According to the Doctrine of Illicit Intentions, it is impermissible both to form and then to act on an illicit intention. An intention is illicit, roughly, if it causes the agent who has it to be, in a certain way, disposed to perform actions that are impermissible. If the range of actions an agent might be directed to perform by an intention includes impermissible actions, then it may be impermissible to form or act on that intention even if, in the (...) end, the agent performs no action that is impermissible (other than forming and acting on an illicit intention itself). (shrink)

This dissertation explores some objections to natural law theory- many of which are also leveled against contemporary naturalism. Despite the way the natural law tradition has fallen into disrepute in much of the American academy, this dissertation defends a classical Thomistic approach to natural law from some modern and contemporary criticisms. It begins with a brief explanation of the theory of natural law that will be defended from these contemporary objections. Chapter three examines G.E. Moore and David Hume's classical problems (...) posed to natural law, along with some contemporary defenders of Moore's position. These arguments are purported to undermine using human nature as a basis for ethics. Chapter four considers how moral relativism, especially the form given by Gilbert Harmon and David Wong, offers a unique challenge to natural law that must be answered and one that seems to undermine any ethical theory than any account relying on human nature. Chapter five explores the relation between neo-naturalism and natural law. Although neo-naturalism is a position often thought of as opposed to natural law, the two share many similarities in the positions they oppose. The last chapter examines how natural law reasoning is used in making medical decisions. The overarching thesis is that, insofar as natural law is coherent and answers many major criticisms, the proposal to reexamine this ethical theory stands as viable. (shrink)

The doctrine of double effect, together with other moral principles that appeal to the intentions of moral agents, has come under attack from many directions in recent years, as have a variety of rationales that have been given in favor of it. In this paper, our aim is to develop, defend, and provide a new theoretical rationale for a secular version of the doctrine. Following Quinn (1989), we distinguish between Harmful Direct Agency and Harmful Indirect Agency. We propose the following (...) version of the doctrine: that in cases in which harm must come to some in order to achieve a good (and is the least costly of possible harms necessary), the agent foresees the harm, and all other things are equal, a stronger case is needed to justify Harmful Direct Agency than to justify Harmful Indirect Agency. We distinguish between two Kantian rationales that might be given for the doctrine, a “dependent right” rationale, defended by Quinn, and an “independent right” rationale, which we defend. We argue that the doctrine and the “independent right” rationale for it are not vulnerable to counterexamples or counterproposals, and conclude by drawing implications for the larger debate over whether agents' intentions are in any way relevant to permissibility and obligation. (shrink)

Solar radiation management (SRM), a form of climate engineering, would offset the effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations by reducing the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth. To encourage support for SRM research, advocates argue that SRM may someday be needed to reduce the risks from climate change. This paper examines the implications of two moral constraints—the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, and the Doctrine of Double Effect—on this argument for SRM and SRM research. The Doctrine of Doing and (...) Allowing, and perhaps the Doctrine of Double Effect, shows that the argument is weaker than it appears. (shrink)

Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, (...) Internet search engine queries for expressions of interest have become quite popular. Apparently, philosophers attempt to surpass the limits of their own linguistic intuitions by appealing to experts or to factual uses of language. I argue that this attempt is commendable but that its execution is wanting. Instead of appealing to dictionaries or Internet queries, philosophers should employ computer-based linguistic corpora in order to confirm or falsify hypotheses about the factual use of language. This approach also has some advantages over methods employed by experimental philosophers. If the importance of ordinary language is stressed, the use of linguistic corpora is hardly avoidable. (shrink)

The trolley problem, first described by Foot (1967) and Thomson (The Monist, 59, 204–217, 1976), is one of the most famous and influential thought experiments in deontological ethics. The general story is that a runaway trolley is threatening the lives of five people. Doing nothing will result in the death of those persons, but acting in order to save those persons would unavoidably result in the death of another, sixth person. It appears that, depending on the situation, we have different (...) moral judgments about the permissibility of action. We will review and systematize all the proposals in the literature of the past 35 years that have attempted to grasp our moral intuitions in a simple deontological principle. In particular, seventeen proposals will be classified: six algorithmic, seven psychological, and four other invalid accounts. This review and classification sheds light on some subtle differences and clarify a few issues. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson has recently proposed a new argument for the thesis that killing the one in the Trolley Problem is not permissible. Her argument relies on the introduction of a new scenario, in which the bystander may also sacrifice herself to save the five. Thomson argues that those not willing to sacrifice themselves if they could may not kill the one to save the five. Bryce Huebner and Marc Hauser have recently put Thomson's argument to empirical test by asking (...) people what they should do in the new trilemma case, in which they may also sacrifice themselves. They found that the majority judge that they should either kill the one or sacrifice themselves; Huebner and Hauser argue that those numbers speak against Thomson's argument. But Thomson's argument was about the dialectical effect of the new trilemma on the traditional dilemma, rather than about the trilemma itself. Here I present the results of a study in which I asked subjects first what they should do in the trilemma and then what they should do in the traditional Trolley Problem. I found that, if asked first about the trilemma, subjects then have the intuition that killing the one in the traditional Bystander at the Switch is not permissible?exactly what Thomson's argument had predicted. (shrink)

