In an earlier post on the thinking of Immanuel Kant, we found that Kant believed that the measure of the morality of an action was to be found only in the intention of the person acting. He argued that we can never know with certainty what outcome an action will produce and so we cannot be held responsible for outcomes, only intentions.
Utilitarians, as we’ve seen, though, are “consequentialists”.
Bentham, Mill and their successors measure good and bad based on the results of action, which is exactly what Kant argued cannot be appropriate.
For Mill, though, certainty of outcome (which Kant seems to require) is not the necessary standard. His is more a “we know it when we see it” sort of approach. It implicitly assumes application within a population of individuals who have broadly similar experience, understanding and constraints. Otherwise, how could we know (almost intuitively or instinctively, as Mill suggests we should) how to anticipate the aggregate pain or pleasure resulting from an action?
So, there is a clear distinction between Kant and Mill on the issue of consequence.
A comparison of their positions on the importance of intention; which is a critical issue for our larger purposes; is also very interesting.
One would think that Mill, being so focused on outcome, would put little emphasis on intention. And, to be fair, his most forthright comment on intention does not appear in his original edition of Utilitarianism. But in the second edition of that book he includes a footnote in which he responds to a criticism of his approach.
In that response, Mill makes this surprising statement:
“There is no point which utilitarian thinkers (and Bentham preeminently) have taken more pains to illustrate than this. The morality of the action depends entirely upon the intention—that is, upon what the agent wills to do.” (emphasis added)”
How can a consequentialist make such a statement?
Dr. Michael Ridge of the University of Edinburgh has written (2002) a very clear analysis of this statement and offers an explanation that is based on Mill’s concepts of “right”, “wrong” and “intention”. We’ll come back to those in a later post but for the specific purposes of this discussion we can focus on the distinction made by both Mill in his footnote and Ridge in his paper, between intention and motive.
The text of Mill’s footnote continues as follows:
“But the motive, that is, the feeling which makes him will so to do, if it makes no difference in the act, makes none in the morality: though it makes a great difference in our moral estimation of the agent, especially if it indicates a good or a bad habitual disposition—a bent of character from which useful, or from which hurtful actions are likely to arise.”
So, Mill is defining intention as the “will to do” something. And the motive is “the feeling which makes him will to do” that something.
If I am hungry and intend to get something to eat I might have several possible courses of action to acquire the food I want. Each of those courses of action will be expressive of a particular intention but all of them arise from the same “motive” i.e. the feeling of hunger.
I might have the intention to cook some food I already have. Or I might buy some food. I might ask someone for some food. But I might think to steal some food from a store, or grab the food from the hands of someone eating at a table nearby. Or I might steal money to buy food.
Mill is distinguishing between these intentions and the motive of hunger when he says that the morality of the action is based only on intention. His point is not to divorce the intention from the outcome but to deny that the motive justifies the action.
This is a different point altogether from that being made by Kant.
And, while on the surface it appears to make the very same point as the Hadith of Intention, which we’ve also discussed, it does not actually do that either. Mill is very sharply focused on outcome while the Hadith of Intention is not.
We’ll have more of Utilitarianism shortly.
©Charles R. Lightner