THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES INTENTIONS AND INTENTIONAL ACTIONS IN ORDINARY LANGUAGE AND THE CRIMINAL LAW

THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES INTENTIONS AND INTENTIONAL ACTIONS IN ORDINARY LANGUAGE AND THE CRIMINAL LAW By THOMAS ALLEN...
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES INTENTIONS AND INTENTIONAL ACTIONS IN ORDINARY LANGUAGE AND THE CRIMINAL LAW By THOMAS ALLEN NADELHOFFER III A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2005 Copyright © 2005 Thomas Allen Nadelhoffer III All Rights Reserved

The members of this Committee approve the dissertation of Thomas Allen Nadelhoffer defended on May 4th, 2005. ________________________ Alfred Mele Professor Directing Dissertation ________________________ Fernando Tesón Outside Committee Member ________________________ David McNaughton Committee Member

Approved: _____________________________________________ J. Piers Rawling, Chair, Department of Philosophy

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

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I would first like to thank my family—especially Tom Nadelhoffer, Sharon Meier, David Morris, and David Nadelhoffer—for always believing in me. Through the years, I have frequently leaned on each of their shoulders and benefited from their kindness and warmth. Few people are as blessed as I am when it comes to having a loving family. Without their support, none of this would have been possible. I would also like to thank my committee members for helping me clarify my ideas as well as encouraging me to pursue interesting new intellectual horizons. Without their time, patience, and wisdom, my dissertation would have been filled with even more imperfections than it currently contains. I owe a special thanks to Alfred Mele for going above and beyond the call of duty in helping me spread my philosophical wings. He is as good a mentor as a budding philosopher could hope to have. Finally, I want to thank Virginia Tice—my companion, my friend, and my inspiration. During the past two years she has taught me more about patience and love than I ever dreamed possible. Living with me has never been easy—as my family will readily admit!—but living with me while I struggled with the ideas contained in this dissertation was a particularly challenging affair. Virginia handled it with grace and aplomb—always soothing my worries and allaying my doubts. For this, I am eternally grateful.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract

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INTRODUCTION

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1. THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Intentions 1.3 Intentions, Intentional Actions, and the Simple View 1.4 Skill, Control, Luck and Intentional Actions 1.5 Moral Considerations and Intentional Actions 1.6 Desires, Foresight, Intentions, and Intentional Actions 1.7 Conclusion of Chapter 1

9 9 10 16 18 21 24 30

2. THE FOLK CONCEPTS OF INTENTION AND INTENTIONAL ACTION 2.1 Motivating the Project 2.2 Malle and Knobe on the Folk Concept of Intention 2.3 Malle and Knobe on the Folk Concept of Intentional Action

31 31 40 46

3. ON SAVING THE SIMPLE VIEW 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Probing Folk Intuitions: Joshua Knobe’s CEO Experiments 3.3 The Pragmatic Features of Intentional Language vs. the Core Concept 3.4 Intentions and Intentional Actions: A Follow-Up Study 3.5 The Objection from Cognitive Dissonance 3.6 The Problem of Non-Falsifiability 3.7 Some New Surveys

52 52 52 55 58 59 62 65

4. PRAISE, SIDE EFFECTS, AND INTENTIONAL ACTION 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Knobe’s Data 4.3 A New Study

69 69 70 72

5. THE BUTLER PROBLEM 5.1 Introduction 5.2 An Empirically Informed Solution to the Butler Problem

76 76 77

6. SKILL, LUCK, CONTROL, AND INTENTIONAL ACTION 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Mele and Moser Revisited

84 84 84

7. BLAME, BADNESS, AND INTENTIONAL ACTION: A RESPONSE TO KNOBE AND MENDLOW

92

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7.1 7.2

Introduction Reply to Knobe and Mendlow

92 93

8. FORESIGHT, INTENTIONS, AND INTENTIONAL ACTIONS 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Hunters, Snipers, and Water Pumpers—Oh My! 8.3 Bentham’s Stag-Hunter Revisited 8.4 Harman’s Sniper Revisited 8.5 Anscombe’s Water Pumper Revisited 8.6 Conclusion of Chapter 8

101 101 101 102 106 109 111

9. MENS REA CONCEPTS IN THE CRIMINAL LAW 9.1 Introduction 9.2 A Brief Historical Sketch of Mens Rea in the Criminal Law 9.3 Intentions, Intentional Actions, Foresight, and the Law

112 112 113 115

10. A “FOLK-CONCEPTUAL” APPROACH TO DEFINING MENS REA 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Malle and Nelson’s “Folk-Conceptual” Approach to Defining Mens Rea

128 128

11. SOME PROBLEMS FOR JUROR PARTIALITY 11.1 Introduction 11.2 The Biasing Effect of Moral Considerations 11.3 Automaticity and Moral Psychology 11.4 Haidt’s Social Intuitionism 11.5 Alicke’s Culpable Control Model of Blame Attribution 11.6 Explaining the Biasing Effect of Moral Considerations 11.7 The Biasing Effect of Moral Judgments and Possibility of Juror Partiality

137 137 138 138 139 142 146 148

12. A BRIEF SKETCH OF POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: FROM JURY INSTRUCTIONS TO STRICT LIABILITY

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REFERENCES

165

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

174

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ABSTRACT

While most philosophers agree that the concept of intentional action plays an important role in our folk psychology, there is still wide-scale disagreement about the precise nature of this role.

Unfortunately, there has traditionally been a dearth of

empirical data about folk ascriptions of intentional action. Lately, however, philosophers and psychologists have begun making a concerted effort to fill in this empirical lacuna. In this dissertation, I discuss how this research sheds new light on problems in action theory, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of law. First, I set the stage with a discussion of some of the problems traditionally associated with the concept of intentional action. Here, questions include: What is it to do something intentionally? How are intentional actions related to intentions? What is the relationship between intentional action and conative, cognitive, and moral considerations? In this first section, my main goal is to survey the relevant literature from action theory in order to give the reader a perspicuous view of the kinds of debates that shape the philosophical landscape. Having laid out some of the salient problems, I then turn my attention to some recent empirical research on the folk concept of intentional action and discuss the relevance of this research to the philosophy of action. Next, I compare and contrast the folk concepts of intention and intentional action with their legal counterparts. My goal is to flesh out the extent to which these concepts diverge—a problem that is particularly pressing given that in litigated cases involving juries, jurors are often asked to judge whether the defendant acted intentionally, purposely, knowingly, etc. Finally, I flesh out the implications of the aforementioned data on the folk concept of intentional action and moral psychology—especially blame attribution—for the problem of jury partiality. I argue that the biasing effect that moral considerations have on our ascriptions of intentional action further complicates our attempt to ascertain the proper role that the concepts of intention and intentional action should play in criminal proceedings.

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INTRODUCTION

One can test attempted philosophical analyses of intentional action partly by ascertaining whether what these analyses entail about particular actions is in line with what the majority of non-specialists would say about these actions… [I]f there is a widely shared concept of intentional action, such judgments provide evidence about what the concept is, and a philosophical analysis of intentional action that is wholly unconstrained by that concept runs the risk of having nothing more than a philosophical fiction as its subject matter. --Al Mele (2001: 27) Thus we cannot avoid the need to explain the meaning of a concept as central to the criminal law as that of intention. It may turn out that juries can often, if not always, be left to apply the concept in its ‘ordinary, everyday meaning’ without any formal direction: but we need to show this to be so, by showing that the concept does have a sufficiently determinate ordinary meaning which is appropriate to the law’s purposes; and this requires us to investigate both what it does mean in ordinary language, and what it should mean in the law. We may (and shall) begin with its ordinary meaning, since it is from that ordinary meaning that its legal meaning must be derived (even if the derivation involves some revision): but we must then ask whether that ordinary meaning is appropriate to the law’s special purposes, and practicable in the law’s special contexts; and if we find that its ordinary usage exhibits ‘different shades of meaning’, we must ask which of them are relevant to its legal use. --R.A. Duff (1990: 34) Intuitions, our immediate and pre-reflective judgments, do indeed play an important role in both moral and legal thought: we ‘see’, or feel, immediately that this person is a murderer while that person is not; and we may then look for an account of legal rules, and of the meanings of the concepts in terms of which those rules are expressed, which will fit our intuitive judgment. --R.A. Duff (1990: 36)

In everyday discourse, we often draw a distinction between actions that are performed intentionally (e.g., shutting a car door) and those that are performed unintentionally (e.g., shutting a car door on your finger). Moreover, in a number of ordinary situations, the question of whether or not an action was performed intentionally can make a big difference in how we respond to it. For instance, if someone accidentally bumps into me on a crowded street, I readily accept her apology insofar as her bumping into me was unintentional. If, on the other hand, someone knowingly and purposely

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bumps into me in an effort to get even with me for some past action of mine, I am much less likely to excuse her behavior—especially if I believe my earlier action was justified. My different responses to these two kinds of situations suggest that at least one role that the concept of intentional action plays in our lives is that of fixing blame and praise. And while we can occasionally be held morally and legally responsible for unintentional actions, intentional actions are more commonly the target of our moral and legal judgments. But the exact nature of this role is not entirely clear. Even though most philosophers agree that the concepts of intention and intentional action play an important role in our folk morality, there is still wide-scale disagreement about the precise nature of this role. Unfortunately, there has traditionally been a dearth of empirical data about how people ordinarily talk about intention and intentionality.1 However, philosophers and psychologists have recently begun making a concerted effort to fill in this empirical lacuna in an empirically informed way. In this dissertation, I consider the various ways that this research sheds new light on the question of which analyses of intention and intentional action are best suited for the purposes of the criminal law. For while scholars often assume that the legal definitions of concepts such as intention and intentionality ought to be broadly consistent with the way these concepts are ordinarily used, there is nevertheless disagreement concerning what this ordinary usage actually is—e.g., do we ordinarily say that an agent intentionally brings about the foreseen but undesired consequences of her actions? And if it turns out that people do ordinarily judge that foreseen yet undesired consequences are brought about intentionally, is this an intuition that the criminal law ought to preserve? Until we have a better understanding of people’s intuitions concerning intentions and intentionality, as well as an appreciation for the various goals we want to accomplish with criminal sanctions, we cannot hope to adequately answer these kinds of questions. In this dissertation, I not only survey some of the ways intentionality has been analyzed in the philosophical and legal literature, but I also look at the gathering empirical data concerning folk intuitions and ordinary usage to see which of the analyses 1

For the purposes of this dissertation, whenever I discuss intentionality, I am only talking about the question of whether an agent’s actions are intentional. This sort of intentionality is to be distinguished from discussions of intentionality that one finds in the literature on the philosophy of mind. When philosophers talk about intentionality in this latter context, they are usually interested in the question of how some of our mental states can be about things in the world.

