating the pump.” “How is the pump operated?” “By moving my arm up and down on the handle.” The rational structure of action revealed by the two questions shows that what the agent currently does is much wider than his bodily movements: he acts on things in the world, such as a pump, some quantity of water, a cistern, a group of Nazis, etc. And his current movements can only be understood within a much wider context: the end for the sake of which they are presently being undertaken. What the questions reveal is the means the agent takes in light of the end the agent is striving to achieve or attain. Now, the pumper’s ability to answer both questions— ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’—depends upon his prior ability to answer the question, “What are you doing?” The agent must know what he’s up to—the specification of the act type he is performing—in order to know why what he’s currently doing (operating a pump) serves its achievement (a poisoning of some Nazis). Now, if actions are constituted by such an internal, means-end order, an order elicited by the question ‘Why?,’ we should be 37 This means that we could always state the agent’s response in progressive form. And then we would have “I’m pumping water”; I’m replenishing the house supply”; I’m poisoning the Nazi’s inside.” This shows the broadness and the openness of events. Even though no one is yet poisoned, and perhaps no water has yet to reach the house, it is true to say that, here and now, this man moving his arms up and down is a poisoning, even if the poison fails (in which case it is an unsuccessful poisoning, but a poisoning nevertheless). 17 able to construct a general account of what it is to represent such an order that will be intelligible from both a first personal and third personal point of view. The Order of A Movement Michael Thompson sees the need for such a general formal account. Recognizing that actions are typically temporally structured movements, he argues that whenever two actions are related as means and end, the end is always what is represented as what is presently incomplete, unfinished, or imperfect. So, if some instance of an action concept ‘doing A’ is to figure in thought as a means, with some instance of a concept of ‘doing B’ as an end, then the latter must in principle figure in the past imperfective judgment ‘X was doing B’, or in the present imperfective judgment ‘X is doing B’. What a representation of something as an end cannot do, Thompson argues, is figure in the past perfective judgment that ‘X did B’ or ‘X B-ed.’ For once one has attained, completed, or is finished with ‘doing B,’ it can no longer count as an end towards which one is progressing, and is then no longer an action at all but something one did, a completed, particular event. These reflections lead Thompson to put forward the following schema of the representation of an intentional action as an event with a means-end order: Explanation by Imperfective: If X is doing A as a means to doing B, then doing A must non-accidentally advance the progress of B, which is at present incomplete.38 For example, let us suppose that in flipping the switch to illuminate the room, Jones also makes a clicking sound, and he knows this. Does he thereby intend to make a clicking sound in flipping the switch? Some philosophers are committed to saying he does,39 but this seems deeply counter-intuitive. Thompson’s account explains why: making a clicking sound does not non-accidentally progress Jones towards his end of illuminating the room. I think Thompson is correct to pay careful attention to the temporality of actions as movements. A “doing” is essentially something in progress towards a specified term 38 For the complete argument for this schema, see Michael Thompson, Life and Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2008, pp. 122-34 39 Some prominent examples are Michael Bratman (1999), p. 123 and Sarah K. Paul, “How We Know What We’re Doing, Philosopher’s Imprint 9 (11) 2009: pp. 1-23. 18 of completion. As such, it may be something that is interrupted or interfered with, and we do mark this in thought by making a transition from imperfective to perfective: passing from the representation of someone as doing A to having done or completed A successfully. And so action concepts have an infinitival form—to do A—which marks them as temporally structured. This means that the canonical form of an action is something in the progressive: A-ing. The importance of this is threefold. First, a progressive judgment (I am A-ing) may be true while the corresponding perfective judgment (I A-ed) is false. For instance, if there was a time when it was true to say that “he is running the marathon,” then it was true to say that “he was running the marathon;” and this is compatible with the corresponding perfective judgment’s (he ran the marathon) being false (perhaps his knee gave out on him in the final mile). Practical knowledge in Anscombe’s sense of “knowledge in intention” is only knowledge of what one is doing presently. Because of the broadness and the openness of the progressive, one may be doing something presently and not doing it well or successfully, and one may be doing something presently that one never finishes at all. The logic of tense and aspect can help us to sort out these entailments.40 Second, Thompson’s account highlights the fact that in order to specify a process as belonging to a general kind—to judge that this process is the running of a marathon— our thought necessarily reaches ahead into an already specified future or state of completion. Any representation that X is doing A depends upon a corresponding representation of X’s having done A, and non-accidentally so. This is true of any movement in progress. For instance, my judgment that the ball is ‘rolling down the hill’ depends upon my general background knowledge of the typical downward trajectory of certain objects at certain angles. This look to the wider context that I can observe at a time shows that the specification of anything in progress depends upon knowledge of its end, or that towards which it is non-accidentally progressing. A movement possesses directionality—it is movement towards some specifiable terminus ad quem. 40 Some of these entailments are worked out in Kevin Falvey, “Knowledge in Intention” Philosophical Studies 99 (1) 2000, pp. 21-44 and Sarah K. Paul (2009). See also Michael Thompson, “Anscombe’s Intention and Practical Knowledge” in Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby, and Frederick Stoutland, eds., Essays on Anscombe’s Intention, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, pp. 198-210. 19 Third, Thompson’s general schema problematizes the unreflective appeal to psychological states as the fundamental units of action explanation. Since an action is a movement towards a specific end, it cannot adequately be captured as a succession of states, and thus it is difficult to see how it can be explained by appeal to a previous state as its moving cause.41 For all of its advantages, however, I think Thompson’s schema is too limited to capture the representation of an action as an essentially intentional event, because it does not yet show that the non-accidental unity of action is a specifically practical one. The temporal structure of actions as movements is insufficient to ground such a unity.42 The terminus ad quem of an intentional action presupposes a terminus ad quo, and we will need materials that go beyond the temporality of action to give a proper account of it. The Order of Intention and the Form of Action Though it is rarely remarked upon, Anscombe insists that we cannot hope to understand her account of practical knowledge, and thus her account of action, unless we first understand its relation to practical reasoning, or what she says is the same thing, the practical syllogism.43 I think this is because she takes the representation of the unity of an intentional action—its internal, means-end order—to be what is expressed in the syllogism. That is, the practical syllogism represents the action in the form of a practical argument, the conclusion of which is the performance of what has been specified by the premises. What the premises show is the end the agent is after and the means through which it is to be attained. As a conclusion of an argument, the action is only intelligible in light of these premises. I will now argue that the intelligibility of the “form of description of events” that we are after is grasped by way of the practical syllogism. First, it is important to state that the syllogism is not a representation of a thought process that occurs prior to action; Anscombe is not suggesting that we “syllogize” before we act intentionally. Rather, the syllogism is a formal presentation of the rational 41 For further arguments, see Douglas Lavin, “Action as a Form of Temporal Unity: On Anscombe’s Intention” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 45 (5), 2016: pp. 609-629. 