In Defense of Intent

[OldGimletEye]

Imagine person A decides he his going to assassinate person B. Person A points is rifle and aims at person B and then pulls the trigger. The bullet, however, doesn’t reach person B because a bird suddenly swoops in between them and absorbs the bullet. Now imagine Person C is driving his car one night. Person C is driving the speed limit, is driving appropriately for the current conditions, and exercising an amount of reasonable care that would be expected by a normal prudent person. Suddenly, person D drives out in front of person C’s car unexpectedly and person C slams into Person D’s car. Person D dies as a result of the car crash.

Who here is more morally culpable? Person A or C? Most people  would say person A. But a certain segment of the left, perhaps the majority, seemingly thinks person C is more morally culpable. Their mantra  is that “intentions don’t matter, only impact does” (which is often left vague, unspecified, and very subjective). They apparently have decided to just overturn centuries of ethical thought, with regard to moral blame, and declare intent doesn’t matter and act like no one should make the slightest objection.

The idea that intentions matter in moral philosophy goes at least back to Aristotle’s . Nicomachean Ethics In philosophy, the notion is usually called the Epistemic Condition to Moral Blame. Without getting too technical, the Epistemic Condition generally asserts that one must have some awareness of their wrongful conduct, or should have at least been reasonably aware that their conduct was wrongful before they can rightly receive moral blame.

In American-Anglo legal tradition, the notion of intent as an element of a civil or criminal offence goes back at least to the 12th Century, as the ancient Anglo-Saxons did not recognize intent as element of an offence, though it is not clear whether it was considered a mitigating factor in punishment.

It appears that many on the left don’t understand that neither ethics or the law don’t have a simple binary of “did an act with purpose” or “did not do an act with purpose”, but allow for cases where an actor “should have known”.The epistemic condition can be fulfilled if an actor should have known certain facts before taking an action.

Robin DiAngelo heavily promotes the idea that intentions don’t matter, but only impact does. In her book, she gives two examples of actions that she took that upset Angela her web developer. She then goes on to explain how her intentions didn’t matter and that the only relevant issue was that Angela was “impacted”.

DiAngelo evidently made an off the cuff comment about the hairstyle of one of her assistants , a women of color, to Angela, another woman of color. The second action that DiAngelo did that upset Angela was that DiAngelo didn’t want to fill out a questionnaire that Angela had provided her. Angela used the questionnaire as part of her process in building websites. Angela felt that DiAngelo’s resistance to filling out the questionnaire was a slight against her intelligence. Angela explained that, as a women of color, she often had to justify her intelligence to white people.

In both cases, DiAngelo accepts moral blame for offending Angela. I can accept DiAngelo accepting blame in one case, but really not the other. In the case of the comment about the hair style, it seems to be that an ordinary prudent person would know better about making a comment about an African American women’s hairstyle. A reasonable person, I think, would know that such a comment could be interpreted as being disrespectful towards African American women. I can therefore agree that an apology to Angela was warranted. In short, DiAngelo deserves moral blame (at least some) for her comment. It is on the question of the questionnaire, however, where I dissent. I don’t think any reasonable person would have thought not wanting to fill out a questionnaire would be interpreted by Angela as a slight against her intelligence. And frankly, Angela should have considered there were other explanations for not wanting to fill out the questionnaire. Most people (me included) don’t like filling out paper work as its tedious. Evidently, DiAngelo doesn’t like to fill out paperwork either and tries to avoid it if she can.

DiAngelo justifies dismissing intent mainly because as she says you can’t prove intent. Yet, courts of law have to decide the issue of intent all the time. And I’d submit, in most cases, most people could reasonably divine whether a bad act was done intentionally or not. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.”

The American legal system incorporates the idea of intent into the law, a notion that it inherited from the British legal system, which in turn was likely influenced by western moral philosophy (probably through the Catholic Church) at least from Aristotle. It’s true that in American law there are both criminal and civil offenses where intent doesn’t matter, only impact. They are called strict liability laws. But, under strict liability laws (and they have generated some controversy as to their fairness), the conduct to be avoided is usually reasonably well specified, so an actor knows what to avoid. Speeding is a typical strict liability crime. Any given driver knows he must not speed. The crime of speeding is well specified. But, under DiAngelo’s, and much of the left’s, conception of “strict liability” the “moral crimes” to avoid aren’t usually well specified. This leaves actors uncertain about how conduct they must avoid and seemingly leads to games of “gotcha”. How on earth, could DiAngelo or anyone else, reasonably know that not wanting to fill out a questionnaire would “trigger” somebody. I’d submit, nobody could know. If DiAngelo, and certain quarters of the left want “strict liability moral crimes”, then I’d submit they ought to, at the very least, clearly specify the actions to be avoided and not just leave it to some vague and very subjective “impact” standard. 