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that have been forward by action theorists and jurists are most consistent with the folk concepts of intention and intentional action. This latter task—which people have only recently begun to undertake—will comprise a majority of the work done in this dissertation since I view it as a necessary first step for determining whether the folk concepts of intention and intentional action are suited for legal purposes. After all, if we do not know how laypersons ordinarily use these concepts—which is a straightforward empirical question—we cannot determine whether these concepts should be used in criminal proceedings. Consequently, in this dissertation I will spend a disproportionate amount of time investigating the data on folk intuitions concerning intentionality. Despite the admitted imbalance in the focus of my discussion—with a lion’s share of the time being spent examining folk intuitions and concepts rather than examining the various technical analyses of intentionality that have been put forward by philosophers and jurists—I nevertheless go on to suggest that, contrary to popular opinion, there may be serious problems with relying on the folk concepts of intention and intentional action in the criminal law. It turns out that folk ascriptions of intentionality are sensitive to moral considerations in a way that might undermine a juror’s ability to make an impartial decision concerning a defendant’s guilt or innocence. Fleshing out the full scope of this problem as well as coming up with a workable solution is a project I hope to undertake in the future. Perhaps one of the technical analyses of intention and intentional action that has been forward in the scholarly literature would be best suited for the purposes of the criminal law. Or perhaps the criminal law should jettison the notion of intentionality altogether.

For present purposes, I will be unable to adequately address these far-

reaching and important issues. I will have to be content with simply identifying the general nature of the problem with using the folk concepts of intention and intentional action in the criminal law—which is, at least by my lights, an important achievement in its own right. In an effort to provide the reader with an appreciation for the difficulties at hand, I will proceed in the following way. In Chapter 1, I set the stage by examining some of the problems associated with the concepts of intention and intentional action that are frequently discussed in the literature on the philosophy of action. Questions to be addressed include: What are intentions? What is it to do something intentionally? How are intentional actions related

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to intentions? Can lucky or unskilled actions be performed intentionally? What is the relationship

between

intentional

action

and

conative,

cognitive,

and

moral

considerations? In this first chapter, my main goal is to give the reader a perspicuous view of the kinds of debates that shape the philosophical landscape. Having laid out some of the salient problems from the philosophy of action, I turn my attention in Chapter 2 to some recent empirical research on the folk concepts of intention and intentional action. First, I motivate my research project by discussing why empirical data about folk concepts are relevant to the various issues I examined in the first chapter (§2.1). Then, in §2.2 and §2.3 I discuss a pair of groundbreaking papers by Bertram Malle and Joshua Knobe where they develop the first empirically informed analyses of the folk concepts of intent (Malle and Knobe 2002) and intentional action (Malle and Knobe 1997). However, while their research represents an important first step towards the development of a more complete understanding of folk psychology, Malle and Knobe nevertheless fail to fully appreciate the possibility that moral considerations may have a biasing effect on folk ascriptions of intention and intentional action. For instance, there is growing evidence that people are more likely to judge that a morally negative action or side effect was brought about intentionally than they are to judge that a structurally similar non-moral action or side effect was brought about intentionally (e.g., Knobe 2003; 2004; Nadelhoffer 2004a; forthcoming). For instance, if two individuals A and B place a single bullet in a six shooter, spin the chamber, aim the gun, and pull the trigger, but A shoots a person and B shoots a target, people are more likely to say that A shot the person intentionally than they are to say that B shot the target intentionally—even though their respective chances of success (one-in-six) and their control over the outcome are identical in both cases. This goes right to the heart of a long-standing debate in the philosophy of action concerning the nature and proper role of ascriptions of intentionality. One of the central issues of this debate is whether moral considerations do—and whether they should— affect our application of the concept of intentional action. While some scholars suggest that our use of this concept is often affected by moral considerations (e.g., Bratman 1987; Duff 1982; 1990; Harman 1976), others claim that moral considerations either do not—or

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should not—have an effect (e.g., Butler 1977; Katz 1987; Mele and Sverdlik 1996). On this latter view, while we may correctly appeal to the intentionality of an action in our effort to determine someone’s moral or legal responsibility, the converse it not the case— i.e., attributions of responsibility should not affect our ascriptions of intentional action. Before considering whether moral considerations should affect our ascriptions of intentional action—something I discuss in Chapters 11 and 12—I first address the empirical question of whether moral considerations do have this effect. In answering this question, I survey the relevant empirical data—paying particular attention to how this research sheds light on some of the aforementioned problems in the philosophy of action. In Chapter 3, for instance, I examine the connection between folk ascriptions of intention and intentional action, and I conclude that according to folk intuitions, an agent need not intend to x in order to x intentionally—especially in cases involving moral considerations. Next, I argue that while moral badness and blame have a more pronounced effect on judgments of intentionality than moral goodness and praise, the latter nevertheless have an effect (Chapter 4). Having examined the data on the effect that both positive and negative moral considerations have on folk ascriptions of intentional action, I then show how the data shed light on the following problem—first put forward by Ron Butler in 1978 to the readers of Analysis: If Brown in an ordinary game of dice hopes to throw a six and does so, we do not say that he threw the six intentionally. On the other hand if Brown puts one cartridge into a six-chambered revolver, spins the chamber as he aims it at Smith and pulls the trigger hoping to kill Smith, we would say if he succeeded that he had killed Smith intentionally. How can this be so, since the probability of the desired result is the same? (Butler 1977: 113) After discussing the relevance of the empirical data on moral judgments and judgments of intentionality to the “Butler Problem” (Chapter 5), I then examine the results of some other studies I ran that were designed specifically to probe folk intuitions concerning the relationship between skill, luck, control and intentionality (Chapter 6). I conclude that insofar as people often judge that an agent x-ed intentionally even though x-ing was not the result of any relevant skill on the part of the agent, we should reject any analyses of the ordinary concept of intentional action that has skill, control, or the absence of luck as a necessary condition. In Chapter 7, I argue that both moral badness and blame affect

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folk ascriptions of intentional action, and I defend my view against objections that have been put forward recently by Joshua Knobe and Gabriel Mendlow (Knobe and Mendlow forthcoming). I then go on to discuss the relationship between foresight, intentions, and intentional actions in ordinary language—paying particular attention to laypersons’ intuitions concerning famous scenarios from the literature on the philosophy of action (Chapter 8). Having examined some of the salient empirical data on folk intuitions concerning intentions and intentional actions—and having considered the relevance of this data to debates in the philosophy of action—I then turn my attention away from the ordinary concepts of intent and intentional action and focus instead on their legal counterparts. In Chapter 9, I examine the way concepts such as foresight, intention, and intentional action are usually defined in Anglo-American systems of criminal law—paying particular attention to the way the definitions of (and relationships between) these concepts have changed during the past several centuries. In doing so, I focus primarily on serious crimes such as murder and rape. If an agent is to be held legally responsible for these types of crimes, the prosecution must normally prove two things. First, the agent has to be guilty of having performed the physical element of the offense—i.e., the actus reus or guilty act. Second, the agent must satisfy the relevant mental or subjective element of the offense—i.e., the mens rea or adequately culpable state of mind.2 The goal of this chapter is to survey the various ways that mens rea concepts have come to play an integral role in determinations of criminal culpability. With the discussion of mens rea concepts serving as a backdrop, I turn my attention in Chapter 10 to a recent paper by Bertram Malle and Sarah Nelson that compares and contrasts the folk concepts of intent and intentional action with their legal counterparts (Malle and Nelson 2003). Their goal in this paper is to flesh out the extent to which the two concepts diverge—a problem that is particularly pressing given that in litigated cases involving juries, jurors are often asked to judge whether the defendant acted intentionally, purposely, knowingly, etc. Malle and Nelson’s central claim is that 2

For the types of serious crimes that I will be focusing on, mens rea usually implies that the agent performed the action purposely, intentionally, designedly, consciously, knowingly, or recklessly. In its narrowest interpretation—sometimes referred to as the elemental meaning—mens rea simply refers to the mental state explicitly required in the definition of the offense in question (e.g., purposely, knowingly, recklessly, etc.).

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in order to prevent confusion in the minds of jurors—and hence the mistakes that inevitably result—we ought to try to ensure that the folk concepts of intent and intentional action and their legal counterparts are not at odds with one another. On their view, the only way of getting at the relevant folk concepts is via the sort of empirical studies that I examined in earlier chapters. While I agree with Malle and Nelson’s general suggestion that if mens rea concepts are going to be used in the criminal law, we should define these concepts in a way that best comports with our ordinary concepts and intuitions, I nevertheless think that some of the data I discuss in Chapters 4-8 concerning the relationship between moral considerations and ascriptions of intentional action suggest that the role these mens rea concepts play in legal proceeding is at least prima facie problematic. After all, if our ordinary applications of concepts such as intent and intentionality are affected by extraneous influences such as blame attribution—then we have reason to question the suitability of these concepts for determining legal culpability. On my view, the biasing effect that moral considerations have on folk ascriptions of intentional action poses a more serious problem for Malle and Nelson’s “folk-conceptual” approach than they realized. In Chapter 11, my main goal is to examine the extent of this problem. On my view, if moral considerations affect folk ascriptions of intentional action, a defendant who is being prosecuted for a serious crime is less likely to receive a fair and unbiased assessment by the jurors. If the folk—in this case jurors—are more likely to say that an action was performed intentionally if they judge that the action is morally bad, and the defendant is accused of performing an act that is immoral in addition to being illegal, then the jurors will naturally be more inclined to say that the defendant’s act was intentional. This problem is especially pressing in cases where jurors must judge whether the offense was committed with a sufficiently culpable mind. Minimally, the discussion of juror partiality in Chapter 11 shows that the strong influence that moral considerations have on our judgments of intentionality further complicates our attempt to determine the proper role that concepts such as intent and intentional action should play in criminal proceedings.

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After fleshing out the details of some of these complications, I consider some possible ways of solving the problems associated with the potentially biased application of mens rea concepts (Chapter 12). I conclude that until we have more data on the folk concepts of intention and intentional action—as well as other relevant concepts such as foresight, recklessness, and negligence—we will not be in a position to make any important decisions about how best to revise the legal concepts of intention and intentional action in a way that minimizes the pernicious effect that negative moral considerations may have on their application in criminal proceedings. As is always the case with arguments for the revision of concepts—legal or otherwise—one must first have a firm grasp of the concept that is to be revised. Otherwise, the degree to which the concept needs to be changed is unclear. Minimally, I hope my current project helps motivate further empirical research into the folk concepts that are central to the philosophy of action, ethics, and legal theory.