42 Thompson himself basically admits as much in explicating his “naïve action theory.” I don’t think he was under any illusion that he had given a complete account; his main aim, I think, was simply to clear up fundamental confusions about the subject matter at hand. 43 Some exceptions to this include Sebastian Rödl, “Two Forms of Practical Knowledge and Their Unity” in Ford, Hornsby, and Stoutland, 2011, pp. 211-241; John Schwenkler, “Understanding Practical Knowledge” Philosopher’s Imprint, 15 (15), pp. 1-32; Candace Vogler, “Anscombe on Practical Inference” in Elijah Millgram, ed., Varieties of Practical Inference, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 437-464. 20 order of action. Let us return to Anscombe’s example of the man pumping water to see this. An agent has an end or goal: in this case, the death of some Nazis. This wanting is no mere idle wish or fantasy, but something that he is striving to attain.44 But now there are many ways a man might kill some Nazis, and he needs to decide upon some specific means, here and now. Obviously, this determination will not be made in the abstract, but within the context of his own life at this juncture, and will thus be constrained by many factors: his background beliefs, his circumstances (including objective facts about the material resources and objects at his disposal), his practical skills, his other goals, and his general conception of how to live. All of these factors are determined prior to the choice of means and constrain it in various ways. Let us suppose, as Anscombe’s example suggests, that the agent wants to kill the Nazis in the least conspicuous way to avoid being noticed by authorities. So he settles on poisoning as the means of killing the Nazis, and further decides to pollute the house water supply with a cumulative poison to avoid suspicion. He makes a practical judgment of these means and then sets about acting accordingly. In the act of deciding upon specific means, the end is no longer willed generally, but now in a specific, determinate way. The order of action is an order of reason and will rather than nature; for, establishing the elements of the order is a matter of reasoning and judgment, whereas being moved to realize what is so ordered is a matter of will or rational desire. The explanation of action necessarily involves both elements: the rational specification of an object of pursuit and the will to attain it. Since reason and will are self-conscious powers, I have immediate, non-observational, self-knowledge of my exercise of them: I know the end I’m after because I have determined myself to seek it on rational grounds; I know the means by which I’ll attain it because I have chosen to pursue my end through them. In this way I have self-knowledge of what I intend: of what I want and how I plan to achieve what I want. Such knowledge is essentially first personal in character, because the ground of the knowledge is the self-conscious exercise of my own agency.45 44 In the example we are told that it is done in order to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. For rich arguments for these claims, see Richard Moran, Authority and Estrangement, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001; Matthew Boyle, “Two Kinds of Self-Knowledge” Philosophy and 45 21 So the order of action, as a rational order, is self-consciously known. However, as not all self-knowledge is practical knowledge, the account is still incomplete.46 We have not yet explained how the cognition of the order is practical: how, to borrow some language from Philippa Foot, the end is represented qua end, and the means qua means.47 To know an end qua end is to know it in relation to one’s other ends; for to will or rationally desire an end is always to adopt it in light of the wider context of one’s life as a whole, and one’s general conception of how one’s life ought to be ordered. This is reflected in the fact that the ‘Why?’ question applies to the end stated in the first premise. It is reasonable to ask why the man wants to kill Nazis. And, as Anscombe would have it, he has a reason: he knows that the Nazis are exterminating Jews, and he wants them out of power. He hopes, generally, to “bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and secure a good life for all people.”48 He doesn’t just find himself wanting to kill Nazis (the way one might just find oneself thirsty or tired), he has determined himself to kill them on grounds he accepts and that he can communicate intelligibly to others. And this determination is, again, no mere idle wish: he also wills to attain this further, more general end. And so he knows his end qua end, as something he seeks to attain under the aspect of the universal good—of his conception of the good human life.49 Furthermore, the representation of the means is an essentially practical representation, for it’s intelligibility also depends on the same look to the wider context of the agent’s own conception of how to live. To see this, let’s borrow another example from Anscombe. Suppose one wants to roast a pig for dinner.50 Well, one way to accomplish that is to burn down the house. What explains the fact that one doesn’t choose those means is surely that it would be unreasonable to burn down the house, given the value one places on having a home, one’s general ideas about wastefulness, one’s Phenomenological Research LXXVII: 1, 2009; and Sebastian Rödl Self-Consciousness, Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 2007. 46 For instance, I have self-knowledge of what I believe, because I have determined myself to believe it on some rational grounds. I do not know what I believe by inference, observation, etc. And yet this knowledge is not practical, for its inherent telos is not an action, but the forming of a proposition which can serve as the content or object of belief. 47 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 54. Of course, Foot is taking this language directly from Aquinas. 48 Anscombe (2000), p. 37. 49 I argue for this claim in more detail in “Action, Practical Knowledge, and the Good,” unpublished manuscript. 50 See her article, “Practical Inference” in Anscombe (2005), pp. 109-148. 22 general conception of how one relates to one’s neighbors, and so on. This shows that the choice of means is grounded not simply in the particular end wanted that it serves here and now, but also in one’s general conception of how to live. A practically rational man doesn’t think of actions in isolation from the rest of his life, but considers his ends and means in relation to the much greater whole of which they are parts. Hence, both the ends and the means are self-consciously known as “Aristotelian necessities”—they are known to be necessary given the ends (or goods) one seeks in one’s life.51 The practical syllogism is fundamentally a representation of this sort of practical necessity. The action, represented as the conclusion of the syllogism, is a preservation of the goodness of the end through these particular means. In acting, I not only know what I do because I determined myself to do it, but I also know it under the formal aspect of the universal good, as related to my general conception of the good life. It follows from the fact that intentional action descriptions are practical necessities that it is not enough that one knows what one is doing in order to be doing it intentionally; rather, one has to know how an intentional action description is practically salient—how it fits in the context of one’s particular action and how this fits within the much wider context of one’s life as a whole. This knowledge is implied by one’s ability to answer the practical sense of the question ‘Why?’ It’s obvious that many perfectly true descriptions of what one does when acting are not practically salient in this way, and thus are not intentional descriptions on Anscombe’s account. For this reason these nonintentional descriptions cannot be substituted, salva veritate, in sentences about an agent’s intentional actions. For example, imagine a marathoner who knows with certainty that by running a marathon he will wear down his shoes. Some philosophers have argued that, since he knows his action will wear down his shoes, we must say he wears them down intentionally.52 However, this seems like the wrong result. For one thing, we can imagine a range of cases in which the ‘Why?’ question is refused application by a runner. He may say something in response like, “well, it can’t be helped” or “I don’t care about that, I’m just 51 For an explication of this concept of necessity, see “Modern Moral Philosophy” in Anscombe (2005), pp. 175-180. 