If people are going to receive moral blame for doing certain acts, then I think, in fairness, those acts should be fairly well specified. People deserve a reasonable amount of certainty about what they can and cannot do. If I were more cynical (and maybe I should be), I would think the vagueness of the impact standard isn’t a bug, but a feature. It would seem to allow certain sorts of bad actors to invent “crimes” retroactively and change acceptable rules of conduct in a rather arbitrary manner. 

Rather than just outright rejecting intent for assigning moral blame (and one hopes they don’t mean to extend this paradigm to the criminal law generally. They never explain this point, it seems), maybe DiAngelo and her fellow travelers should use a richer analytical framework to judge bad acts. Intent as defined in the Model Penal Code probably would be a good start. Under the MPC, there are four levels of intent. Under the MPC one does not have to purposely intend to cause a bad act to have the necessary scienter or the necessary epistemic condition to be held liable for an offense. In some cases, it is enough that one “should have known” in order to be liable for an offense. Under such an understanding of intent, the “impact only” crowd would have richer system to evaluate certain moral offenses, and wouldn’t be left making the dubious assertion that “intent doesn’t matter”.  Such a system would make DiAngelo, and similarly situated persons, culpable for clumsy remarks about people’s hairstyles, even if their purpose wasn’t to offend. But, it would also protect them from being blindsided by a charge of moral wrongdoing when all the facts and circumstances surrounding their actions couldn’t possibly have been known to them.

[Fragile Bird]

Wow, long post, you sound upset!

In law school the example the profs used was person A wants to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of 10 storey building. As he falls to the ground, person B on the 5th floor shoots and kills A as he passes B’s window. Is B guilty of murder?

Or, person A and person C are on the roof and C pushes A off the roof. B shoots and kills A as he passes his window. Who murdered A?

[Iskaral Pust]

Initially I thought @OldGimletEye must be working through some torturous evaluation of disparate impact, but instead the catalyst here is subjective micro aggressions.

This is the natural result of intersectionality.  Victimhood has been successfully weaponized and anyone’s subjective experience can be a meta-truth trump card, provided you are the approved type of anyone.  The only obvious next step is to compete ruthlessly and performatively to define yourself higher on the victim scale of moral authority.

Perhaps some day, in a cruel, dystopian future, we’ll stop trying to pander to billions of mutually inconsistent subjective perceptions and selfish biases.

[Maltaran]

The OP seems to be mixing up criminal intent and simply causing offence. Obviously intent matters in criminal cases, but you can easily offend someone without meaning to, just through ignorance.

[Conflicting Thought]

5 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Initially I thought @OldGimletEye must be working through some torturous evaluation of disparate impact, but instead the catalyst here is subjective micro aggressions.

This is the natural result of intersectionality.  Victimhood has been successfully weaponized and anyone’s subjective experience can be a meta-truth trump card, provided you are the approved type of anyone.  The only obvious next step is to compete ruthlessly and performatively to define yourself higher on the victim scale of moral authority.

Perhaps some day, in a cruel, dystopian future, we’ll stop trying to pander to billions of mutually inconsistent subjective perceptions and selfish biases.

How is that the natural result of intersectionality? 

[kiko]

48 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

The OP seems to be mixing up criminal intent and simply causing offence. Obviously intent matters in criminal cases, but you can easily offend someone without meaning to, just through ignorance.

Stop being reasonable.

The op definitely is intending to hurt the feelings of the left. Since he hasn't defined the left in this context ( with intent?), he misses and thus no intent can be established.

[Knight Of Winter]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

and person C slams into Person D

 

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

intentions don’t matter, only impact does

And rightly so. As shown above, impact can literally kill you.
I know, I'll show myself out. 

More seriously though, I agree with the broad point. And I speculate that it's the logical outcome of society which considers victimhood as a virtue and people's natural desire to conceptually simplify multi-layered and complex things.  I mean, ethics is hard. It requires lot of thinking, proposing and counter-proposing, analyzing, constructing, deconstructing and evaluating various arguments. Substituting it all with "only impact matters" idea serves as quick, but horribly defective shortcut to what should have been arduous moral and intellectual process.

