I’ve written on the issue of intention in several prior posts. I’ve just read a paper by Daniel Berthold of Bard College in which he compares the views of Kant, the Utilitarians and Freud on the Golden Rule.
Berthold lays out the problems with the Golden Rule as seen by Freud and the answers to those problems as understood by Kant and by the original utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
One sharp contrast between the views of Kant and Mill is on the question of intention.
For Kant, intention is paramount. Since we can never be certain of consequences, we can only judge an action based on the intention with which it was performed.
The utilitarians believed, conversely, that only the consequences of our actions matter. Good results can come from bad intentions and vice versa, so intention is fundamentally irrelevant.
Is it possible to agree with either of these points of view?
Are the situations in which men are required to make decisions; always lacking complete information, always in conditions of uncertainty; really that black and white?
Clearly not.
Philosophers seek accuracy of expression. They employ language and logic as if they were, themselves, capable of certainty of expression. They also assume their readers will understand their words as they are intended. Neither of those conditions is necessarily true.
Kant assumes that rules derived from pure reason can be effective guides for real people. And if an act is guided by an intention that is consistent with that condition, it must be considered a moral act.
But human beings are clearly not perfectly rational and all acts are taken in conditions of more or less uncertainty. The outcome of an action does matter.
If consequences did not matter there would be no penalty for involuntary manslaughter. There would be no concept of contributory negligence.
On the other hand, to argue that only consequences matter is equally inappropriate. And the same examples that can be brought against one view can be brought against the other.
Kant would argue that we judge the morality of an act, essentially in isolation from its situational aspects. Mill would argue that everything must be viewed in a situational context.
Acts matter. But context does, too.
To evaluate the actions of real human beings in real-life situations requires both a benchmark — some accepted and understood device of comparison or evaluation — as well as an appreciation of the environment in which the action is taken.
Philosophers, it seems to me, have an understandable tendency to fall in love with their tools. They are masters of formal language and logic. (But their logic, as far as I can tell, is still grounded in a Newtonian mechanical mind-set. It hasn’t adjusted to the Quantum world.)
It is said “to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”.
What might be extremely useful in the abstract (for the philosopher) might seem far less certain in the concrete (for the human actor).
We do not need to look too closely around us every day to be convinced that human beings are not the rational actors the philosophers like to posit.
Freud might have committed the logical fallacies that Kant and Mill accused him of, but he wasn’t all wrong!
People, their behavior, their lives and relationships are messy and illogical and irrational. We will never live up to the ideals of either Kant or Mill in our actions, our intentions or in the conditions we create.
We can, and should, take guidance from philosophers but their voices must be tempered by those whose perspectives are closer to reality in which we all must live and act.
©Charles R. Lightn