According to the doctrine of double effect(DDE), there is a morally significantdifference between harm that is intended andharm that is merely foreseen and not intended.It is not difficult to explain why it is bad tointend harm as an end (you have a ``badattitude'' toward that harm) but it is hard toexplain why it is bad to intend harm as a meansto some good end. If you intend harm as a meansto some good end, you need not have a ``badattitude'' toward (...) it. I distinguish two ways inwhich you can treat something that is yourchosen means to your ends. You can pursue yourends directly, and treat X as a mere means thatyou pursue for the sake of your end. Or you canpursue your ends indirectly, and treat X as a``plan-relative end'' that you pursue for its ownsake. I argue that much of the time we pursueour ends indirectly, and treat our means asplan-relative ends. There are significantanalogies between intending harm as an end, andintending harm as a plan-relative end. So,under certain circumstances, it is morallyworse to intend harm as a means or an end thanto foresee bringing about the same amount of harm. (shrink)

The difficulty of distinguishing between the intended and the merely foreseen consequences of actions seems to many to be the most serious problem for the doctrine of double effect. It has led some to reject the doctrine altogether, and has left some of its defenders recasting it in entirely different terms. I argue that these responses are unnecessary. Using Bratman’s conception of intention, I distinguish the intended consequences of an action from the merely foreseen in a way that can be (...) used to support the doctrine of double effect. (shrink)

I argue against the Doctrine of Double Effect’s explanation of the moral difference between terror bombing and strategic bombing. I show that the standard thought-experiment of terror bombing and strategic bombing which dominates this debate is underdetermined with regards to the agents’ psychologies: (a) if Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber have the same causal beliefs, then why does Terror Bomber set out to kill the children? It may then be this unwarranted and immoral choice and not the Doctrine of Double (...) Effect that explains the moral difference; (b) if the two have different causal beliefs, then we can’t rule out the counterfactual that, had Strategic Bomber had the same beliefs as Terror Bomber, she would have also acted as Terror Bomber did. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether there is a morally significant difference between acting with the intention of bringing about some state of affairs and acting with the mere awareness that that state of affairs will occur as an unintended side effect of what one is trying to achieve. This controversy is mirrored in the criminal law in a number of places, most notably with respect to the question of whether the mens rea for the crime of murder should require the (...) intent to cause death or only the knowledge that it will occur. In this paper I propose what I believe is a satisfactory way of drawing the intended/foreseen distinction and then argue, contrary to what Duff and others have supposed, that such a distinction does not underwrite a difference in moral or legal culpability. I leave open the possibility, however, that there may be consequentialist reasons for sometimes imposing greater liability in the case of intended harms than in the case of those that are merely foreseen. (shrink)

Thinking is overrated: golfers perform best when distracted and under pressure; firefighters make the right calls without a clue as to why; and you are yourself ill advised to look at your steps as you go down the stairs, or to try and remember your pin number before typing it in. Just do it, mindlessly. Both empirical psychologists and the common man have long worked out that thinking is often a bad idea, but philosophers still hang on to an intellectualist (...) picture of human action. This book challenges that picture and calls on philosophers to wake up to the power of mindlessness: it is our habits, skills and conventions that help us cope with a world way too diverse for us to hope to always reinterpret it. The book presents the empirical evidence that has been accumulating over the last few decades and offers a philosophical analysis of mindless phenomena such as habits, skilled activity, automatic actions, emotional and spontaneous reactions and social conventions, arguing that traditional philosophical theories of action should be revised to do justice to this forgotten but important part of our lives: when we act mindlessly, we are free and fully rational even though we neither deliberate nor are aware of what we are doing. (shrink)