Ee.g. in cases where I'm the offended party, there are so so many things I'd like to know before casting any kind of moral judgement. Was offending party (let's call them A) actively trying to hurt me? Could A know they were going to offend me? Should they have known? Even if they did, were they rightb to say it anyways? Could it be just a miscommunication? What's my relationship with the A? Are there any elements of truth to what A said? Is whatever it is I'm offended about a reasonable thing to be offended about? What are the circumstances in which A said it? 

Like I said, it's complicated, like anything else in interpersonal relationships. And like anything else, here as well intent matters a lot. I'd treat hell of a lot differently someone who accidentally said something insensitive and someone who was truly out there to hurt me. And let's not even get into it how even in best case scenario - even in case of two people honestly communicating and wishing the best for each other - unintentional hurt can sometimes (and unfortunately) occur. That's just the way life is.

The other thing that Robin DiAngelo and like minded people seem to believe that the "chain of offensiveness" only ever goes in one direction; from one predesignated set of groups towards another; and never the opposite. I've never seen anyone walking on eggshells desperately trying to avoid offending e.g Trump voters. Or conservatives. Or rich. Or police officers few months ago. Nor should they have been (that would have been ludicrous) - I'm just pointing out the double standard. 

 

2 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

The American legal system incorporates the idea of intent into the law

All western legal codes do the same. That's why involuntary manslaughter (no intent, huge impact) is always and ever treated much less harshly than attempted murder (huge intent, no impact).

 

 

[Mlle. Zabzie]

While I certainly am behind the idea of “intent” particularly with respect to criminal liability (in which the full weight of the state comes to bear on an individual actor) I think that is the wrong lens to view DiAngelo’s examples.  Rather, I think the thread of Western moral legal thought that this more closely resembles comes from civil law; more particularly, torts.  There is a very, very old doctrine known as “qualem tales” or the “eggshell rule” which finds that if a wrong [tort] has been committed, then the harm is measured by the harm to the actual victim (I.e., even if a “normal” person wouldn’t have been harmed, if your victim has a condition where a minor wrong causes a major harm, then you as tortfeasor are liable for 100% of the harm caused by your action to the victim).  This has been extended by some common law courts to take into account the cultural and family circumstances of the victim.  

Torts tend to have lower or non-existent “intent” standards as well (negligence is a prime example though that does have a “reasonable person” standard in terms of LEVEL OF CARE).  While there are intent based torts, intent does not have the same weight in the tort area as the criminal area.

That’s a long way of saying that I agree that intent matters, but it doesn’t end the inquiry and doesn’t mean that a wrong did not occur.

[Kalbear]

Yeah, this is garbage. 

Intent does matter as far as severity, but impact should come first. The issue at large is not whether or not someone is MORE guilty than someone else, but rather if someone is actually guilty at all if they 'really didn't mean' to cause harm. A lot of our cultural norms have been passed off as that person isn't 'really' racist or bigoted or sexist or whatever, even though they're causing massive harm by their actions.

And then when you point out that harm, and ask them to change or modify (or if it's severe, hold them accountable) they say 'but I didn't MEAN to'.

 The time has come to not accept that nearly as strongly as an excuse. Especially when intent is so often wedded in white patriarchy and we accept the intent argument from people we consider 'respectable' as excuses. 

Furthermore, we cannot easily gauge or judge intent. It is one of the hardest things to do in criminal justice. But we can by comparison gauge harm caused significantly more easily. Harm is significantly more objective and fair to measure, and far easier to agree on. 

[OldGimletEye]

23 minutes ago, KalbearAnon said:

Yeah, this is garbage. 

Intent does matter as far as severity, but impact should come first. The issue at large is not whether or not someone is MORE guilty than someone else, but rather if someone is actually guilty at all if they 'really didn't mean' to cause harm. A lot of our cultural norms have been passed off as that person isn't 'really' racist or bigoted or sexist or whatever, even though they're causing massive harm by their actions.

And then when you point out that harm, and ask them to change or modify (or if it's severe, hold them accountable) they say 'but I didn't MEAN to'.

 The time has come to not accept that nearly as strongly as an excuse. Especially when intent is so often wedded in white patriarchy and we accept the intent argument from people we consider 'respectable' as excuses. 

Furthermore, we cannot easily gauge or judge intent. It is one of the hardest things to do in criminal justice. But we can by comparison gauge harm caused significantly more easily. Harm is significantly more objective and fair to measure, and far easier to agree on. 