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1: THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION

1.1 Introduction Going back at least to Aristotle’s discussion of voluntary action in the Nicomachean Ethics, philosophers have long been interested in the relationship between desires, beliefs, foresight, intentions, and intentional actions. Whereas some philosophers are primarily interested in developing explanatory models of the etiology of intentional actions—i.e., in the psychological events and processes that play a role in the production of intentions and intentional actions—others are interested in intentions and intentional actions because of the role they play in moral and legal discourse. After all, on a number of occasions, determining how much praise or blame an agent deserves may depend on our having first understood the proper connection between this closely related cluster of mental elements. For instance, should we hold an agent who knowingly but reluctantly brings about an undesired side effect y just as morally or legally responsible as someone who actually aims to bring y about? Answering this moral/legal question will depend in part on how we answer questions concerning the aforementioned etiology of human action, but it will also depend in part on how people ordinarily talk about intentions, intentional actions, and moral responsibility. In this chapter I am going to examine some of the views that have been put forward in the philosophy of action literature concerning intentions and intentional actions. First, I look at some of the various ways philosophers have tried to give an account of the nature of intentions (§1.2). One of the more important issues surrounding the philosophical discussion of intention that I will discuss is whether intentions can be reduced to combinations of beliefs and desires.

Having examined the nature of

intentions, I will then discuss the relationship between intentions and intentional actions (§1.3). According to some philosophers, in order for an agent to intentionally x, she must have intended to x. Arguments both for and against this view will be examined in detail. Next, in §1.4 I will examine the claim that in order for an agent to intentionally x, her x-

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ing must be the result of a certain amount of skill or control—i.e., an agent cannot intentionally x if her x-ing was primarily the result of luck. More specifically, I will discuss the analysis of the ordinary concept of intentional action put forward by Al Mele and Paul Moser—paying particular attention to their view concerning the relationship between skill, control, and intentional action (Mele and Moser 1994). Perhaps the most important issue that I discuss in this chapter is the proper relationship between judgments of intentionality and moral judgments (§1.5). The debate surrounding this issue will be particularly important in subsequent chapters, where I will examine empirical data that suggest that not only do people rely on their judgments of intentionality to make moral judgments, but the contrary is true as well—i.e., sometimes people’s moral judgments influence their ascriptions of intentional action.

For the

purposes of the present chapter, however, I will simply lay out some of the relevant issues of the debate—putting off the discussion of the salient data until later. Finally, in §1.6 I look at the philosophical literature on the relationship between desires, foresight, intentions, and intentional actions. Owing to the central role that these mental states play in both moral and legal philosophy, this section is perhaps the most important one in terms of the material on the criminal law that I discuss in Chapters 9 through 12. The goal of the discussion of these issues in the present chapter is to familiarize ourselves with some of the philosophical literature concerning foresight, intention, and intentional so that we will be in a better position to understand and critically evaluate the role that these mental states play in the criminal law. For now, we should first take a look at the nature of intentions. After all, intentions are surely going to play an important role in any philosophical account of human agency.

1.2 Intentions The concept of intention understandably receives a lot of attention in the action theory literature. After all, in some important sense our ability to form and act upon intentions goes hand in hand with our capacities to control our own behavior and to act as voluntary agents. But how should we distinguish our intentions from the voluntary actions that they enable us to intentionally bring about? The easiest way to distinguish intentions

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from intentional actions is to point out that the former, unlike the latter, are “in the head,” so to speak. As Brice Fleming suggests, “A man’s intention is one thing, the action intended is another; and his intention, unlike his action, is something which is not overt…which seems to be mental, in his mind or on his mind, like his thoughts, or in the way his thoughts are” (Fleming 1964: 306). On this view, intentions are the relevant mental states of an agent that serve as the backdrop or motivation for the performance of intentional actions. Thus, when an agent intends to x, she has what Donald Davidson calls a “pro-attitude” towards x-ing (Davidson 1963). But while conceiving of intentions in this way is helpful, we must be careful not to conflate intentions with desires—both of which can be viewed as pro-attitudes. One often cited difference between desires and intentions is that the content of an agent’s intentions must purportedly consist of representations of actions that she may perform or states of affairs that she may bring about (e.g., Baier 1970; Castañeda 1972; Fleming 1964). Desires, on the other hand, can be about nearly anything at all—even things that the agent can neither control nor possibly bring about. So, for instance, while I can both desire and intend to go to the park this afternoon, I can only desire or hope, but not intend, to go to the moon. Of course, this is not to deny that desires and intentions may be intimately connected, but before discussing the nature of relationship between the two in any more detail, I should first examine some of the various ways of carving up the concept of “intention.” As Robert Audi correctly points out, there are at least two different kinds of intentions—what he calls “end directed intentions” and “simple intentions” (Audi 1973a: 387). An agent who does x in order to bring y about has an end directed intention to y, whereas an agent who merely does x without some further goal in mind has a simple intention to x. This difference is supposed to capture the ordinary distinction between, for instance, cooking for the sheer joy of it versus begrudgingly cooking to feed a group of hungry guests. In the former case, I intend to cook as an end-in-itself whereas in the latter case my intention to cook is purely instrumental. In addition to distinguishing between end directed and simple intentions, we can also distinguish intentions to do x in the immediate future from intentions to do x in the non-immediate future. So, for instance, I can intend to cook something right now for

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dinner or I can intend to cook something next month for a dinner party. Following Mele, we can call intentions to do x straightaway proximal intentions and those concerning doing x in the non-immediate future distal intentions (Mele 1992: 143-44). Given that the distinction between proximal and distal intentions cuts across the distinction between end-directed and simple intentions, this gives us at least four kinds of intention: (a) proximal end directed, (b) proximal simple, (c) distal end directed, and (d) distal simple. But what do these four kinds of intention have in common in virtue of which they are all intentions? According to one standard analysis of intention—sometimes called the “beliefdesire” model—in order for an agent to intend to perform some action x, she must satisfy some minimal cognitive and conative conditions. On this view, intending to x requires that, (a) the agent either knows or believes that she will x (or likely x), and (b) the agent desires, wants, or prefers to x. John Austin, for example, defines “a present intention to perform a future action,” as, “a present desire of an object (either as an end or as a means), coupled with a present belief that we shall do acts hereafter for the purpose of attaining the object” (Austin 1873: 451). This definition seems to capture what the four aforementioned kinds of intention have in common. Some proponents of the belief-desire model not only suggest that beliefs and desires are required for intending to x, they also claim that intentions are reducible to beliefs and desires (e.g., Audi 1973; 1986; Austin 1873; Davis 1984; 1997). According to reductive models of intention, to intend to x just is to have a desire to x and a belief that you either will or likely will x—assuming, of course, that the beliefs are “connected in the right way” to the desires (Davis 1984: 44). Wayne Davis, for instance, offers the following reductive analysis of intention: “S intends that p iff S believes that p because he desires that p and believes his desire will motivate him to act in such a way that p” (Davis 1984: 54). Moreover, he suggests that (a) to believe that p “is equivalent to being more certain that p than non-p,” and (b) to desire p is “equivalent to preferring p to nonp” (Davis 1984: 44-45). On the surface, this latter requirement seems to fall prey to simple counterexamples involving agents who intend to do things that we would ordinarily say that they neither want nor prefer to do. The kinds of cases that are usually discussed in this context

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trade on the fact that there is both a broad and a narrow sense of the word “want.” For instance, I may intend to go to the dentist this afternoon in order to have a root canal even though in some ordinary sense of the word “want,” I do not want to have the procedure performed. This sort of example suggests that desires are not necessary for intentions after all. However, as proponents of belief-desire models are quick to point out, there is a broader sense in which I do want the root canal performed. Otherwise, I would not have made—nor would I keep—the appointment to have the procedure performed (Bedford 1966: 654). Proponents of belief-desire models often suggest that this broader kind of wanting—which Audi calls “extrinsic” rather than “intrinsic” (Audi 1973a: 389) and Davis calls “volitional” rather than “appetitive” (Davis 1984: 54)—may be necessary for intention even if the narrower kind is not. This claim is usually challenged in one of two ways: On the one hand, as Roderick Chisholm correctly points out, using phrases such as “wanting to x” or “desires to x” in this perhaps overly broad sense is question begging if these phrases are simply taken to mean “having the intention to do x” (Chisholm 1970: 645). On the other hand, even if the broad sense of wanting or desiring is not question begging, these concepts nevertheless run the risk of becoming “so stretched beyond anything with which we are familiar that the thesis then becomes uninteresting. (Shades of psychological egoism)” (Miller 1980: 339). Either way, these sorts of ambiguities are not unique to the concept of “wanting”—the concept of “preferring” presents similar difficulties. Just as there are two senses of the word “want” that are relevant to the question of whether an agent who intends to x wants or desires to x, there are two corollary senses of the word “prefer”—namely, an evaluative one and motivational one—that are relevant to the question of whether an agent who intends to x prefers to x (Mele 1997: 18). Someone who has an evaluative preference for doing x over doing y, gives x a higher evaluative rating than y, but need not desire or want to x. So, for instance, I may prefer eating broccoli to eating asparagus—in the sense that given a choice between having to eat one or the other I would choose the former over the latter. But having this sort of preference in no way entails that I have any desire to eat broccoli—indeed, I may dislike the taste of both vegetables to varying degrees. In other instances of preferring x to y, however,

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having a preference for x often motivates the agent to do x rather than y. So, for instance, I may prefer to play pool tonight rather than staying home and working on an overdue paper even though I realize that it would be better for me to stay home—evaluatively speaking.