Automation is inherently tied to ethical challenges because of its potential involvement in morally loaded decisions. In the present research, participants (n = 34) took part in a moral multi-trial dilemma-based task where the agent (human vs. machine) and the behavior (action vs. inaction) factors were randomized. Self-report measures, in terms of morality, consciousness, responsibility, intentionality, and emotional impact evaluation were gathered, together with electroencephalography (delta, theta, beta, upper and lower alpha, and gamma powers) and peripheral autonomic (electrodermal activity, heart (...) rate variability) data. Data showed that moral schemata vary as a function of the involved decider, and when the agent and behavior factors are crossed. Subjects did not consider machines full moral deciders to the same degree as humans and tend to morally better accept human active behavior and machine inaction. Moreover, the autonomic physiological activity might support the a-posteriori moral evaluation. In the evaluation of the agent’s consciousness, a beta ventrolateral prefrontal synchronization was detected for human action and machine inaction, while a generalized gamma synchronization occurred in artificial agent trials while rating the emotional impact of the decider’s behavior. The detected differences might point to a potential explicit and implicit asymmetry in moral reasoning toward artificial and human agents. (shrink)

There are two perspectives available from which to understand an agent's intention in acting. The first is the perspective of the acting agent: what did she take to be her end, and the means necessary to achieve that end? The other is a third person perspective that is attentive to causal or conceptual relations: was some causal outcome of the agent's action sufficiently close, or so conceptually related, to what the agent did that it should be considered part of her (...) intention? Recent goods based views in ethics are divided as to whether only the first person perspective, or a mix of both perspectives, are necessary to understand intention and action. But resolution of the issue is necessary if goods based views are to be able to deploy to principle of double effect; for that principle requires an account of how to distinguish what is genuinely a matter of intention in human action from what is not. I argue that the pure first person account is better than the mixed account. (shrink)

Many medical interventions have both negative and positive effects. When health care professionals cannot achieve a particular desired good result without bringing about some bad effects also they often rely on double-effect reasoning to justify their decisions. The principle of double effect is therefore an important guide for ethical decision-making in medicine. At the same time, however, it is a very controversial tool for resolving complex ethical problems that has been criticized by many authors. For these reasons, I examine in (...) this paper whether the principle of double effect can serve as a basis for ethical decisions in medicine. The conclusion reached in this article is that even though this principle has desirable effects on clinical conduct, it is only an unreliable guide and physicians and nurses cannot feel secure in continuing to use this principle for ethical guidance. (shrink)

The problem of closeness was posed by Philippa Foot in the article “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect”. Foot criticizes the classic version of the principle of double effect which distinguishes direct from indirect intention. On this basis, she considers it justified to cause bad effects which were foreseen but not intended. She believes that if we consider causing a bad effect to be justified then the way we do it is irrelevant, while the reference to (...) the direct/indirect distinction may lead to absurd solutions in some cases that allow us to distinguish two events in one action. These constitute, respectively, the object of direct and indirect intention and they are much too close for an application of the principle of double effect, such as when a doctor performs a craniotomy. The root of the problem of closeness is the question about the possible criterion that would allow us to determine which of the effects of an action are intended and which are merely foreseen. The starting point of the analysis of the problem of closeness in this article is the manner in which Foot outlines it in her article. In the second and more extensive part of the article, a number of contemporary attempts to solve the problem of closeness are presented, while the third section is an attempt to answer the question of why the discussion of the problem of closeness seems to remain deadlocked. (shrink)

Based on the results of empirical studies of folk moral judgment, several researchers have claimed that something like the famous Doctrine of Double Effect may be a fundamental, albeit unconscious, component of human moral psychology. Proponents of this psychological DDE hypothesis have, however, said surprisingly little about how the distinction at the heart of standard formulations of the principle—the distinction between intended and merely foreseen consequences—might be cognised when we make moral judgments about people’s actions. I first highlight the problem (...) of precisely formulating the distinction between intended and foreseen consequences and its implications for interpreting the empirical data on folk moral judgment. I then distinguish between three different approaches to this problem that have been taken by proponents of the DDE in normative ethics: so-called “closeness” accounts, accounts that employ what has come to be known as a “strict” notion of intention, and Warren Quinn’s recasting of the DDE in terms of the distinction between “direct” and “indirect agency”. I show that when taken as claims about moral psychology, these different accounts entail quite different empirical predictions about what people’s moral judgments should be in particular cases. Based on the current empirical data, I argue that a version of Quinn’s formulation of the DDE is the most empirically plausible, and that adopting such a formulation helps to diffuse much of the recent empirical criticism of the DDE hypothesis. (shrink)

A number of practices at the end of life can causally contribute to diminished consciousness in dying patients. Despite overlapping meanings and a confusing plethora of names in the published literature, this article distinguishes three types of clinically and ethically distinct practices: double-effect sedation, parsimonious direct sedation, and sedation to unconsciousness and death. After exploring the concept of suffering, the value of consciousness, the philosophy of therapy, the ethical importance of intention, and the rule of double effect, these three practices (...) are defined clearly and evaluated ethically. It is concluded that, if one is opposed to euthanasia and assisted suicide, double-effect sedation can frequently be ethically justified, that parsimonious direct sedation can be ethically justified only in extremely rare circumstances in which symptoms have already completely consumed the patient’s consciousness, and that sedation to unconsciousness and death is never justifiable. The special case of sedation for existential suffering is also considered and rejected. (shrink)

This file contains the Bibliography of my book Mindlessness.