No, I think more likely this is garbage. Its one thing to say somebody is morally culpable if they "should have been aware" before engaging in the offending conduct. But, I'm not quite sure how you hold somebody morally culpable if you can't even establish they should have been aware. Now if a situation occurs that a person couldn't have been aware that the conduct was bad and you want to explain to them  why it was bad, then that is fine. But, it should be done under the understanding they are not morally culpable. If they do it next time, then you can establish they knew what they were doing.

[Ran]

12 minutes ago, KalbearAnon said:

Harm is significantly more objective and fair to measure, and far easier to agree on. 

I think the sort of situations @OldGimletEye is thinking of have extremely subjective cases of "harm", truth be told. I see a lot of people talking about "feeling" this or that because of some statement or action someone else made, and that this was "harmful", and... like, how am I supposed to objectively measure your feelings, their depth, or the level of harm caused by them? It's easier for me in these cases to try and gauge intent because at least one can explore a person's record with such statements and contextualize them and figure out if they meant to harm anyone.

[Relic]

4 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Who here is more morally culpable? Person A or C? Most people  would say person A. But a certain segment of the left, perhaps the majority, seemingly thinks person C is more morally culpable.

What if person C has been telling Person A they should get a sniper rifle and shoot person B?

[OldGimletEye]

29 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

While I certainly am behind the idea of “intent” particularly with respect to criminal liability (in which the full weight of the state comes to bear on an individual actor) I think that is the wrong lens to view DiAngelo’s examples.  Rather, I think the thread of Western moral legal thought that this more closely resembles comes from civil law; more particularly, torts.  There is a very, very old doctrine known as “qualem tales” or the “eggshell rule” which finds that if a wrong [tort] has been committed, then the harm is measured by the harm to the actual victim (I.e., even if a “normal” person wouldn’t have been harmed, if your victim has a condition where a minor wrong causes a major harm, then you as tortfeasor are liable for 100% of the harm caused by your action to the victim).  This has been extended by some common law courts to take into account the cultural and family circumstances of the victim.  

Torts tend to have lower or non-existent “intent” standards as well (negligence is a prime example though that does have a “reasonable person” standard in terms of LEVEL OF CARE).  While there are intent based torts, intent does not have the same weight in the tort area as the criminal area.

That’s a long way of saying that I agree that intent matters, but it doesn’t end the inquiry and doesn’t mean that a wrong did not occur.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the tort cases you mention have a fact pattern like: I punch somebody, not intending to kill them. Unknown to me, though, they have an underlying medical condition and die as a result of the punch. Accordingly, even though I was unaware of the medical condition, I'm liable for their death. I concur with the general result in these sort of cases. But, there was bad intent, which was throwing the punch. A reasonable person is aware that throwing punches is a bad act.

 

[Heartofice]

Often these discussions around offence and intent centre around language rather than say accidentally shooting someone. 

For some people it seems that words are literally violence, and that you can be harmed by them, the sheer power of a word can damage you, and so in that case there can be no context where certain phrases or words are used that are not harmful. Even if the person saying something didn't mean any offence or any harm, it is irrelevant because simply saying something is like being attacked. 
 

[Kalbear]

12 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

No, I think more likely this is garbage. Its one thing to say somebody is morally culpable if they "should have been aware" before engaging in the offending conduct. But, I'm not quite sure how you hold somebody morally culpable if you can't even establish they should have been aware.

Because ignorance is not an excuse for causing harm. That's another big part of traditional law.

12 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Now if a situation occurs that a person couldn't have been aware of the conduct was bad and you want to explain to them  why it was bad, then that is fine. But, it should be done under the understanding they are not morally culpable. If they do it next time, then you can establish they knew what they were doing.

Alternately, perhaps they should be the ones responsible for understanding this harm first? We don't say that people should just jump in a car and drive, after all, and then find out that oh yeah, signaling is good. We put the onus of responsibility on the driver first and foremost, not the pedestrian who got hit. 

 

11 minutes ago, Ran said:

I think the sort of situations @OldGimletEye is thinking of have extremely subjective cases of "harm", truth be told. I see a lot of people talking about "feeling" this or that because of some statement or action someone else made, and that this was "harmful", and... like, how am I supposed to objectively measure your feelings, their depth, or the level of harm caused by them? It's easier for me in these cases to try and gauge intent because at least one can explore a person's record with such statements and contextualize them and figure out if they meant to harm anyone.