And as a result of my motivational preference for playing pool, that is

precisely what I decide to do. Presumably, when proponents of the belief-desire model suggest that an agent must either want or prefer to x in order to intend to x, they have the broad sense of “want” and the motivational sense of “prefer” in mind. Otherwise, as we have already seen, their analyses of intention are subject to counter-examples involving agents who intend to x even though they do not want to do x in the narrow sense and who do not prefer to do x in the evaluative sense. Minimally, it should be clear that proponents of any analysis of intention whereby wanting or preferring to x are necessary for intending to x must specify the exact nature of the conative conditions they have mind. Having looked briefly at some of the ambiguities and problems associated with the motivational element of the belief-desire model, we should now look at the cognitive element. While most action theorists agree that in order for an agent to intend to x, she must have some degree of confidence in her ability to x, the exact nature of this confidence condition is unclear. Clearly, proponents of belief-desire models must be careful not to place overly stringent cognitive constraints on intending. Claiming, for instance, that an agent must know that she will do x in order to intend to do x once again opens the belief-desire model up to easy counter-examples. After all, I can intend to go to the store later this evening even if I could not properly be said to know that I will go. In these sorts of situations, presumably all that is required for my intending to do x is that I am confident that I will. But while nearly everyone will agree that if I intend to x my confidence cannot be approaching zero, there is little consensus among action theorists concerning the level of confidence that is required. As a result, we find the following array of claims in the action theory literature about what cognitive conditions an agent must satisfy in order to intend to x: (a) an agent must confidently believe that she will x (Chisholm 1970), (b) an agent must believe that she will x (Harman 1976), (c) an agent must believe she will likely or probably x (Audi 1973; Velleman 1989), (d) an agent must believe that there this is some chance she will x

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(Davidson 1985), (e) an agent must believe that it is possible that she will x (Adams 1986), and (f) an agent must lack the belief that she probably will not x (Mele 1989). The fact that so many different accounts have been put forward concerning what is cognitively required for an agent to intend to x is evidence that even those who agree that belief and intention are connected in some important way nevertheless disagree about how intimate the relationship is. Another point of contention among action theorists concerns the aforementioned reducibility of intentions to complexes of beliefs and desires. After all, even if everyone agrees that beliefs and desires are connected to intentions in important ways, it does not follow that the latter need be reducible to the former. And given that there are gardenvariety examples of situations involving agents who satisfy the cognitive and conative conditions of the belief-desire model yet who nevertheless seemingly lack an intention, we have prima facie grounds to be wary of the attempt to analyze intentions solely in terms of beliefs and desires. Imagine, for instance, that you have successfully stopped smoking for six months. However, owing to a really stressful week you prefer—in the motivational rather than the evaluative sense—to have a cigarette after dinner tonight. Moreover, owing to a number of failed attempts to stop smoking in the past, you believe that there is a 51% chance that you will break down and smoke a cigarette. In this case, you satisfy Davis’ requirements. On his view, to the extent that (a) you desire or prefer to smoke a cigarette tonight after dinner, (b) you believe that there is a 51% chance that your desire to smoke will motivate you to do so, and (c) you believe that you will smoke, you necessarily intend to have a cigarette after dinner. Yet, however plausible this may initially sound, upon reflection it is easy to imagine (a), (b), and (c) being true even though you nevertheless do not intend to smoke a cigarette after dinner. After all, perhaps despite the fact that you prefer to smoke and believe that it is likely that you will do so, you may nevertheless be unsettled or undecided about whether or not to give in to the temptation (Mele 1997: 18-19). And if you were unsettled about whether to smoke, then it would be strange indeed to suggest that you intend to do so. If this is correct, then (a), (b), and (c) are not jointly sufficient for intending to x as Davis and others suggest.

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On the basis of this sort of counter-example, some philosophers have rejected the attempt to reduce intentions solely to beliefs and desires—preferring instead to offer nonreductive analyses of intention (e.g., Brand 1984; Bratman 1987; Davidson 1980; Harman 1976; Mele 1992). According to most non-reductive models, in order for an agent to intend to x, she must satisfy some additional conditions—e.g., she must be committed to (or settled on) x-ing. Al Mele argues along these lines in suggesting that intentions are “executive attitudes toward plans” (Mele 1997:17). On this view, since plans “constitute the representational contents of intentions,” in order for an agent to intend to x, she must in some sense be settled on doing x (Mele 1997:17; see also Harman 1976). This explains why you did not intend to smoke a cigarette even though you satisfied all of Davis’ requirements—namely, you lacked the sort of “settledness on a course of action” or “psychological commitment” that is required for intending to bring about some state of affairs. The notion of settledness or commitment gives us another way of distinguishing mere desires and hopes from intentions. After all, whereas I can desire to x even though I am in no way committed to bringing x about, in order for me to intend to x, I must, at least tentatively, be settled on x-ing. And if (a) being settled on x-ing is necessary for intending to x, and (b) being settled on x-ing cannot be reduced to a complex of beliefs and desires, then reductive models of intention are “doomed to fail” (Mele 1997:17). In Part II, I will look at some empirical data that support the view that intentions cannot simply be reduced to belief-desire pairs, but for now I want to focus on another important question in action theory—namely, what is the relationship between intentions and intentional actions?

1.3 Intentions, Intentional Actions, and the Simple View As we saw in the introduction, the question of whether an agent’s actions are intentional can make a significant difference in the way we react to them. If you believe you were harmed intentionally, for instance, then you will likely be angry with the person who harmed you. If, on the other hand, you believe you were harmed unintentionally, you will not react nearly so harshly.

Owing to the important role that ascriptions of

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intentional action play in our daily lives, it is not surprising that the concept of intentional action often takes center stage in discussions among philosophers. But what does it mean to act intentionally and what is the relationship between intending to x and intentionally x-ing? According to the analysis of intentional action that Michael Bratman has dubbed the “Simple View” (SV) in order for an agent to intentionally x, she must intend to x (Bratman 1984: 377). On this view, in order for my going to the park to count as an intentional action, at the time that I go to the park my mental states must be such that going to the park is among the things that I intend to do (e.g., Adams 1986; McCann 1986; 1991).

And while proponents of the SV do claim that an intention to x is

necessary for x-ing intentionally, they do not make the further claim that an agent who intends to x and actually does x, does x intentionally. On their view, the intention must cause the action “in the right way” for the action to be intentional (Adams 1986: 284).3 Proponents of this view defend it on a number of grounds. First and foremost, the simple view purportedly captures our pre-theoretical intuitions and coheres with our ordinary usage of the concepts of intending and intentional action (McCann 1998: 210). After all, in ordinary contexts it would admittedly sound strange for me to say that I dialed my friend’s phone number intentionally even though I did not intend to do so. Second, given that the SV is the seemingly uncontroversial claim that intending to x is necessary for intentionally x-ing, the view has the virtue of being, well, simple or “uncluttered” (Adams 1986: 284). Third, it “gives us reason to believe that our intentions causally guide our actions in virtue of their content” (Adams 1986: 284)—thereby supporting our ordinary view of ourselves whereby the contents of our intentions to x play an important role in our intentionally x-ing. Finally, proponents of the SV suggest that if intentions to x are not necessary for intentionally x-ing, in cases involving agents who lack an intention to x, we will be unable to distinguish intentionally x-ing from unintentionally x-ing. In this respect, the SV is purportedly the only analysis of intentional action that enables us to explain a 3

By insisting that an agent’s intentions must be connected to her actions in the right sort of way in order for those actions to be intentional, the proponent of the SV thereby shield themselves from objections based on deviant causal chains whereby an agent intended to x and x-ed, but we would nevertheless not ordinarily say she x-ed intentionally.

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“folk-action-theoretical” distinction that is “deeply embedded” in our daily lives. As we will see in second chapter, there is empirical evidence that suggests perhaps the SV is inconsistent with folk intuitions concerning particular cases involving intentional actions. But for now, we should consider some other puzzles and problems surrounding the concept of intentional action—the first of which is the relationship between considerations of skill and intentional actions.

1.4 Skill, Control, Luck, and Intentional Actions On the surface, it seems intuitively plausible that if an agent luckily manages to perform a desired action (e.g., rolling a six with a fair die or winning the lottery), the performance of which is not the result of any relevant skill on her part, we should not say that she performed the action intentionally. This intuition suggests that our concept of intentional action is sensitive to considerations of skill, luck, and causal control. Indeed, some philosophers have claimed that in order for an action to be performed intentionally it must be performed with a relevant amount of skill or control—i.e., an intentional action cannot simply be the result of luck. In “Intentional Action,” Al Mele and Paul Moser defend this view, suggesting that analyses of the everyday concept of intentional action that do not make room for considerations of skill, luck, and control can be shown to “fall prey to counterexamples” (Mele and Moser 1994: 223). One of their targets is Carl Ginet’s claim that the following conditions are sufficient for an action’s being intentional: S’s V-ing at t consists of some action, S’s A-ing at t, plus that action’s causing certain results or its occurring under certain circumstances, where: (a) S’s A-ing at t was intentional and (b) (i) At t, S believed of her A-ing that she would or might thereby V and (ii) At t, in what S knew that had not slipped her mind, S had justification for the belief that was not, at the time, justification for believing a proposition too far from the truth as to how she was going to thereby V. (Mele and Moser 1990: 87) In order to show that this analysis fails, Mele and Moser describe examples of actions that apparently satisfy Ginet’s conditions yet are not properly said to be intentional. The

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first case they discuss involves an agent who luckily performs a desired action that is not the result of any relevant skill of his. It goes as follows: Example #1 (E1): Consider the following case. A nuclear reactor is in danger of exploding. Fred knows that its exploding can be prevented only by shutting it down, and that it can be shut down only by punching a certain ten-digit code into a certain computer. Fred is alone in the control room. Although he knows which computer to use, he has no idea what the code is. Fred needs to think fast. He decides it would be better to type in ten digits than to do nothing. Vividly aware that the odds against typing in the correct code are astronomical, Fred decides to give it a try. He punches in the first ten digits that come into his head, in that order, believing of his doing so that he ‘might thereby’ shut down the reactor and prevent the explosion. What luck! He punched in the correct code, thereby preventing a nuclear explosion. (Mele and Moser 1994: 224; see Mele 1992 for a similar scenario) According to Mele and Moser, Fred’s shutting down the reactor and his preventing the explosion satisfy Ginet’s conditions for being intentional actions.