52 See for instance, Michael Bratman (1999), p. 123. 23 running the race.” Such responses refuse the question, but not for lack of knowledge of what is happening—he is perfectly well aware that his shoes are getting worn down by his running the race. Rather, the agent simply has no reason for wearing down his shoes—it is entirely outside the A-D or intentional order of his practical reason and will, and so the description is not salient from a first personal, practical point of view. That is, ‘wearing down his sneakers’ is not a description of the action that gets represented as a practical necessity by the agent, as it preserves no good he is after because it serves none of his practical ends. Therefore, the description ‘wearing down my sneakers’ it is not an object of practical knowledge, anymore than ‘moving particles about the universe’ is an intentional description of what I’m doing as I sit here typing these words. Of course, we can imagine a different runner, for whom the description is intentional. Perhaps the shoes are stolen from an enemy, and the runner wants to wear them down in order to damage the property of someone he loathes. But in absence of such a background, the description will typically be unintentional, or accidental to the practical order that defines what happens. The important of practical salience invites a comparison between Anscombe’s view and the purely first personal account of intention. And there is a crucial similarity between them: both views give priority to the perspective of the acting person and the specifying role of intention. What distinguishes them, however, is that Anscombe’s view that this perspective is essentially embodied and operates in a natural and social world that both shapes and limits it in important respects. We can see this by returning to the idea that the D-A order of the premises (the order of intention) is the mirror image of the A-D order of the conclusion or the action itself (the order of execution). The Order of Execution and the Matter of Action I have been arguing that an object of practical knowledge is represented as practically necessary or good. Anscombe further argues that such knowledge is “the cause of what it understands.”53 I take this to mean that in representing an action concept as to be done or realized the agent is thereby moved to realize it: he is the rational cause of its realization. This too is represented in the syllogism, since its conclusion is a doing or a performance of a certain action made intelligible by its premises, rather than a 53 Anscombe (2000), p. 87. 24 proposition about an action whose truth is made intelligible by its premises. And it explains why Anscombe says that the form of description of events she is after—the form of intentional actions—is characterized as “the execution of intentions.”54 The account of practical reasons would be incomplete if we stopped at the thought that the action is purportedly justified or made intelligible by the premises. For we should notice that the intentional performance itself is a mirror image of the order expressed in the syllogism. In the order of intention (the order internal to the premises) we begin with what is wanted and work towards finding appropriate means; in the order of execution (the order internal to the conclusion) we begin by realizing the first step towards what is wanted, the end, which is the farthest removed from it; moreover, the action is only complete or finished when the intended end is actually attained (or the good identified in the first premise is realized through the intentional performance of the means specified in the second premise). The syllogism is a representation of a unified order of practical reason and will that can be understood in two different ways: rational deliberation and material execution. And so there is a difference between intending and doing, just as there is a difference between the premises of an argument and its conclusion. But the difference is not that we are dealing with metaphysically distinct entities that are unified by some generic causal relation suitably specified by distinguishing features. For just as premises become mere sentences without the wider context of a conclusion which could possibly make them into the parts of a unified and complete argument, so intentions are mere wishes or hopes without the wider context of the bodily movements that could possibly make them into an action that realizes them. And just as I must have knowledge of the premises and the conclusion if I am to grasp an argument as a unified whole, so I must have self-knowledge not only of what I intend and how I can realize what I intend, but also how the movements of my body and objects in the world are the material realizations of this order if I am to grasp the exercise of my practical reason and will in their full actuality. The lesson of Intention is that both intending and doing are determined through acts of will and practical reason and are thereby constituted by the same practically rational order, which in turn means that the intentional order is constrained by some 54 Ibid. 25 given matter, including natural and social realities that can be described independently of my agency. I find that some terminology from Thomas Aquinas is helpful in explicating Anscombe on these points, in particular his distinction between “interior” and “exterior” acts of will. This division he draws is meant to help mark the distinction between intending and doing, not as separate metaphysical existences, but as different “acts” of one and the same power of will.55 According to Aquinas, intending the end and choosing the means to the end are “interior” acts of will.56 These are acts that order or proportion the agent to the doing or realizing of these objects. Interior acts are represented in the premises of the syllogism. The “exterior” acts, by contrast, are those by which the will uses other powers to realize its objects. In the language of Aquinas, an external act of will is the application of the object of choice (an end to be achieved through such and such means) to the powers that are necessary in order to realize it in concreto. This exterior act is necessary because an agent’s arm and a pump won’t move up and down simply because an agent intends for this to happen—the agent must actually move the pump himself.57 And to move the pump he must enlist powers other than the will—e.g., his locomotive and perceptual powers. 55 Action is ambiguous between action and actuality—I intend the latter. Thus, it would be a mistake to think that Aquinas is referring to temporally distinct mental actions such as choosing, intending, using, and so on. Rather, we should think of “acts” as actualizations of one and the same capacity of will. In the case of someone who decides to ϕ but doesn’t do anything to realize it—doesn’t use his other powers in order to bring it about that he has ϕ-ed—his will has not been completely actualized. This is the reality that Aquinas—an Aristotelian—wants to get at with his talk of different acts of will. 56 For a more extensive analysis of Aquinas’s theory of interior and exterior acts of will, see Stephen Brock, Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998, chapter 4 and Steven J. Jensen, Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through Saint Thomas Aquinas, Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 2010, chapter 3. I am indebted to each for my own grasp of the importance of this distinction. 57 Many proponents of the causal theory of action deny this of course. See, for instance, Berent Enç, How We Act, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Enç argues that the work of practical reason does not culminate in an action, but in the selection of some “macro behavior” or general representation of an acttype which is then translated into a concrete action by an entirely different automatic subsystem. On this view, rational agency ends in the formation of an intention—the rest is up to nature. Other causal theorists argue that Enc’s view delimits rational agency too much, and that we are more than causal initiators of subpersonal systems, but these theorists still stop short of agreeing with the Aristotelian tradition that the conclusion of reasoning is an action. For a paradigmatic example of latter view, see Sarah K. Paul, “The Conclusion of Practical Reasoning: The Shadow between Idea and Act” The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (3) 2013, pp. 287-302. 