It seems to me to be correct, that what makes something permissible or not has little to do with the intention of an agent, but rather on other moral considerations (including the actors ability to do otherwise). This is something I concede to Scanlon.
But I wonder then why intentions seem so important for permissibility in the first place? I have a suspicion that this has something to do with the human mind being largely rooted in assessing the intentions of other agents.
Indeed, in order for any society to survive and flourish, freeloaders, tricksters, and enemies need to be separated from workers, the trustworthy, and friends. Because of this humans developed many ways to both examine and display their real intentions, largely subconsciously.
If this is true that might help us work towards an explanation as to why intentions seem so fundamentally important in deciding if an action is permissible or not. If someone has bad intentions, we would like to know who and why, and then as a community condemn the intention. Such an ability was, and in many ways still is, vital to community cohesiveness (What counts as a "bad intention"? Perhaps a mindset that disposes one to take on harmful, selfish, or communally deleterious behaviors later. Or at least, that would be my best guess.).
Intentions are thus not unimportant in themselves but--and here I think Scanlon would agree-- our tendency to take intentions and judge persons, confuses how we should judge an action, which is what Scanlon is concerned with.
I think you find the answer to your question in your final paragraph. At least part of the reason we are interested in an actor’s intentions is because we are interested in judging persons, and not solely actions. I don’t have biological or psychological evidence, but I think that we are interested in judging more than just actions. Actions, after all, do not exist without actors.
ReplyDeleteJudging actions in a vacuum seems to remove a very human element from moral judgment. The end result of determining the permissibility of an activity is to pass judgment on the actor (i.e. evaluate if they are morally blameworthy). If we only pass moral judgment upon actions, and do not extend it to the actor, then I think we have cut out a crucial aspect of our social experience. We are interested in the people around us. Simply knowing a person’s history gives us no insight into their mind.
If a driver crashes her car into another person, killing them, the driver’s state of mind will tell us something about her character, and how we should treat her going forward. If the crash was caused by her absent-mindedness, we may be less inclined to trust her behind the wheel and be interested in punishing her for such negligence, but little else. If, on the other hand, she caused the crash out of a bloodthirsty rage, we have reason to meet her with revulsion – her contempt for human life makes her a danger to a social order, and as social creatures, such order is important.
Ultimately, I think the fact that we are social creatures is what drives this. The end result of ethical judgment is to pass it upon a person, and thus give us tools for moral coexistence. Judging actions alone doesn’t tell us enough about our peers.