Abstract
In the traditional view of morality, intentions play a central role: they define what a typical action consists of and allow for the assignment of both blame and praise. Actions are intentional bodily movements, and if actions are morally assessed, it is first and foremost because they are intentional. Recently, several psychologists have investigated the neural basis of these mental phenomena. Although many studies confirm the traditional view, others point in the opposite direction: intentions play only a subordinate role in morality. For Joshua Knobe, intentionality is not central but depends on ascriptions of responsibility, far from grounding them. For Joshua Greene, moral judgement is based on intentions only when we rely on alarm emotions. If these studies are found to be convincing, it would oblige us to modify our view of morality: responsibility would be linked with outcomes rather than with intentions. On the legal level, the doctrine of mens rea would also be modified, and perhaps even abandoned. Neuroethics would then be a field that purports to offer a renewed view of morality. However, I think that a careful examination of the data and their interpretation shows that this conclusion is mistaken: intentions remain at the centre of morality even if it is not easily noticed in some situations, especially when side effects are involved.
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Notes
- 1.
Mental acts like decisions have been extensively studied by neuropsychologists since Benjamin Libet in the debate concerning free will (Fried et al. 2011). My subject focuses on another important point in action theory, unrelated to the free will debate.
- 2.
Here, I follow Franz Brentano, who said: “Each mental act is primarily directed to an object” (Marek 2013). For a mental act, to be directed to an object and to have a goal are synonymous.
- 3.
Rigato and col. notice: “What philosophers call ‘intentional,’ neuroscientists call ‘goal-directed’” (2014: 181). However, everything that is goal-directed is not intentional in the relevant sense, but this terminological difference is not important for my argument.
- 4.
There exist other kinds of nontypical actions, like impulsive actions, which seem to be intentional only in the sense of aboutness, actions performed under coercion or actions made while sleeping, during an episode of REM sleep behaviour disorder (Maoz and Yaffe 2015; Cerri 2016). I will not investigate them.
- 5.
“I follow a useful philosophical practice in calling anything an agent does intentionally an action” (Davidson 2002: 5).
- 6.
Every bodily movement can be described in different manners. Consequently, an intentional action can be described without any reference to the intention, but of course, it does not deprive it of its intentional character: a bodily movement is intentional – it is an action – if there exists a description of it mentioning an intention; otherwise, it is (a part of) an event.
- 7.
I leave here the question of negligence or carelessness aside.
- 8.
Notice that lex talionis (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth) and many ancient laws focus on action’s effects rather than on intentions.
- 9.
Legal systems consider some of these expressions to be synonyms (Zangrossi et al. 2015: 2).
- 10.
- 11.
When the outcome is not bad, Moran and colleagues did not observe any significant difference between the moral judgements of Asperger’s patients and typical adults (Moran et al. 2011: 2690).
- 12.
Ngo and colleagues have nevertheless not been able to confirm the results (Ngo et al. 2015: 5).
- 13.
See nevertheless (Leslie et al. 2006: 425).
- 14.
- 15.
However, Machery seems to understand “intentionally” as “deliberately”, since he says: “Because [people] believe that costs are intentionally incurred, they judge that harming the environment is intentional” (Machery 2008: 177).
- 16.
They have been tackled by the doctrine of double effect. I will make some observations on this doctrine in the last section.
- 17.
Their argument presupposes hard determinism and is presented in the context of the free will debate.
- 18.
The connection between utilitarianism and psychopathy is nevertheless weak and probably misguided; see Jaquet (2015).
- 19.
See also Baertschi (2013: chap. 1–2). Contrary to Greene, I conclude that we should refine our conception of intention and of its direction when several effects, good and bad ones, are present and not throw intentions overboard.
- 20.
Notice that in the case of the Knobe effect, the doctrine of double effect considers that the chairman’s project is not permissible: harming the environment is too high a cost.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Florian Cova, Ugo Gilbert Tremblay, Jean-Yves Goffi, François Jaquet, Pierre Le Coz and Yves Page for their helpful comments on a first version of this paper.
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Baertschi, B. (2017). Neuroethics: A Renewed View of Morality? Intentions and the Moral Point of View. In: Racine, E., Aspler, J. (eds) Debates About Neuroethics. Advances in Neuroethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54651-3_8
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