After all, Fred

intentionally punched in the first ten numbers that came into his head, believing that by doing so he might thereby shut down the reactor. Moreover, Fred’s belief that he might shut down the reactor by punching in the numbers was justified. Thus, if we adopt Ginet’s analysis, we are forced to say that Fred intentionally shut down the reactor and intentionally prevented the explosion. Mele and Moser claim that this conclusion is implausible. On their view, “when luck plays this great a role in the success of an attempt at A-ing, the A-ing is generally deemed too coincidental to count as intentional” (Mele and Moser 1994: 225). To further illustrate this point, they present the following two cases: Example #2 (E2): Lisa selects a sequence of six numbers to win a fair Florida instant lottery. Upon punching her six numbers into the lottery computer, Lisa wins instantly. (1994: 249) Example #3 (E3): Mike, a normal person, is playing a game with a pair of fair dice. He will win $20 on his next roll if and only if he throws something other than boxcars (two sixes). Mike, wanting to win, has a simple plan: he will throw a non-boxcar roll and win the money. Mike realizes that there is a slight chance that he will roll boxcars, but

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this does not threaten his plan. As it happens, he throws a seven. (Mele and Moser 1994: 252)4 While allowing that the concepts “skill,” “luck,” and “control” that are under consideration are admittedly vague—like the concept “baldness”—Mele and Moser claim that in both of these cases (i.e., E2 and E3), the ordinary notion of intentional action does not allow for these types of lucky and unskilled actions to count as intentional (Mele and Moser 1994: 252). In Lisa’s case, for instance, they suggest that her punching the correct numbers “is too lucky for Lisa to have intentionally won the lottery, under the circumstances” (Mele and Moser 1994: 249). Similarly, in Mike’s die rolling case, Mele and Moser claim that, “Mike lacks a kind of control over the dice required for his intentionally throwing a nonbox-car roll” (Mele and Moser 1994: 252). Thus, on their view, neither Lisa’s punching in the correct numbers nor Mike’s rolling the number he needs to win was intentional because in both cases the outcomes were not the result of any relevant skill on their part—i.e., the outcomes of their actions were simply the fortunate result of chance or luck. Having put forward these examples in support of their claim that skill and control are necessary conditions for intentional action, Mele and Moser proceed to offer the following analysis—an analysis they claim is more in line with the ordinary concept of intentional action than Ginet’s: Necessarily, an agent, S, intentionally performs an action, A, at time t, if and only if: (i) at t, S A-s and her A-ing is an action; (ii) at t, S suitably follows…an intention-embedded plan, P, of hers in A-ing; (iii) (a) at the time of S’s actual involvement in A-ing at t, the process indicated with significantly preponderant probability by S’s on balance evidence at t as being at least partly constitutive of her A-ing at t does not diverge significantly from the process that is in fact constitutive of her Aing at t; or (b) S’s A-ing at t manifests a suitably reliable skill of S’s in Aing in the way S A-s at t; and (iv) the route to A-ing that S follows in executing her action plan, P, at t is, under S’s current circumstances, a suitably predictively reliable means of S’s A-ing at t, and the predictive reliability of that means depends 4

Mele and Moser’s article is replete with interesting scenarios. However, for my present purposes I am just going to focus on these three.

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appropriately on S’s having suitably reliable control over whether, given that she acts with A-ing as a goal, she succeeds in A-ing at t. (Mele and Moser 1994: 253) Whereas condition (iii) rules out unskilled actions, condition (iv) rules out actions that an agent performs successfully with the requisite amount of skill, but that are nevertheless the result of luck or chance—e.g., cases involving deviant causal chains. Thus, (iii) and (iv) are intended to prevent the three aforementioned examples of lucky or unskilled actions (i.e., E1 – E3) from counting as intentional action, thereby fixing what Mele and Moser took to be one of the primary weaknesses of Ginet’s analysis. In Chapter 6, I will examine some empirical data that suggests that skill is not a necessary condition for folk ascriptions of intentional action. But first, I want to consider another important issue from the philosophy of action literature—namely, the proper relationship between moral judgments and ascriptions of intentional action.

1.5 Moral Considerations and Intentional Actions There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of action concerning the relationship between ascriptions of moral responsibility and ascriptions of intentionality. One of the central issues of this debate is whether moral considerations do—or should—affect our application of the concept of intentional action. While some scholars suggest that this concept is intimately bound up with moral considerations (e.g., Bratman 1987; Duff 1982; 1990; Harman 1976; Knobe 2003a; 2003b; 2004), others claim that moral consideration should not act expansively on our ascriptions of intentional action. On this latter view, while we may correctly appeal to the intentionality of an action in our attempt to determine someone’s moral or legal responsibility, the converse it not the case—i.e., attributions of blame and praise should not affect our ascriptions of intentional action. Mele and Sverdlik (1996) offer the most well developed and forcefully argued defense of this view (see also Butler 1978; Katz 1987). On their view, philosophers who claim that, “ordinary speakers of English are, to some extent, properly guided by their judgments of moral responsibility in determining what an agent did intentionally,” are wrong about the evaluative nature of proper ascriptions of intentional action (Mele & Sverdlik 1996: 270).

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The view that evaluative features both do and should influence our intuitions concerning the intentionality of side effects has received support in the philosophical literature. Michael Bratman, for instance, claims that a runner may intentionally wear down the soles of his heirloom shoes even though he doesn’t intend to do so (Bratman 1987: 123). As he says: I conjectured that our inclination to extend what I do intentionally, in the light of my belief about my sneakers, is grounded in our interest in the ascription of responsibility. Our scheme for classifying actions as intentional is shaped in part by an interest in locating paradigm actions for which agents are to be held responsible. (Bratman 1987: 136) On this view, our concept of intentional action is intimately bound up with our notion of responsibility such that whether we say some action x is intentional may partly depend on whether x is something that we either could or should be held responsible for performing. Thus, even though Bratman’s runner does not intend to wear down the soles of his heirloom shoes insofar as he does not want or aim to wear them down, to the extent that he knowingly wears them down and can be properly held responsible for doing so, he does so intentionally. If Bratman’s analysis of the runner’s intentions and actions is correct, then we have good reasons to reject the aforementioned Simple View. Gilbert Harman is another philosopher who rejects the Simple View. As he says, “it is a mistake to suppose that whenever someone does something intentionally, he intends to do it” (Harman 1976: 433). To support this claim, Harman points to cases involving foreseen yet unintended and undesired side effects. For instance, Harman suggests that a sniper may intentionally alert his enemies when he shoots his target, even though he neither desires nor intends to alert them (Harman 1976: 433). On this view, we can properly say that the sniper intentionally alerted the enemies even though he did not intend to because “in firing his gun, the sniper knowingly alerts the enemy to his presence. He does this intentionally, thinking that the gain is worth the possible cost. But he certainly does not intend to alert the enemy to his presence” (Harman 1976: 433). Harman does not want to say that the soldier intended to alert the enemies because he did not desire to alert them; indeed, the soldier had both a desire and a reason not to do so. This is not to suggest that intentionally doing x while knowing that x will bring an undesired side effect about is sufficient for intentionally bringing about the side effect.

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As Harman says, “One can do something intentionally even though one does not intend to do it, if one does it in the face of what ought to be a reason not to do it and, either one tries to do it, or one does it as a foreseen consequence of something else that one intends to do” (Harman 1976: 434). To highlight this aspect of his analysis of intentional action, Harman points out that, in addition to knowingly alerting his enemies to his presence, the sniper also knowingly heats the barrel of his gun by firing it—but he argues that this latter side effect, unlike the former, is not intentionally brought about because the sniper does not have a reason not to heat the barrel of his gun in the way that he has a reason not to alert his enemies. Having discussed Harman’s view on foresight and side effects, I want to look at two other examples of his that merit our attention. The first involves a sniper who shoots a soldier, and the second involves a sniper who shoots a bull’s-eye. Harman claims that our intuitions suggest that if the sniper in the first case luckily manages to shoot the soldier then his doing so is intentional, whereas if the sniper in the second case luckily manages to shoot the bull’s-eye, then his doing so is not intentional. In explaining our alleged conflicting intuitions, Harman makes the following remarks: The reason why we say that the sniper intentionally kills the soldier but do not say that he intentionally shoots a bull’s-eye is that we think that there is something wrong with killing and nothing wrong with shooting a bull’s-eye. If the sniper is part of a group of snipers engaged in a sniping contest, they will look at things differently. From their point of view, the sniper simply makes a lucky shot when he kills the soldier and cannot be said to kill him intentionally. The same sort of consideration leads us to say that, in firing his gun, the sniper intentionally alerts the enemy to his presence. We say this because the sniper acts in the face of a reason not to alert the enemy to his presence. (Harman 1976: 433 – 34) Thus, on Harman’s view, in the event that an agent is aware that she has either moral or prudential reasons not to bring x about and yet she brings x about despite these reasons to the contrary, we should judge that she brought x about intentionally. Insofar as both Bratman and Harman believe that moral considerations affect folk judgments concerning the intentionality of the side effects of an agent’s actions, they would likely agree with R.A. Duff’s suggestion that: Ascriptions of intentional agency belong with ascriptions of responsibility and demands for justification. To say that A brings y about intentionally is to say that he is responsible for its occurrence and may have to justify his action under the 23

description “bringing y about”…the criteria of intentional agency as to a given effect are also the criteria of responsibility for that effect. (Duff 1982: 4) As we will see in subsequent chapters, there is growing empirical evidence that Bratman, Harman, and Duff are correct in assuming that moral considerations do have an effect on our ascriptions of intentionality. But before I examine this data, I want to examine one final issue from the philosophy of action—namely, the relationship between foresight and intentional action. This relationship not only plays an important role in both Bratman’s and Harman’s respective analyses of intention and intentional action, but it is one that concerns philosophers of action, ethicists, and legal theorists alike as well.

1.6 Desire, Foresight, Intentions, and Intentional Actions As we saw in the last section, some philosophers—e.g., Bratman and Harman—suggest that if an agent (a) foresees that by doing x she will bring about y, (b) she has a reason not to bring y about, and (c) she does x intentionally, then she brings about y intentionally as well, even if she neither wanted, aimed, nor intended to bring y about. So, for instance, to the extent that Bratman’s runner knew that by running in his heirloom shoes he would wear down their soles, he intentionally wore them down—nevertheless, since wearing them down was neither a goal of his nor something he wanted to bring about, Bratman suggests that the runner did not intend to do so. On this view, because the runner knew that his actions would bring about an undesirable side effect and he performed the actions anyway, we can say that he intentionally brought the undesired side effects about even though we cannot say he intended to bring them about because doing so was neither one of his goals nor something he wanted to do. This alleged asymmetry between what is required for intending to x and what is sufficient for intentionally x-ing is what allows Bratman to use the case of the runner with the heirloom shoes as a counter-example to the Simple View. After all, if doing x intentionally with the foresight that x will bring about y were sufficient for both intending to y and intentionally y-ing, then neither the side effect brought about by Bratman’s runner nor the one brought about by Harman’s sniper would show that an agent can intentionally x even though she did not intend to x. But as we have already seen, both 24