26 It is striking how many contemporary theorists stop at what Aquinas would call an interior act of will, as if human agents were simply an internal control center that initiated causal sequences that they then observed happening. Rather, in moving his arm and moving the pump, the agent self-consciously applies the object of an interior act to powers other than the will; that is, he moves his arm in accordance with his practical reason and will, and he does so in the practical knowledge that he is so doing it. This is just as much a part of his practical agency as deliberating about what to do. The concept of exterior acts of will allows Aquinas to explain how the selfconscious powers of will and practical reason can be the explanatory ground of the movements of a living human body in the world, and thus how agents can have selfknowledge of their own actions. The movement of my arm and the movement of a pump can both be movements of will when they are the “executions of intentions” and objects of practical knowledge. This will be so when it is true to say that the pump is moving up and down because I intend that it so move through the exercise of my own power to move it in accordance with my will. The order of this movement is not in the arm or in the pump naturally, since the movements in question are not explained by any natural tendencies in the human body or the objects acted upon. The explanation of the movements of the arm and the pump, therefore, properly lay in self-conscious acts of reason and will, whereby they become intentional movements. And so on his view, practical reason and will are self-conscious, rational powers whose exercise is not limited to some inner realm of the “mind”, but whose typical exercise is not fully actualized or remains incomplete without bodily transactions with and upon things in the world. The will informs external powers to be directed to some end through some means; likewise, the external powers must be suitable to receive forms of practical reason and will, since the nature of these powers is fixed independent of acts of will. For example, if an agent uses his power of sight in order to realize some end—say, to write on the blackboard—he does not thereby change the nature of his power of sight. An agent can voluntarily direct his sight upon this or that object, or refrain from looking at certain objects, and he can do this for reasons; therefore we say he exercises voluntary control over this power. But just as obviously, he cannot will to see in X-ray or hyperspectral color vision. Moreover, just as the will must move other powers to a voluntary operation, 27 so too these other powers must themselves be such as to be united to a human will, and not all human powers are subject to direct control. A human being cannot intend his cells to divide properly or intend to grow wings and fly to the moon. 58 All of these independent facts constrain our intentions and practical reasoning.59 Typically, human beings do not merely move their bodies but also act upon and bring about changes in things in the world. The thing acted upon is what Aquinas calls the act’s object, and the object plays an essential role in specifying an action into a general kind. For instance, in writing a sentence about action, I make use of my body, but I also make use of a pen and paper. The pen makes a contribution to my action by supplying the distribution of ink, and the page provides the necessary space for the words to appear—these are the material elements of my action. The formal element comes from the exercise of my capacities of practical reason and will: I determine that these objects will get bound up into an act of writing a paper on action, and thus determine what gets written on this paper by this pen, here and now. Of course, the matter and form are only separate conceptually—in reality, they are elements of one and the same intentional action. Although form is prior, matter plays an indispensible role, a role that is utterly neglected by the purely first personal account of action. Because practical thought and will extend into the world in this way, because their joint exercise specifies “what happens” in the world intentionally, there must be third personal constraints upon what an agent can reasonably be said to do intentionally. That is, there must be some third personal, objective criteria for what can count as an intentional description of an action, pace the radically first personal account. Although the first personal account is correct that reason and will provide the form of the action, and that this plays the crucial specifying role, it is equally true that the matter into which the form is being realized must be such as to receive that form, that is, to be able to undergo the change brought about by the agent. 58 Of course, human beings can do things that they know will promote healthy cell division. But we still don’t have direct control over our how our cells behave. 59 These reflections point to a truth about a power of will in animals. It belongs to the very idea of the operation of a power of will in an animal that it needs to ‘use’ the powers that it, in its interior acts, proportions itself towards; likewise, it belongs to those powers to be such that they can and need to be used. And that means that what can be typically known to fall under the formal aspect of the universal good, and what can typically be an object of practical knowledge, must be what is typically realizable though the agent’s animal powers. To specify anything as an object of will and practical knowledge is already to have necessarily constricted one’s practical thoughts to one’s own form of life. 28 The judgment of ends and means is constrained by facts about what it is in the agent’s powers to realize, as well as facts about what is being acted upon. Insofar as the operations of will and practical reason are intrinsically aimed at action, they are aimed at the world and the things in it. This is what distinguishes willing from wishful thinking or simple wanting: willing is aimed at what can possibly be done by the agent himself, and intentions (unlike hopes or wishes) are aimed at the execution or realization of what is wanted. If a child tells her parents she intends to ride her bike at the speed of light, it is perfectly correct for them to respond, “no you don’t, that’s impossible!” In fact, it is key to the acquisition of the concept of intention that such responses are in fact legitimately given, as a child must learn what is and what isn’t within the realm of human action. We are now in a position to discuss some of the third personally accessible facts that constrain the first person perspective of practical reason and will. First, practical reason and will are constrained by objective facts about human nature and its powers. Second, they are constrained by facts about an agent’s practical skills. One cannot intend or intentionally perform actions one does not have the skill to accomplish. Third, since practical reason and will are typically trained on objects in the world, facts about these objects and the world place further limitations. So, I cannot intend to kill a rock for the simple reason that a rock isn’t alive, and therefore nothing I do to it could constitute killing it. Social facts provide constraints in the same way. I cannot intend to marry a dog, because my country does not legally recognize marriage between humans and canines; nor can I intend to give all of my students the grade of E for effort, as this grade doesn’t exist at my university.60 If I tell you that I intend to do any of these things, it is well within your rights, from a third person perspective, to insist that I am simply wrong. In fact, our concept of intention appears to become entirely too subjective without these objective, material constraints.61 So while it is true that I have self-knowledge and first person authority over what I do, this authority is still answerable to a shared reality—the human world in which we live and act. And it is so answerable because acting intentionally is not simply a matter 60 Of course, I could set about getting the law changed. But that is something else entirely. For further discussion of material constraints and the specification of action, see Kevin Flannery, S.J.’s discussion in Acts Amid Precepts: The Aristotelian Logical Structure of Thomas Aquinas’s Moral Theory, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001, chapter seven. 