The doctrine of double effect, together with other moral principles that appeal to the intentions of moral agents, has come under attack from many directions in recent years, as have a variety of rationales that have been given in favor of it. In this paper, our aim is to develop, defend, and provide a new theoretical rationale for a secular version of the doctrine. Following Quinn (1989), we distinguish between Harmful Direct Agency and Harmful Indirect Agency. We propose the following (...) version of the doctrine: that in cases in which harm must come to some in order to achieve a good (and is the least costly of possible harms necessary), the agent foresees the harm, and all other things are equal, a stronger case is needed to justify Harmful Direct Agency than to justify Harmful Indirect Agency. We distinguish between two Kantian rationales that might be given for the doctrine, a “dependent right” rationale, defended by Quinn, and an “independent right” rationale, which we defend. We argue that the doctrine and the “independent right” rationale for it are not vulnerable to counterexamples or counterproposals, and conclude by drawing implications for the larger debate over whether agents' intentions are in any way relevant to permissibility and obligation. (shrink)

Distributive egalitarians believe that distributive justice is to be explained by the idea of distributive equality (DE) and that DE is of intrinsic value. The socio-relational critique argues that distributive egalitarianism does not account for the “true” value of equality, which rather lies in the idea of “equality as a substantive social value” (ESV). This paper examines the socio-relational critique and argues that it fails because – contrary to what the critique presupposes –, first, ESV is not conceptually distinct from (...) DE, and second, the idea of ESV cannot serve as a “foundation” or “root” of distributive egalitarianism. (shrink)

The use of intention in ethics has been the subject of intense debate for many years, but no consensus has emerged over whether intention is morally relevant, or even how it should be understood. In this paper I wish to make a thorough, though by no means exhaustive, examination of the concept and the concepts around it, some to be seen as near-synonyms, and some as contrasting ideas. My interest is in the ethical use of the concept, though my own (...) analysis of it will be indebted to discussions in the philosophy of action. The most famous ethical use, which will not, however, be my direct focus here, is the ‘principle of double effect,’ which states that an agent may cause or allow something bad as long as, first, no evil is intended as an end or a means; and, second, that the foreseen bad is not out of proportion with the anticipated good. It is important to note the principle’s testimony to the plausibility of prohibitions expressed in terms of intentions, and, alongside these, a general prohibition on doing inordinate harms even without intention. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDem sogenannten Knobe-Effekt zufolge bestimmt die moralische Valenz von Nebeneffekten menschlichen Verhaltens die Zuschreibung ihrer absichtlichen Verursachung. Wir argumentieren, dass erstens die empirisch ermittelten sozialpsychologischen Daten den Knobe-Effekt in der üblichen Lesart nicht belegen, vor allem wegen der unvollständigen Untersuchung der entscheidenden moralischen Varianzfaktoren. Zweitens zeigen wir, dass - und wie - eine spezifische Version des traditionellen Prinzips des Doppeleffekts den empirisch bestätigten Teil des Knobe-Effekts philosophisch erklärt. Die Erklärungskraft des Prinzips des Doppeleffekts kann auch als eine Rechtfertigung eben dieses (...) Prinzips gesehen werden. (shrink)

This essay concerns itself with the methodology of practical ethics. There are a variety of methods employed in ethics. Although none have been firmly established as dominant, it is generally agreed that casuistry, or the case-based method, is one important strategy commonly used for resolving ethical issues. Casuists compare the case under consideration to a relevantly similar precedent case in which judgements have already been made, and they use these earlier judgements to determine the proper resolution of the present case. (...) In this article, I try to provide a better understanding of the nature of contemporary casuistry. To accomplish this, I explain the basic features of casuistic reasoning. The second section focuses on the logic of casuistry. By assessing casuistic reasoning from the logical viewpoint, casuistry can be reconstructed as a logically correct method of reasoning. The third section looks at casuistry from the epistemic point of view and investigates the justificatory force of casuistic reasoning. Finally, in the fourth section, I show the usefulness of formal casuistry. (shrink)