The Varieties of Normativity: an Essay On Social Ontology

VI. The Normativity of Intentions

The structure of intending is rather complicated, and it is the subject of a very extensive debate. Virtually all participants to this debate, however, agree that intending is subject to more stringent rational considerations than are other intentional states. We could have contradictory desires without thereby being irrational, but for one who has contradictory intentions, i.e., one who intends to have a meal and not to have a meal simultaneously, a charge of irrationality will almost always succeed.

Intentions are connected to actions in ways in which mere desires are not. You can only intend to do things that you believe are up to you, and when you intend to do X, then if your intention is to be fulfilled X must come about “in the right way”, i.e., in the way the intending agent foresees that X should come about. These two features of intentions not only distinguish them from related phenomena like desires or wishes, but also explain why intending to do Xcommits us in certain ways. If you form an intention today to visit friends tomorrow, forming that intention somehow settles your deliberative process; you are now committed to visit your friends tomorrow. This does not mean that you cannot possibly change your mind: the commitments that arise from intentions are defeasible, just like those that arise from promising. But there is nonetheless a stark contrast between the way commitments arise from intentions and the way they arise out of speech acts. Forming intentions is itself optional, but once they are formed, the commitments which follow from them do not arise in virtue of constitutive rules imposed, as it were, from without; rather, they arise solely in virtue of the intrinsic nature of the intentions themselves.

Imagine that you communicate to your students your intention to tidy up your office. Month after month, indeed semester after semester, students visit you and see that you have done nothing of the sort: your office is ever messier. Regularly they ask: “What about your intention to tidy up your office?”, to which you reply: “It is still there”. Nothing has prevented you from carrying out your intention; you simply have not done so. After some time your students will be justified in believing that either you do not have the intention to clean your office at all (that you have been lying, or confused as to what it is to have an intention), or that, if you do have the intention, then you are somehow irrational.

If, in contrast, you had merely wished or desired to tidy up your office, then your inaction would be evidence neither of irrationality nor of dissimulation or confusion. This is not to say that there are no constraints on what we can desire. Your desire that a fairy godmother should materialize and tidy up your office would properly be counted as a sign of irrationality, just as would the corresponding cognitive state of believing that a fairy godmother is on her way to do the job. Such constraints are, however, more stringent in the case of intentions than in the case of other mental states.

What does this tight connection between intentions and rationality tell us about normativity? We note, first, that acting goes hand in hand with the possibility of blame. Actingintendedly means acting in such a way that one is committed to acting in precisely the way one acts. If, therefore, what one does intendedly is a bad thing, then one is clearly at least not less blameworthy for doing it than if one had done it unintendedly. This normative principle, namely that intended wrongdoing ought to be blamed more severely than unintended wrongdoing, is rooted in the intrinsic nature of the phenomenon of intending, and not related to conventional constitutive rules.

The same reasoning explains why doing bad things on the basis of a commitment to those bad things is evaluated differently from doing those same bad things in the absence of such commitment. Regardless of whatever general character traits one possesses, being committed to a bad thing makes one,ceteris paribus , no less blameworthy than if one does this bad thing without being so committed. This normative principle follows, again, from the intrinsic nature of intentions, and it is quite unlike those normative claims that follow from conventional constitutive rules.

In order to drill home this point it is profitable to take a look at Christine Korsgaard’sLocke Lectures which open with a statement to the effect that “ Human beings are condemned to choice and action”.[^42] This statement is part of Korsgaard’s ambitious project of showing how “we human beings constitute our own personal or practical identities - and at the same time our own agency - through action itself. We make ourselves the authors of our actions, by the way that we act”. Clearly, when Korsgaard says “through action” she means “throughintentional action”. Indeed, she points out that

to call a movement a twitch, or a slip, is at once to deny that it is an action and to assign it to some part of you that is less than the whole: the twitch to your eyebrow, or the slip, more problematically, to your tongue. For a movement to be my action, for it to be expressive ofmyself in the way that an action must be, it must result from my entire nature working as an integrated whole.

Twitches are not actions because they do not express our selfhood in any meaningful way. Slips are more problematic precisely because slips of the tongue can in some cases be actions, though except in rare and contrived cases, unintended actions. It is however precisely intentions which constitute our selfhood; and it is intentions, too, which constitute the principal grounds for blameworthiness of our actions.

According to Korsgaard “ there is noyou prior to your choices and actions, because your identity is in a quite literal wayconstituted by your choices and actions”. And then Korsgaard adds:

The identity of a person, of an agent, is not the same as the identity of the human animal on which the person normally supervenes. Human beings differ from the other animals in an important way. Because we are self-conscious, and choose our actions deliberately, we are each faced with the task of constructing a peculiar, individual kind of identity - personal or practical identity - that the other animals lack. It is this sort of identity that makes sense of our practice of holding people responsible, and of the kinds of personal relationships that depend on that practice.

What distinguishes our identity from that of animals is, in other words, our capacity to act intentionally; our capacity to act intentionally is of course wholly dependent upon our more fundamental capacity to form intentions. And, ultimately, it is these capacities to form intentions and to carry them through which make sense, not only of the practice of “holding people responsible”, but of other normative phenomena such as the apportioning of praise and blame.

The intrinsic nature of intentions gives rise in this way to important normative principles. As R. Jay Wallace puts it, the intentional actions, and ultimately the intentions, of morally responsible people “are thought to reflect specially on them as agents, opening them to a kind of moral appraisal that does more than record a causal connection between them and the consequences of their actions”.[^43] In order for agents to be the subjects of judgments of praise and blame it is necessary that agents be autonomous beings, and the role played by intended action in the constitution of this autonomy is a rich and still untapped source of insight.