61 29 of an inner pointing towards the world, for if it were, it could not be practical in any meaningful sense. I have been arguing that the key to understanding “the form of description of events” which intentional descriptions of action share, is that they are objects of an agent’s practical knowledge. I have defended this by establishing the following: (1) Intentional actions are events constituted by an order of practical reason whose inferential connections are explicitly represented in the practical syllogism. (2) This is a selfdetermined order, because its existence depends upon the exercise of the self-conscious powers of practical reason and will. The exercise of a self-conscious power is always self-consciously or first-personally known, and so this order is self-consciously and firstpersonally known. (3) The conclusion of the syllogism is an action rather than a proposition, because the performance of an intentional action is the self-consciously understood material realization of the goods rationally sought after by the agent. (4) The syllogism represents the unity of the order of intention and the order of execution, because an intentional action is the execution of the order specified in the premises through the voluntary use of the agent’s powers to act in and upon objects in the world. (5) Because practical reason and will are powers not only to intend but also to execute intentions, their proper exercise is constrained by the agent’s own form of life, including facts about the social and natural world in which this life form typically pursues its characteristic good. I conclude that the form of description of events that all intentional action descriptions share is both a description of a first personally known practical order of reason and will and a description of a first personally known performance in the world. Since actions are typically events unfolding in the world, they are also such as to be known from a third personal, observational point of view. If this is correct, then we can agree with Anscombe that when an agent acts, he must have practical knowledge of what he does in and to the world—of “what happens.” V. The Break in the A-D Order of Intention Although practical knowledge helps us to grasp what can count as an intentional description of an action, there is still the unfinished business of what can count as the most formal, defining description of the action itself. That is, when can we say that the 30 order of intention stops, say, at D rather than E, F, or G? Can the theory of practical knowledge outlined in the previous sections accomplish this? To see how we can answer this postivitely, let us return to the original example in detail: A man is pumping water into the cistern which supplies the drinking water of a house. Someone has found a way of systematically contaminating the source with a deadly cumulative poison whose effects are unnoticeable until they can no longer be cured. The house is regularly inhabited by a small group of party chiefs, with their immediate families, who are in control of a great state; they are engaged in exterminating the Jews and perhaps plan a world war.—The man who contaminated the source has calculated htat if these people are destroyed some good men will get into power who will govern well, or even institute the Kingdom of heaven on earth and secure a good life for all the people; and he has revealed the calculation, together with the fact about the poison, to the man who is pumping. The death of the inhabitants of the house will, of course, have all sorts of other effects; e.g., that a number of people unknown to these men will receive legacies, about which they know nothing.62 The question Anscombe asks, in light of the imagine scene, is simple: What is this man doing? Well, she admits, any number of descriptions here will be perfectly true, including ‘wearing away his shoe-soles’, and ‘making a disturbance of the air.’ But, as we have seen already, these descriptions will be ruled out on the grounds that they do not give the objects of the pumper’s practical knowledge, as they bear no intelligible relation to any potential practical syllogism, nor do they contribute causally to the changes in the object that the agent is acting upon (the Nazis inside of the house). For these reasons, the descriptions are accidental to the order of practical reason that interests us. Anscombe further notes a “break in the series of answers” one could give to her ‘Why?’ question. Although there is a further reason for poisoning the inhabitants of the house, these further intentional descriptions of what is being done—to save the Jews, to put in the good men, to get the kingdom of heaven on earth—are not such that we can now say he is performing these actions. Anscombe says that it is D (poisoning the Nazis) that gives “the intention with which all the other descriptions (A, B, and C) are ordered as means to end. This intention, Anscombe writes, “swallows up all the preceding intentions with which earlier members of the series were done.” This is shown by the 62 Anscombe (2000), p. 37. 31 fact that “it is not wrong to give D as the answer to the question “Why are you A-ing?” by contrast with the further ends stated. We should note, however, that the pumper can say, in response to the question, “Why are you pumping?” “That I am doing it to save the Jews and bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.” But in so doing he will be giving us not the intention with which he is pumping the water, but the further intention with which.63 That we need to make such a distinction is clear from the case of those who defended Truman, who said that what he wanted to do was end the war, or save American lives. Although these were no doubt his further (very good!) intentions, we must still look to what he did intentionally as a means to these further aims. And what he did, Anscombe notes, is command the wholesale slaughter of innocent Japanese citizens. The distinction is important when we consider, again, the object of the agent’s activity—what he is acting upon in order to bring about some change. And what he is acting upon in Anscombe’s example are the Nazis inside of the house. That is, it is for the sake of acting upon them—of killing them, in fact, since this is the change in them he wants to bring about—that he acts upon the pump, the water, and so forth. And it is the intentional object that specifies the action into a kind—a poisoning—that makes the action suitable for evaluation. Of course, his further intentions are important as well, they provide the action with a further and important practical intelligibility. But further intentions, no matter how good, cannot nullify the fact that an intentional poisoning is what the pumper is doing, at this time, in these circumstances. VI. The Voluntary I have been arguing for a theory of intentional action that is neither purely third personal nor purely first personal; this account is a sensible, hylomorphic compromise between these two extremes. I have also been arguing that we find the materials for such a view in the writings of Elizabeth Anscombe. Some readers of Anscombe, however, take her to be giving a purely first personal account.64 63 Anscombe (2000) pp. 30-32. For example, Warren Quinn, “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect” Morality and Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 175-193; and John Finnis, Reason, Morality, and Law: The Philosophy of John Finnis, John Keown and Robert P. George, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 480-490. 