Bratman and Harman deny that doing x with the foresight that y will occur is sufficient for intending to y. By their lights, an agent can (a) intend to do x, (b) foresee that doing x will bring about y—an undesired side effect, (c) do x intentionally, and (d) bring about y intentionally, even though the agent did not intend to bring y about. Whereas some philosophers will deny that Bratman’s runner and Harman’s sniper brought about their respective side effects intentionally on the grounds that neither agent intended to bring the side effects about, others will suggest that both the runner and the soldier intended to bring these side effects about on the grounds that, in the relevant circumstances, foresight is sufficient for both intending to x and intentionally x-ing. If either of these two responses to Bratman and Harman works, then the Simple View will be insulated from their alleged counter-examples. Jeremy Bentham was one of the first philosophers to argue in detail that if an agent intentionally does x knowing that x will bring about y, then she both intends to bring y about and brings y about intentionally even if y is a state of affairs that the agent desires. On his view, both an agent’s actions and the consequences of those actions can be intentional. Moreover, Bentham suggests that in order for either x or the consequences of x to count as intentional, the agent must have either intended to x or intended to bring about the consequences of x (Bentham 1789: 84). In this respect, his analysis of intention and intentional action is in line with the Simple View. For present purposes, the most important part of Bentham’s theory of action is his distinction between “direct” and “oblique” intentions, a distinction that he draws in the following way: When the prospect of bringing about a set of consequences “constituted one of the links in the chain of causes by which the person was determined to do the act,” then these consequences are brought about directly or “lineally” (Bentham 1789: 86). On this view, if bringing about y was part of an agent’s motivation for doing x, both x and y were directly intended and hence y was brought about intentionally. On the other hand, when an agent foresaw but did not desire that y would occur as a result of doing x—i.e., when the prospect of bringing y about did not constitute one of the reasons for which the agent x-ed, then bringing about y is something the agent intended, albeit obliquely or “collaterally” rather than directly (Bentham 1789: 86). And since in this latter case the

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agent obliquely intended to y, the agent still brought y about intentionally even though she neither wanted to nor aimed at doing so. In arguing for the correctness of the distinction between direct and oblique intentions, Bentham introduces the now famous stag-hunter example (Bentham 1789: 87). We are asked to imagine a stag-hunter who spots a stag in the woods. But before the hunter shoots an arrow at the stag, he notices that the King is in close proximity. And while the hunter does not want to shoot the King, he realizes that if he shoots the stag, he will likely kill both the stag and the King. This realization notwithstanding, the hunter shoots and kills the stag, and, as expected, he shoots and kills the King in the process. According to Bentham, while the hunter directly or lineally intended to shoot and kill the stag given that doing so constituted part of his reason for acting, he merely obliquely intended to shoot and kill the King given that he foresaw that the King could be shot, but he did not want or aim to do so. In any event, insofar as the death of the stag and the death of the King were intended, they were both brought about intentionally (Bentham 1789: 87). If Bentham’s analysis is correct, then Bratman’s runner both intended to and intentionally wore down the soles of his shoes and Harman’s sniper both intended to and intentionally alerted his enemies. And as we saw earlier, this would thereby undermine the usefulness of these examples for refuting the Simple View. Of course, not everyone accepts Bentham’s analysis. One philosopher who disagrees with Bentham on this score is Elizabeth Anscombe. In her groundbreaking work Intention (1957), Anscombe claims that doing x with the foresight that x will bring about y is not sufficient for either intending to y or intentionally y-ing. On her view, wanting to bring about y is necessary, but not sufficient, for intending to y and for bringing about y intentionally. The example that Anscombe uses to defend this claim has proved to be no less controversial than Bentham’s own example. We are asked to imagine a man whose job it is to pump water into a cistern, thereby replenishing the supply of drinking water in a nearby house (Anscombe 1957: 37). Unfortunately for the inhabitants of the house, the water that the man is pumping into the cistern has been contaminated with a lethal poison whose effects are unnoticeable until those who ingest it can no longer be cured. Even though the man pumping the water had nothing to do with poisoning the water, he knows that the water has been poisoned.

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Nevertheless, the man pumps the water into the cistern knowing that it will poison and kill the inhabitants. But, he neither wants nor aims to kill them; he just wants to do his job and get paid. He views the death of the inhabitants as an unfortunate by-product of his pumping water into the cistern. The question this example is supposed to highlight is the following: Can we properly say that the water pumper did not intend to kill the inhabitants even though he foresaw that pumping the water into the cistern would inevitably have this effect? Anscombe answers this question in the following way: A further difficulty arises from the fact that the man’s intention might not be to poison them but only to earn his pay. That is to say, if he is being improbably confidential and is asked “Why did you replenish the house water-supply with poisoned water?,” his reply is not “To polish them off,” but “I didn’t care about that, I wanted my pay and just did my usual job.” In that case, although he knows concerning an intentional act of his…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 water supply with poisoned water was intentional. And I do not doubt the correctness of this conclusion; it seems to show that our criteria are rather good. (Anscombe 1957: 41-42) Not surprisingly, some philosophers have taken Anscombe’s intuitions about the water pumper case to show that her criteria for intentions and intentional actions are actually rather bad. Arthur Miller, for example, suggests that Anscombe’s claim that “desirability characterizations” (Anscombe 1957: 75) are necessary for both intending to x and intentionally x-ing is “unable to withstand analysis” (Miller 1980: 337). By his lights, “poisoning the inhabitants was as much an intentional action on the part of the pumper as was replenishing the water supply” (Miller 1980: 337). In arguing against Anscombe’s view, however, Miller does not deny that there is a close connection between intending to x (or intentionally x-ing) and wanting to x—he merely denies that the former entails the latter.

In his efforts to show that wanting is not necessary for either intention or

intentional action, Miller discusses what he takes to be the implications of Anscombe’s view—implications that he finds “clearly unacceptable” (Miller 1980: 339). In fleshing out the consequences of Anscombe’s analysis, Miller points out that one of the most important factors that we take into consideration when making moral judgments about an agent’s actions (or the consequences of those actions) is the question 27

of whether or not the agent acted intentionally. As he says, “we behave differently toward an agent whose act is intentional than we do toward an agent whose act is not intentional” (Miller 1980: 340). Thus, if A killed B intentionally whereas C killed D but not intentionally, then all other things being equal, we will judge A more harshly than C. In other words, if an agent either unintentionally or non-intentionally x-ed, this ordinarily serves either as an excusing condition or, minimally, as a mitigating circumstance. Conversely, we normally hold an agent fully responsible for x-ing if she either intended to x or x-ed intentionally. And while Miller allows that intending to x often involves desirability characterizations, he claims that these characterizations are by no means necessary. On his view, “if Y is not only the foreseeable result of doing X in a given set of circumstances, but foreseen by the agent himself, then if doing X is to count as an intentional action on his part, then so is doing Y” (Miller 1980: 341). Miller suggests that if his analysis of the relationship between foresight and intentional action were not correct, we would not be able to hold Anscombe’s water pumper fully responsible for killing the inhabitants given that lack of intention is either an excusing condition or a mitigating circumstance—all other things being equal. As he says, “if we know that A was willing to do Y and he then went on to do it, we will certainly hold him responsible and…blame him for Y-ing; and ceteris paribus this we would not do if Y were not intentional” (Miller 1980: 342). After all, by Miller’s lights, if intending entails wanting, and Anscombe’s water pumper neither wanted to, nor cared about, poisoning the inhabitants, then he did not intend to poison them. And to the extent that Miller thinks this would “incline us to view the episode more leniently than we might otherwise have done”—a consequence that he finds “patently absurd” given the circumstances—he concludes that Anscombe’s view that intending entails wanting must be incorrect (Miller 1980: 341). While I am entirely sympathetic with Miller’s reluctance to say that the water pumper neither intended to kill the inhabitant nor intentionally did so given the culpability of his actions, it is not clear that we are forced to follow Miller in concluding that the converse is true—i.e., just because we say that he did not unintentionally kill the inhabitants, it does not follow that he intentionally did so. Indeed, the assumption that if an agent did not unintentionally bring about a side effect she must have intentionally

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brought it about may explain why some action theorists insist that agents such as Bratman’s runner, Harman’s sniper, Bentham’s stag-hunter, and Anscombe’s water pumper intentionally brought about their respective side effects. After all, since saying that an agent brought something about unintentionally usually suggests that it was brought about accidentally or unknowingly—two characterizations that do not seem to adequately describe the relationship between the water pumper and the side effect of his actions—some philosophers conclude that the agents must have brought these side effects about intentionally. But as George Pitcher correctly points out, “it is quite possible to deny that a person did x unintentionally without committing oneself to holding that he did x intentionally—for perhaps he did x neither intentionally nor unintentionally—and most certainly without committing oneself to holding that doing x was part of the agent’s intention or that he acted with the intention of doing x” (Pitcher 1970: 665-666). Perhaps the most thorough defense of this line of reasoning can be found in Al Mele and Steven Sverdlik’s “Intention, Intentional Action, and Moral Responsibility” (1996). And while the target of their criticism was Bentham, Bratman, and Harman rather than Miller, it works just the same for all of their views. According to Mele and Sverdlik, while we may correctly assume that Bratman’s runner does not unintentionally (i.e. accidentally or unknowingly) wear down the soles of his shoes—or that Harman’s sniper does not unintentionally alert the enemies to his presence—we should not assume that because the runner and sniper do not unintentionally bring about these side effects, it follows that they must have intentionally brought them about. On their view, there is a middle ground between unintentionally A-ing and intentionally A-ing, namely, nonintentionally A-ing: Insofar as an agent who is A-ing is neither aiming at A-ing nor trying to A, either as an end or as a means to an end, she is not intentionally A-ing; insofar as an agent is A-ing knowingly and non-accidentally, she is not unintentionally A-ing; and actions that are neither intentional nor unintentional are nonintentional. (Mele and Sverdlik1996: 274) And having carved out this middle ground, Mele and Sverdlik apply the notion of nonintentionality to Bratman’s runner and Harman’s sniper.

According to this line of

reasoning, because (a) neither the runner nor the sniper intended or tried to bring about

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the side effects of their respective actions, and (b) they did not bring about these side effects accidentally, we should say that they brought them about non-intentionally—i.e., neither intentionally nor unintentionally.5 If Mele and Sverdlik are correct, this gives us another way to save the Simple View from Bratman and Harman’s alleged counterexample. After all, if neither the runner nor the sniper intentionally brought about their respective side effects, then their actions cannot be used to rebut the claim that an agent can intentionally bring about some side effect y, even though she did not intend to y.

1.7 Conclusion of Chapter 1 In the first chapter, my goal has simply been to give the reader a perspicuous overview of the philosophical landscape. Before I examine how recent empirical work sheds light on a number of the issues I have just discussed, however, I should first summarize the most salient problems and questions that have arisen so far. These include: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Are intentions to x necessary for intentionally x-ing? Is skill or control necessary for intentional action? Do moral considerations act expansively on ascriptions of intentional action? If an agent does x knowing that x will bring about y, is this sufficient for the agent’s intending to y or intentionally bringing y about?

These four issues will serve as the backdrop for the upcoming seven chapters—where the focus will be on the folk concepts of intention and intentional action and on various attempts to probe the intuitions of laypersons about particular cases involving intentions and intentional actions. But first, I must motivate the project by discussing the relevance and importance of folk concepts and intuitions to the philosophy of action, ethics, and legal theory—which is the subject of Chapter 2.

5

For a similar discussion of non-intentional action – i.e. action that is neither intentional nor unintentional – see Duff (1990: 77-9) and Mele & Moser (1994).

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2: THE FOLK CONCEPTS OF INTENTION AND INTENTIONAL ACTION

2.1 Motivating the Project6 Ever since Socrates began challenging the beliefs and assumptions of his fellow Athenians—often much to their chagrin—philosophers have been in the business of analyzing concepts. One of Socrates’ motivating assumptions was the claim that general terms are explicable in terms of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions—an assumption that is still operative among analytic philosophers today. Indeed, for a number of contemporary philosophers, the method of doing philosophy is still broadly Socratic. When doing conceptual analysis, philosophers put forward tentative definitions of concepts to see whether they fall prey to counter-examples or involve hidden internal inconsistencies. Perhaps the best example of how this is supposed to work is the age-old definition of knowledge as justified true belief.

According to Edmund Gettier, at least, this

definition simply won’t do (Gettier 1963: 121-122). After all, we can imagine situations involving agents that seemingly have justified true beliefs about x, yet, intuitively, we would not say that they know x. And given that conceptual analyses are supposed to give us essential definitions spelled out in terms of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, we have reason to conclude that knowledge that x cannot simply be analyzed as justified true beliefs that x. The method of appealing to intuitions about particular cases is used in nearly every area of philosophy. One of the most important things about conceptual analysis so conceived for our present purposes is that it is entirely a priori.

Philosophers consult

their own intuitions about particular cases to see whether tentative definitions are

6

Selected parts of §2.1 are forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology—in a paper entitled “Surveying Free Will”—and in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research—in a paper entitled “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive.” Although I co-authored both of these papers with Eddy Nahmias, Steven Morris, and Jason Turner, the parts that I have used in my dissertation come from sections that I was primarily responsible for writing in the original papers.

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satisfactory. When definitions fail to satisfy a philosopher’s intuitions, they are either rejected or revised.

Given this view of conceptual analysis, our intuitions about

particular cases often take center stage in contemporary philosophy in areas as diverse as epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of language, free will, and action theory. And as Alvin Goldman and Joel Pust correctly point out, “the contents of intuitions are usually singular classificational propositions, to the effect that such-and-such an example is or is not an instance of knowledge, of justice, of personal identity, and so forth” (Goldman and Pust 1998: 182). But given that intuitions play a central role in conceptual analysis, it seems reasonable to ask whose intuitions philosophers ought to be interested in. In principle, there are three possible answers to this question. First, each philosopher could be interested only in her own intuitions. On this view, when a philosopher says that a particular definition of a term does not withstand analysis she is simply claiming that, on the basis of some alleged counterexamples and associated argumentation, she does not find the definition to be intuitively plausible. But what sort of evidentiary weight is such a claim supposed to have? After all, as a quick glance at the philosophical literature on knowledge, ethics, free will, etc. reveals, philosophers often have disparate intuitions. As a result, many of the central debates in philosophy end in an argumentative impasse. And given that philosophers’ intuitions often conflict, appealing to one’s own intuitions is unlikely to have much persuasive force except to those who already share their intuitions. Moreover, by relying solely on her own intuitions, a philosopher runs into the problem of “theory contamination” (Goldman and Pust 1998: 183).

After all, to the extent that someone is wed to a

particular theory, this theory is likely to taint her intuitions about particular cases, thereby further weakening the evidentiary status of the intuitions. This possibility gives us additional reason to conclude that if intuitions are to be helpful, our interest in them cannot be limited to solely the intuitions that each of us happens to have. Another possibility is that when philosophers talk about intuitions they are interested not just in their own particular intuitions, but rather in philosophers’ intuitions in general. However, given that we just saw that philosophers often have divergent intuitions, this view of intuitions is no more helpful than the previous one. Presumably, appealing to philosophers’ intuitions in general would only be of use if these intuitions

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were at least roughly symmetrical. But, as we have already seen, for many of the most perplexing philosophical issues the sort of consensus that we would need to make the appeals to intuitions helpful is entirely lacking. Moreover, if we limit ourselves solely to philosophers’ intuitions, the aforementioned problem of theory contamination is further compounded. Owing to the shortcomings of focusing exclusively on philosophers’ intuitions, we might prefer instead to focus on the pre-theoretical intuitions of laypersons who are not invested in particular philosophical theories. On this view, ordinary concepts and folk intuitions are the proper subject matter of conceptual analysis. Indeed, this seems to be the approach to conceptual analysis adopted by Socrates himself. After all, in asking his interlocutors to answer questions such as “What is courage?” or “What is knowledge?”, he was trying to force them to give an account of their own ordinary concepts and not some technical or philosophical counterparts.

Moreover, the

effectiveness of the Socratic method was dependant on the interlocutors’ own intuitions about the counter-examples that Socrates put forward. In this respect, philosophers’ appeals to intuitions have often—although admittedly not always—been fueled by an interest in our everyday concepts and our judgments concerning particular cases. Frank Jackson has arguably put forward the most thorough and persuasive defense of the view that philosophers should be in the business of analyzing folk concepts. On his view, “our subject is really the elucidation of the situations covered by the words we use to ask our questions—concerning free action, knowledge…or whatever” (Jackson 1998: 33). And given that ordinary usage is the proper subject matter of conceptual analysis, “consulting intuitions about possible cases” is the proper method (Jackson 1998: 33). As he says, “if we wish to address the concerns of our fellows when we discuss the matter—and if we don’t we will not have much of an audience—we had better mean what they mean” (Jackson 1998: 118). Of course, while Jackson is quick to admit that coming up with correct analyses of folk concepts and theories may be difficult, he nevertheless expresses confidence in our ability to get at the “patterns underlying our conceptual competence” (Jackson 1998:64). And while I entirely agree with Jackson’s contention that philosophers should be primarily interested in the concepts of ordinary

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language, his view is based on at least one questionable assumption—viz., that the intuitions of analytic philosophers are representative of folk intuitions. Consider, for instance, Jackson’s own analysis of folk morality. From the outset, he assumes—based on his own intuitions—that “some sort of objectivism is part of the current folk morality” (Jackson 1998: 137). The important thing about this remark for our present purposes is not whether Jackson’s claim about the objectivist nature of folk morality is true—although there is gathering evidence that laypersons are not as objectivist about morality as he assumes (Nichols 2004)—but rather his method for arriving at the purported truth of this claim. Keep in mind, when philosophers make claims such as these about ordinary usage or folk intuitions from their armchairs, these claims are resolutely empirical. However, the evidence used to support these empirical claims about folk concepts is often entirely speculative.

Hence, it is fair to ask

philosophers what justifies these sorts of empirically unsubstantiated claims. This is a question that Jackson himself acknowledges when he admits that he is “sometimes asked—in a tone that suggests that the question is a major objection—why, if conceptual analysis is concerned to elucidate what governs our classificatory practice, don’t I advocate doing serious opinion polls on people’s responses to various cases? My answer is that I do—when it is necessary” (Jackson 1998: 36-37). And while I applaud Jackson’s sensitivity to folk intuitions, his own method of getting at them—namely, informal polls of students—is methodologically problematic when compared with the kinds of formal polls commonly used in the social sciences. Nevertheless, the question about the importance of opinion polls for conceptual analysis is an important one. Taking this question seriously has led a number of philosophers to rethink the purely speculative practice of fashioning folk intuitions out of one’s own intuitions. Working under the rubric of “experimental philosophy,” a number of researchers have recently begun making an attempt to get at folk intuitions in an empirically informed manner. In some respects, these researchers have simply taken Jackson’s comments about the necessity of opinion polls seriously. After all, to the extent that claims about folk concepts and intuitions are empirical claims about ordinary usage, the only method of accurately determining what they are will itself involve empirical methods. Working at the crossroads of philosophy and the social sciences, researchers

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engaged in experimental philosophy use techniques borrowed from social psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and developmental psychology to get at folk intuitions with the goal of shedding light on philosophical debates that are mired in conflicting a priori intuitions. To see how this research is carried out, we should briefly look at an area where it seems especially relevant—namely, the free will debate. To say that the parties to the free will debate find themselves in a stalemate would be an understatement. One indication of how intractable the debate has become—and how entrenched the respective parties are—is the curious fact that so many philosophers claim that their own position has the most intuitive appeal.7 One intuition pump after another is offered in support of compatibilism and incompatibilism, each time accompanied by the empirically unsubstantiated assertion that folk intuitions about these cases support whatever position is being advanced at the time. Of course, as we have already seen, intuition pumps are not unique to the free will debate. Lots of philosophical arguments rely on thought experiments to suggest that some conceptual claim about a premise or counterexample has at least prima facie support, thus situating the burden of proof on the opponent.

These are usually meant to be descriptive claims about

commonsense intuitions that then provide support for normative or theoretical claims. Moreover, the descriptive claims are meant to be uncontroversial—i.e., intuitive—and thus not in need of empirical support. The problem in the free will debate is that philosophers often find themselves in disagreement about which claims are in fact the most intuitive. Obviously, to the extent that incompatibilists and compatibilists both claim that their own respective positions are most consistent with our pre-philosophical intuitions, 7

We find, for instance, incompatibilists such as Robert Kane suggesting that ordinary people start out with incompatibilist intuitions and have to be convinced by the “clever” arguments of compatibilists to see how free will could possibly exist in a deterministic universe. Laura Ekstrom asserts that “we come to the table, nearly all of us, as pretheoretic incompatibilists” (2002: 310) and “the compatibilist, then, needs a positive argument in favor of the compatibility thesis” (2000: 57). Galen Strawson argues that libertarian free will, though impossible, is precisely “the kind of freedom that most people ordinarily and unreflectively suppose themselves to possess” (1986: 30). And Saul Smilansky writes, “People naturally assume they have libertarian free will” (2003: 259). On the other hand, some compatibilists make claims about commonsense intuitions, too, suggesting that the folk do not demand the libertarian conception of free will that is incompatible with determinism. For instance, Daniel Dennett claims that when ordinary people assign moral responsibility, “it simply does not matter at all … whether the agent in question could have done otherwise in the circumstances” (1984b: 558). Frankfurt-style cases (1969) are also designed to bring to light the intuition that the freedom necessary for moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise.