64 32 The evidence for this reading of Intention comes from an iteration of Anscombe’s pumping example: unlike the original case, the second gardener Anscombe imagines is utterly indifferent to what happens to the Nazis—he could not care less whether they live or die—he is just doing his normal job, in spite of the fact that someone else has poisoned the water he uses.65 Although he has no interest in it, the indifferent gardener knows that someone else has poisoned the water he typically pumps into the cistern. And so he knows that doing his usual job to earn his pay will involve pumping poisoned water into the house. And yet, Anscombe says that the gardener does not intentionally “replenish the house water supply with poisoned water.” She writes: [A]lthough he knows concerning an intentional act of his—for it, namely replenishing the house water supply, is intentional by our criteria—that it is also an act of replenishing the house water-supply with poisoned water, it would be incorrect, by our criteria, to say that his act of replenishing the house supply with poisoned water was intentional. And I do not doubt the correctness of this conclusion; it seems to shew that our criteria are rather good.66 Her analysis of this case hinges on the fact that, in response to the question “Why did you replenish the house supply with poisoned water?” the indifferent gardener sincerely replies: “I didn’t care about that, I wanted my pay and just did my usual job.”67 This result is exactly what we should expect given our previous analysis. This case is structurally identical to our earlier example of the runner who knows that his shoes will wear down by running the marathon. We have already seen that this effect on his shoes was neither his end nor his means in running the race, nor are his shoes the object of his action. Similarly, the fact that the indifferent gardener is pumping poisoned water is entirely accidental to his intended end, which is to do his usual job for the sake of his pay. Therefore the description ‘pumping poisoned water’ is not “practically necessary” to attain the end the agent is trying to realize. This example can seem radically first personal because it can seem as though the agent is specifying his intentions with respect to his means in a way that conveniently ignores reality—the fact that the water is poisoned—in a way similar to the doctor who wants to say that although he is crushing the unborn baby’s skull he doesn’t intend to kill 65 Anscombe (2000), p. 42. Anscombe (2000), p. 42. 67 Ibid. 66 33 it. But we can see that the cases are importantly different once we pay attention to the object acted upon—the material circa quam. What is the gardener acting upon? It’s not the Nazis—he doesn’t care about them at all. If they don’t end up drinking any of the water, he won’t have failed to execute his intentions. Rather, he is acting upon the cistern that holds the house water supply, since it is his usual job to replenish it. It is for the sake of filling up the cistern with water that he is operating the pump. It is important to the case that performing this act is habitual: it is his normal job to replenish the cistern, so this is a standing intention to replenish the house supply that he is executing, and typically this does not result in anyone’s death. It is also important to the case that someone else has poisoned the water the gardener typically pumps; if he had undertaken that means he would have done so intentionally, as this was not part of his usual job. In specifying what is done, we seek to place the particular under some general act type. And so the agent’s action must be such as to be understood in terms of ‘doing his normal job’ or ‘replenishing the house supply’ rather than ‘poisoning the Nazis.’ The facts about what his job usually consists in matter to what we can say he intends. Still, the gardener knows the water he is pumping is poisoned, and he is under no illusions about what that means for the Nazis inside the house. But this knowledge is not practical, on Anscombe’s account, since its object does not pick out a “practical necessity.” For this reason Anscombe seeks to distinguish between “the intentional poisoning described in the original example from the case of the indifferent gardener.68 But now one may ask: How can he knowingly pump poisoned water and not intentionally pump poisoned water, without thereby creating a rift between what is known from the perspective of practical thought and what is known by observation of what is happening? In response to this sort of worry, Anscombe stresses that there must be third personally accessible checks upon the truthfulness of what the agent claims with regard to his intentions; thus, in order to know if he intended to pump poisoned water and kill the Nazi’s, we must observe whether or not he did anything to ensure that this end was accomplished, over and above what he typically does as part of his normal job. Once 68 Ibid. 34 again, we find confirmation that Anscombe does not think the intentionality of action is a purely first personal affair; it must, in principle, line up with descriptions that could be given by an informed observer of events.69 Although Anscombe does not think that the indifferent gardener intends to pump poisoned water and kill any Nazis, it is important to note that he is not thereby absolved of the charge of criminally negligent murder.70 Anscombe does not think one has to kill intentionally in order to be guilty of murder. It is enough to know that what one does do intentionally will kill a man who has a right not to be killed, and that this action could have and should have been avoided for that reason. Again, the case is structurally similar to the runner we have discussed; for he too would have been guilty of destruction of property, had it turned out that the shoes he wore down were not his, and had been entrusted to his care by their rightful owner. The runner needn’t wear down the shoes intentionally in order to be responsible for what happens to them as a result of what he does do intentionally. The intention/side effects distinction is key to understanding these cases. Now, in saying that the agents are responsible, Anscombe is drawing on a broader category than intention: the voluntary. I will now take up (all too briefly, I’m afraid) her treatment of this category as it relates to the questions we are pursuing, in particular to the role that practical knowledge plays in assessing an agent’s responsibility for what he causes to happen outside the order of intention we have outlined. The first group of cases Anscombe discusses fall under the heading of the voluntary as idle or inattentive actions. These are things a human being might do for “no particular reason” and in a particularly inattentive way. Examples might be: drumming one’s fingers on the table, humming a tune under one’s breath, running one’s fingers along the fencepost, dancing to a catchy tune while making dinner at home, etc. We do 69 I think this is enough to render the worry neutral, but I recognize that my reading is not without its controversies. However we parse this case in the end—Anscombe herself admits that there will always be difficult cases at the periphery—her general point will still hold: the specification of what a man does intentionally, either as a means or an end, is not a purely first personal affair. We must, in principle, be able to line up the perspective of the acting person with the perspective of a reasonably well-informed observer of events. 70 Of the fact that he does it knowingly but not intentionally, she writes, “that will not absolve him from guilt of murder!” Anscombe (2000) p. 45. She clarifies her views in a later article, “Murder and the Morality of Euthanasia” where she reaffirms that “the intention of harm or danger to the victim is not a necessary part of the mental element in murder.” See Anscombe (2005), p. 264. 35 not typically do these sorts of actions deliberately or intentionally,71 but they are not done instinctively either. We say they are voluntary because we exercise rational control over them: we will not do them when there are reasons against it. For example, if I know that it annoys you, then I should not hum under my breath when you are around, and I am responsible for annoying you if I do—even though the doing is thoughtless. It’s voluntary character stems from the fact that I can and should refrain.72 The second group of cases Anscombe discusses are those in which what one does is “the antecedently known concomitant result of one’s intentional action, so that one could have prevented it if one would have given up the action; but it is not intentional: one rejects the ‘Why?’ [question] in its connexion.”73 This is clearly a description that fits the indifferent gardener’s act of ‘replenishing the house water supply with poisoned water.’ We can say of our indifferent gardener that his act of replenishing the house supply with poisoned water is voluntary because it is “the antecedently known concomitant result of his intentional action” of ‘doing his normal job.’ And he could have and should have refused to do his normal job, thus preventing it from being the case that he replenishes the house supply with poisoned water. This makes the case similar to the earlier case of driving the car to work in gravely dangerous conditions. Both are cases of negligence in the classical sense of nec eligens—or “not choosing” what one could and should choose. Both agents fail to choose to do what they could and should have done (the gardener fails to choose either to refuse his pay or to find other means to earn it, and the driver fails to choose either to stay home from work, or to find other means of getting there). So, although it is true that the indifferent gardener and the reckless driver do not intend to cause harm, since neither chooses what it is needful for them to choose in the circumstances, the harms they can easily foresee they might cause are voluntary, and they are accountable for them. The third group Anscombe discusses are those “which are not one’s own doing at all, but which happen to one’s delight, so that one consents and does not protest or take 71 Of course, you could do them intentionally. It’s just that typically one doesn’t. It makes no difference if it is hard for me to refrain (say, because it is an entrenched habit). After all, it is a habit I voluntarily developed and it is up to me to reign it in when needful. 73 Anscombe (2000), p. 89. 72 36 steps against them.”74 Here she is imagining cases in which something merely happens to an agent but is pleasing to him. Imagine a person who gets pushed down a hill and rolls into a party of people at the bottom. This action is initially involuntary, but Anscombe argues that it becomes voluntary in virtue of the fact that it pleases the agent once it has begun, and because he enjoys it while it happens and does nothing to stop its progress. If the agent does nothing to try to stop the movement, Anscombe argues, we must say that he “consents” to it, and this act interior act of will makes the exterior movement voluntary and a subject of praise or blame. Finally, Anscombe says the voluntary extends to what is neither willed nor done.75 For instance, there can be voluntary omissions, such as when one fails to do what one ought, either from forgetfulness or laziness. An example is a student who sleeps in and misses class. Of course, the student did not decide to oversleep. But still she is responsible for not showing up, and responsible for not setting an alarm or taking any means to ensure that she would wake up. Such omissions are voluntary even though not grounded in any act of will, and because it is voluntary the agent is responsible for any bad results that he could reasonably foresee might result from it.76 From this brief review of Anscombe’s remarks, we can see that her account of the voluntary is quite close to what we find in Aquinas. He argues that [W]e call something voluntary both because it falls within an act of the will, and because it falls within the power of the will. The former is directly voluntary, the latter indirectly. For in the latter case, we call even non-willing voluntary, since it is within the power of the will to will or not to will, and likewise to do or not to do something.77 On this account, the will is a power to do what reason has judged one ought to do. This power is what Aquinas calls the agent’s dominium.78 Any act of will is an exercise of this power, which is a rational capacity to make things happen in accordance with one’s general ideas about what ought to happen. Whatever is a voluntary action concept must be something that can in principle be an object of the will—that over which the agent 74 Anscombe (2000), p. 89. See her discussion in “Action, Intention, and Double Effect.” Anscombe (2005), p. 209 76 Of course, not all “not doings” are omissions. For a failure to do to be an omission, it has to be a genuine failure—an act one could have and should have done. 77 ST IaIIae q. 74, a. 7, ad. 2 78 ST IaIIae q. 1, a. 1 75 37 exercises his dominium. It is this sort of thing for which human agents are typically responsible. Now I would say that what can be grasped as within one’s dominium is also a practical cognition. It is not “knowledge in intention,” which is a more specific kind of practical cognition, but rather knowledge of what one can and ought to do through the use of one’s own powers. This sort of knowledge is necessary for actions (and omissions) to be voluntary. This is a much weaker sense of practical necessity than the one I outlined in the previous section—the necessity of being a means to an end. Although a voluntary description fails to meet that condition, it does still represent what happens as falling within the agent’s rational causality, of what she knows she can and ought to do (and thus, what she can fail to do). This knowledge of what an agent can and ought to do is practical but also objective and universal. Although I cannot argue for it now, I think the knowledge of what expresses one’s rational dominium must be practical knowledge of one’s own life form: of the good human life. I say this because in cases where a particular agent does not know that what she does is gravely harmful, this lack of knowledge does not necessarily make her action involuntary, and it certainly does not necessarily excuse. For again, it may be that she ought to have known that what she did (or failed to do) is gravely harmful. As we have seen, agents can unintentionally do things but still be responsible for them, since what they do (or fail to do) still falls under their rational causality—of what they ought to know they can and should do. And so there is an essential connection between responsibility and practical knowledge. Insofar as every properly human action is a voluntary action—one that is essentially such as to be praised or blamed—it is something that reflects the agent’s self-conscious capacity to cause things to happen in accordance with a conception of the universal good: of what can and ought to be done in general—of how to live. Whenever a happening is such as to be caused in that specific sense, it will be subject to a voluntary description, and an object of practical knowledge. VII. Practical Knowledge and Double Effect I will conclude by making some very preliminary remarks about how this account of action and practical knowledge affects any reasonable treatment of the intention/side 38 effects distinction, and the so-called doctrine of double effect. I will anchor the discussion by returning to the cases with which we began these reflections. On my view, what is intended is what can be represented in a potential practical syllogism; what is merely foreseen will not. Moreover, what is a foreseen effect of what I intentionally do may or may not be a voluntary effect. It will be voluntary if the result is within the agent’s dominium or power of will. If it is voluntary, then the bringing about of the effect is susceptible of being praised or blamed. If it is not voluntary, then I suggest it is outside the realm of moral responsibility altogether, since it is outside the agent’s rational powers. Let us now apply these schematic thoughts to our original cases. Wicked Tyrant: In the case of the wicked tyrant, we should say that the cardinal is not responsible for the bad effects of his intentional action—the grave harms inflicted on his priests. For the cardinal cannot do what he knows is evil that good may come; this principle is bedrock of Catholic Christian morality, which he must uphold. So long as he does everything he can to help his priests—tries to reason with the tyrant, tries to find a way to hide them, etc.—then he is not responsible for their terrible fate, because this effect of what he refuses on principle to do is not voluntary. After all, it is not something that he can change, and it is not his fault that he could not change it. It would be an error to say that he voluntarily accepts or consents to these foreseen results just because he knows they will happen as a result of what he deliberately intends; this would only be so if he saw them as objects of his will, as somehow in accordance with what he rationally desires. We should simply say he is the involuntary cause of grave harms. Because human acts are voluntary acts, there is nothing morally defective in being an involuntary cause of grave evil.79 Craniotomy: We should say that in performing a craniotomy, the doctor intentionally kills the fetus, for the simple reason that the procedure involves crushing a human being’s skull, which is just one way to kill a fetus. Because a skull crushing is a means of death in a human being, it is not available for the doctor to say that he doesn’t intend to kill the fetus, but simply to “change the dimensions of the child’s skull” in order to save the life of the mother. The capacity to form intentions is not a capacity for wishful thinking; it is a capacity to realize intentions in some matter. If the action is 79 We should give the same analysis of the murderer at the door. 39 directed upon a human being, if that is its matter, then objective facts about human beings constrain any intentions formed with respect to it. And so if a doctor performing a craniotomy says he doesn’t intend to kill the fetus whose skull he is