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both sides cannot be right. Moreover, they can’t really claim to know if they are right, since no one has systematically tested to see what people’s pre-philosophical intuitions are. So how are we to best understand this sort of intellectual gridlock? According to some researchers, so long as philosophers make empirical claims about folk intuitions that they are not required to support with empirical evidence, we should not be surprised to find philosophers on opposite sides of the fence making conflicting claims about folk intuitions. In cases where philosophers assume that one of the selling points of their theories is the supposed fact that these theories are most consistent with commonsense or folk intuitions, it becomes increasingly important to know what these intuitions actually are. Consider, for instance, the common claim that the majority of non-philosophers have incompatibilist intuitions. On the surface, this is a straightforward empirical claim that entails certain predictions about how people would respond to certain thought experiments. So, for instance, if it were true that most non-philosophers do share the incompatibilists’ intuitions, then we should expect that if they were given a thought experiment involving an agent whose actions were entirely determined—or who could not have done otherwise—a majority of the subjects would not attribute free will and moral responsibility to the agent. Conversely, compatibilists who claim that the folk share their intuitions should predict that a majority of subjects would attribute free will and moral responsibility to such an agent—assuming that the agent’s cognitive capacities are not dysfunctional, externally constrained, etc. Yet, until a concerted effort is made to probe folk intuitions and judgments via systematic psychological experiments, the truth of these sorts of empirical claims goes unchecked. One of the primary goals of researchers working in the nascent field of experimental philosophy is to take the requisite preliminary steps toward filling in these kinds of empirical lacunae.

Hence, there is growing data about folk concepts and

intuitions relevant to epistemology (e.g., Nichols, Weinberg, and Stich 2002), ethics (e.g., Doris and Stich forthcoming), free will (e.g., Nahmias et al. forthcoming a; forthcoming b), and most importantly for our present purposes, the philosophy of action (Knobe 2003, 2004; Malle and Knobe 1997; 2001; Nadelhoffer 2004, forthcoming). In motivating their approach to philosophy, experimental philosophers often make the following claims:

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First, philosophers frequently appeal to pre-theoretical intuitions in supporting their positions. Second, philosophers’ own intuitions are not likely to reflect these intuitions given the aforementioned problem of theory contamination. Third, the only way of getting at folk intuitions is by actually presenting cases to laypersons. Given these three points, experimental philosophers conclude that empirical research must be undertaken to determine whether philosophical theories really are intuitive. This is not to suggest that discovering what folk intuitions really are will solve any philosophical problems. Nor is it to suggest that ordinary language or pre-theoretical judgments should serve as the final court of appeal. The goal of experimental philosophy is ordinarily much more modest. Researchers first and foremost want to get at the relevant folk concepts and intuitions in an empirically informed rather than merely speculative manner. Presumably, once we know what the pre-theoretical intuitions about a particular philosophical problem are, we will then be able to determine which philosophers must shoulder the burden of responsibility. After all, philosophers will no longer be able to claim that their position aligns with common sense unless their views empirically merit such support. Of course, if a particular analysis of an ordinary concept does turn out to cohere with folk intuitions, that alone would not prove it to be true, but it would seem to shift the argumentative burden to those who argue contrary to these intuitions. By my lights, analyses that most closely agree with the judgments of nonspecialists minimally enjoy “squatters’ rights” until they are shown to be defective for other reasons. One natural response for philosophers whose positions are not in line with folk intuitions would be to explain why these intuitions are mistaken or why these folk concepts need to be revised. Alternatively, they might offer an explanation for why we have the intuitions we do but why they do not in fact commit us to certain conceptual or theoretical views. But these moves still require that we first determine—rather than merely speculate about—what these folk intuitions and concepts actually are. Otherwise, we will not know exactly what it is that needs to be explained away or revised. This suggests that we must first make an earnest attempt to probe the folk intuitions in question before subsequent analyses are developed.

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As Richard Double suggests,

“Theorizing may suggest which intuitions we have to give up, but if we do not start from them we will never get anywhere” (1987: 28). Of course, the philosophical relevance of folk intuitions will vary from topic to topic. Owing to the inherently abstract nature of some philosophical subjects—e.g., logic, metaphysics, or the philosophy of mathematics—we may not care at all about pretheoretical judgments and intuitions. Hence, a mereologist will not (and arguably should not) bother to determine whether a majority of laypersons judge that a box with two marbles in it contains two or three objects. Similarly, a philosopher interested in the foundations of mathematics will not be interested in our pretheoretical intuitions concerning the ontological status of numbers. In some of the other areas of philosophy we have discussed, on the other hand, it looks as if folk intuitions do (and arguably should) play a more important role in philosophical theories—especially when the relevant concepts are intimately bound up with our everyday moral views and practices. One concept in particular that has received a lot of attention among experimental philosophers recently is the folk concept of intentional action (Adams and Steadman 2004a; 2004b; Knobe 2003, 2004; Knobe and Burra forthcoming; Knobe and Mendlow forthcoming; Malle and Knobe 1997; 2001; McCann forthcoming; Nadelhoffer 2004, forthcoming). After all, as Mele has correctly pointed out, any adequate philosophical analysis of intentional action should be “anchored by common-sense judgments” about particular cases (Mele 2001: 27)—even if it need not capture or reflect all of these judgments. On this view, one way of testing an analysis of intentional action would be to find out whether it agrees with our pretheoretical intuitions. And the only method of determining what the majority of non-specialists say about particular cases is to actually ask them. Having done so, if we find that an analysis of intentional action is entirely inconsistent with folk intuitions, we will be in a good position to suggest that it “runs the risk of having nothing more than a philosophical fiction as its subject matter” (Mele 2001:27).

Data about the folk concept of intentional action become all the more

important for philosophers such as Hugh McCann who explicitly claim to be interested in ordinary concepts and not their philosophical counterparts (McCann 1998: 210). Minimally, any philosopher who offers an account of intentional action that is not

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anchored by folk judgments would need to admit that her view does not cohere with some aspects of ordinary usage after all. There is another important reason why the folk concept of intentional action is particularly important—namely, our criminal justice system relies heavily on the distinction between intentional and unintentional actions. More importantly, the jurors who are often called on to make judgments concerning whether an action was intentional are themselves non-specialists who will be familiar with the folk concept of intentional action. Hence, it is crucial that the legal concepts of intention and intentional action adequately settle with their folk counterparts—otherwise, courts and judges will confuse and frustrate jurors whose job it is to pass verdicts based on these concepts. But until we study the folk concept of intentional action in an empirically informed way, any comparisons we draw between the folk and legal concepts of intentionality will be speculative at best. Hence, by my lights at least, the folk concept of intentional action is particularly ripe for empirical investigation. The following sections will highlight the various ways that the data on folk concepts can be brought to bear on philosophical issues. Minimally, empirical data about the folk concept of intentional action should (a) force philosophers to state more precisely what it is they are investigating when they discuss intentional actions, (b) prevent philosophers from appealing to the intuitive plausibility of their analyses of intentional action unless these analyses really are intuitive, (c) encourage philosophers to re-examine some of their own methodological assumptions concerning the role of intuitions in conceptual analysis. And in the event that a particular analysis of intentional action is inconsistent with ordinary usage, the onus will be on its proponents to explain why we should care about a technical concept of intentional action rather than the ordinary one— especially when understanding the latter is an important philosophical goal in its own right for the reasons I have already discussed. For now, I want to turn our attention to some of the recent attempts to probe folk intuitions concerning intentions and intentional actions.

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2.2 Malle and Knobe on Intentions and Desires In “The Distinction Between Desire and Intention: A Folk-Conceptual Analysis,” Bertram Malle and Joshua Knobe examine one of the central issues I discussed in §1.1— viz., what distinguishes desires from intentions. By blending “conceptual analysis with empirical study” they hope to determine what criteria we ordinarily use to distinguish intentions from desires, wishes, hopes, and wants (Malle and Knobe 2001: 46). The starting point of their investigation is the observation that while desires and intentions are both representational mental states that involve pro-attitudes, we often say that an agent desires to x even in cases where the agent has not actually decided to do anything. Intentions, on the other hand, seem to entail a sort of settledness that many desires lack. According to Malle and Knobe, desires and intentions “occupy different positions in the path that (typically) leads to action” (Malle and Knobe 2001: 46). On their view: Desires stand at the very beginning of the process. Before making a decision about how to act, the person needs to consider various desires, balancing them against each other and asking which one of them can potentially be fulfilled. In the course of this reasoning process, the person arrives at an intention. This intention is an all things considered decision that takes into account the person’s various desires. The intention, then, is just one step away from the action; all that remains is to put one’s decision into motion. (Malle and Knobe 2001: 46) In order to test this view, Malle and Knobe postulated that social perceivers rely on three different criteria to distinguish intentions from desires—namely, “the type of content, the function in reasoning, and the degree of commitment” (2001: 46). As we saw earlier, a number of philosophers suggest that one difference between desires and intentions is that the latter, unlike the former, must seemingly “always have as their content an action performed by the person who holds the intentions” (Malle and Knobe 2001:47). This difference between avowals of intentions and avowals of desires leads Malle and Knobe to put forward the following hypothesis: “people use the content of a pro attitude to identify it as a desire or an intention, with desires representing any content and with genuine intentions representing what we call action content” (Malle and Knobe 2001: 48). On their view, a pro attitude has action content if the agent who performed the action is the same person who had the attitude.

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In arguing for their view about action content, Malle and Knobe point out that the difference in content between avowals of intentions and avowals of desires has “grammaticalized in English such that there is a systematic difference in the syntactic complementation patterns for the verbs want and intend” (Malle and Knobe 2001: 48). Previous studies, for instance, have shown that the word “wanting” is commonly used in three different ways—namely, with to + infintive (55% of the cases), with a direct object (28% of the cases), or with a noun phrase or other various complements (17% of the cases)” (Aaarts and Aaarts 1991). Malle and Knobe claim that the word “intend,” on the other hand, is used almost exclusively with to + infinitive. To support this claim, they looked at a random sample of occurrences of “intend” in American newspapers and magazines and they found that 97% of the time that the active verb intend is used with to + infinitive. Moreover, in constructions involving the verb intend and to + infinitive, “the grammatical subject is identical to the grammatical subject of the infinitive, guaranteeing identity between the agent who intends and the agent of the intended action” (Malle and Knobe 2001: 48-49). This sort of evidence gives prima facie support for Malle and Knobe’s claims about the importance of action content for folk ascriptions of intention. To further test their hypothesis about action content, they collected more data on the difference between the content of intention verbs (e.g., intend, plan, and decide) and desire verbs (e.g., want, wish, hope). In collecting the relevant data, Malle and Knobe coded the occurrences of each of these verbs and checked them for content. The results showed that whereas the content of the intention verbs made reference to the agent in 98% of the cases, the content of the desire verbs only referred to the agent in 63% of the cases—a statistically significant difference: χ2 (1, N=396) = 82.4, p

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