crushing, it is within the right of a third person observer to correct her, for she can see that that is what she does. Hysterectomy: We should say that the doctor intends to remove the cancerous uterus and merely foresees that this act will result in the death of the fetus inside of it. A hysterectomy is a medical procedure aimed at healing the female body: its goal is to remove a certain organ from a female human body because it is no longer functioning properly and is a source of harm to it. Any performance of a hysterectomy has this goal, because it is in virtue of this aim that the procedure is a hysterectomy as opposed to anything else. Although it is true that, in the imagined circumstances, the doctor knows there is a baby inside of the uterus he is removing, and that removing the uterus will cause the baby inside it to die, this does not entail that he represents this death as a means to his end. The end internal to the procedure he undertakes is to heal the mother’s body, and the means to that end is to remove the uterus. The death of the baby in no way serves this end internal to the procedure. However, the doctor does foresee the death of the fetus by removal from the mother’s body, and this effect is voluntary because he is the voluntary agent of the removal of the uterus. However, since the baby will die even if he does not perform the operation, and because the mother will die too if he does not perform it, the doctor is not to blame for causing this death. It is good and praiseworthy for a doctor to save one life when he can by means of a permissible procedure, rather than allow both patients to die because the procedure may cause harm.80 Now, the hysterectomy case looks like a straightforward invocation of what is known as the doctrine of double effect. Notice, however, that in explaining this case I have not relied on any “double effect reasoning” or double effect “principle” of practical deliberation, as I reject the idea that “double effect” is either a form of practical reasoning or a practical principle of any sort. In order to see why not, imagine the case of a good 80 This is not because the morality of killing is a numbers game, such that it is always better to save the greater number. I am saying no more or less than if you see two people drowning and you can only save one, you should save at least one rather than walk away and let them both perish. 40 Catholic bomber.81 He knows with certainty that in dropping bombs on a military target he will also kill the children in the neighboring school. He is deliberating about whether he can do this. He’s unsure. He goes to his priest and asks, “Father, may I kill the children at the school?” It would be worse than strange if the priest replied, “well, it all depends on your intentions. When you push the button, will you be intending to destroy the munitions factory or will you be intending to kill those kids?” This sort of appeal to “double effect reasoning” does not square with our intuitions, because it suggests that the moral assessment of what I do can be fixed by a kind of inner mental pointing in one way rather than another; as if the specification of action depends on whatever I say to myself in reassuring tones. Of course, we do so reassure ourselves that we are really decent people, even as we set about doing wicked deeds. But that just underscores the plain fact that if we want to know what a man is really like, look first to what he does rather than to what he says about it. Now, if our imagined Catholic bomber is asking whether or not he can kill children as a means to his end, the answer will be no. If we want to know if his military campaign upholds this moral principle, then we have to inquire into its end. The bomber’s end, in this case, is to do his job, and his means is to bomb legitimate military targets (a munitions plant is a legitimate military target). Now, whether a munitions plant right next to a school full of children is a legitimate military target, is, I think, up for debate. But let us stipulate that the ius in bello states that it is legitimate. Well, then, the practical advice given by the priest must involve taking care not to harm the children insofar as this is possible. Happily, it is plainly possible. Children don’t live at school; they are only there at a fixed, easily discernable schedule. Therefore, the bomber can at least try take care that the bombing take place early in the morning, or late in the evening, or even in the middle of the night, when the children are safely at home. However, if the instructions are to bomb the target while the children are in school, then a good Catholic bomber must at least question these instructions. Why must it be done at this time? What military advantage is gained? It is very hard to imagine that the goal is something 81 For Anscombe’s discussion of what the “good Catholic bomber” may or may not do, see her “War and Murder” Ethics, Religion, and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers Volume III, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981, pp. 51-61. The reason for picking a Catholic bomber is that this morality holds on to absolute prohibitions. 41 other than to “terrorize” or “dehumanize” the enemy, by killing its most precious resource: its children. But if he detects that this is the end of the orders, we have hit upon an order that the good Catholic bomber may never obey; for he may never kill the innocent intentionally as his end, no matter what military good may come of it. He must conscientiously object to such orders, as they would be terror rather than tactical bombing. If double effect is not a principle of sound practical deliberation, perhaps it is a guide to the permissibility of certain act types. Here again, I am doubtful. To see why, let’s start with the impermissible. If an act is impermissible in its kind, it’s the sort of thing that can never be rightfully intended. Perhaps torture and murder are acts it is never good for a man to set his will upon. If something is permissible or good, then it can only be made wrong by something external to it—bad circumstances, say, or a bad motive. Now, what is important is that the evaluation of the act kind is prior to any act of will. And it’s hard to see how an inner act of will, an act of intending, say, can make an impermissible act permissible, or vice versa. This is the truth behind the recent critiques of double effect.82 So, if double effect is neither a practical principle nor a guide to moral permissibility, what is it? Here is my suggestion: Insofar as we talk meaningfully about an action having two effects—one intended and one merely foreseen—what we are registering is the fact that human action, qua rational action, has a distinctive practicallogical structure. Grasping this structure is essential to our moral evaluation of action, because the first question of moral analysis is “what kind of human act is done?” This is a question of specification, of what we can say the agent does intentionally. In order to answer this question we must always be clear about what is intended by the agent as end, and the means chosen toward the end, which are also intended. This is how the evaluation of action proceeds: first we determine what general act kind is intended or done, and second we determine whether or not that sort of action, in these particular circumstances, is good or bad. This is precisely what Aquinas is trying to do in his famous question on self-defense: to specify what is done.83 He was not trying to find a 82 In particular, see arguments by Thomson (1999), pp. 514-515. If what I have argued here is correct, these criticisms only speak against the radically first personal account of action, not my own. 83 ST IIaIIae, Q. 64, a. 7. 42 new principle of practical reasoning or a fixed guide to what is permissible, nor did he discover one as he settled upon an answer to this question. What Aquinas did make clear in answering the question of specification is this: not everything one knows or foresees that one causes to happen falls under the intention that specifies the act’s kind. To think otherwise is to have a purely third personal account of action. Acknowledging this is what justifies his claim that self-defense is an act classified generally as a life preserving act and not a killing. But in order to say this, he needs to rely upon what I’ll call double effect analysis, which, if I’m correct, is the analysis of the logical structure of human action as practically rational or intentional action, as a kind of event with a defining and specifying order that is known by the agent in a peculiarly practical way. 43