I think they're possibly using that as an excuse, but most of the time the cases are not particularly minor and the person has been warned several times. And in the above case, you can establish harm with extemporaneous data (did that person tell other people, did they tell their therapist, etc). Again, it's FAR easier to establish harm than intent. 

[OldGimletEye]

7 minutes ago, KalbearAnon said:

Because ignorance is not an excuse for causing harm. That's another big part of traditional law.

The correct statement is that ignorance of law is no excuse. Mistake of fact is a defense. And if the law finds that you couldn't have been aware, then there is no negligence.

In addition, the problem here is often its not clear what the "law" even is. Is it a crime to not want to fill out a survey?

7 minutes ago, KalbearAnon said:

.Alternately, perhaps they should be the ones responsible for understanding this harm first? We don't say that people should just jump in a car and drive, after all, and then find out that oh yeah, signaling is good. We put the onus of responsibility on the driver first and foremost, not the pedestrian who got hit. 

I agree that people should take prudent measures. The problem here is that even a prudent person my find themselves trapped. Using your example: If the pedestrian just runs out in front of the car is the driver liable?

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

The correct statement is that ignorance of law is no excuse. Mistake of fact is a defense. And if the law finds that you couldn't have been aware, then there is no negligence.

I don't think knowing basic things about other humans is something that someone couldn't be aware of. 

2 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

In addition, the problem here is often its not clear what the "law" even is. Is it a crime to not want to fill out a survey?

You're the one that conflated moral behavior with legal values in intent. You tell me. 

2 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

I agree that people should take prudent measures. The problem here is that even a prudent person my find themselves trapped. Using your example: If the pedestrian just runs out in front of the car is the driver liable?

...yes? Legally, the driver is liable; this is one of the reasons that the US requires drivers to have insurance. Are they criminally guilty? Probably not. 

I'll say it another way because you don't seem to get it - for basically most of the time around in the world the person who gets harmed has two shitty choices: bring it up and risk their employment/career/environment/whatever, or eat it and just seethe in the harm. The option of having the person who caused harm actually do something about it has been excused over and over and over again, just like you are doing. The important thing here is to stop centering the story on the person causing the harm using things like intent, and instead center the story on the person who is actively taking harm. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

2 hours ago, Knight Of Winter said:

I've never seen anyone walking on eggshells desperately trying to avoid offending e.g Trump voters. Or conservatives. Or rich. Or police officers few months ago. Nor should they have been (that would have been ludicrous) - I'm just pointing out the double standard. 

It seems your just paying attention to the more vitriolic actions/ rhetoric from Biden voters, liberals, police protesters, and leftists in regards to the groups you’ve listed.

One could easily claim to have never witnessed anyone walking on eggshells from offending Biden supporters, the middle-lower class, and police protesters.

 

[OldGimletEye]

2 minutes ago, KalbearAnon said:

I don't think knowing basic things about other humans is something that someone couldn't be aware of.

Like for instance knowing they would get upset if I didn't want to fill out a survey?

3 minutes ago, KalbearAnon said:

You're the one that conflated moral behavior with legal values in intent. You tell me. 

Where do you think our legal system got the notion of intent from? Both the law and ethics, usually require some "bad" state of mind.

 

3 minutes ago, KalbearAnon said:

..yes? Legally, the driver is liable; this is one of the reasons that the US requires drivers to have insurance. Are they criminally guilty? Probably not. 

I'll say it another way because you don't seem to get it - for basically most of the time around in the world the person who gets harmed has two shitty choices: bring it up and risk their employment/career/environment/whatever, or eat it and just seethe in the harm. The option of having the person who caused harm actually do something about it has been excused over and over and over again, just like you are doing. The important thing here is to stop centering the story on the person causing the harm using things like intent, and instead center the story on the person who is actively taking harm. 

Nope. Under the fact pattern I gave, the driver wouldn't likely be found liable because there was no negligence.

You  the one not "getting it".

[Kalbear]

Just now, OldGimletEye said:

Like for instance knowing they would get upset if I didn't want to fill out a survey?

Like knowing that requiring them to fill out a survey while understanding the long history of having to prove your intelligence? Yes, exactly like that.

Just now, OldGimletEye said:

Where do you think our legal system got the notion of intent from? Both the law and ethics, usually require some "bad" state of mind.

But that's the point - you can't just throw out one and include the other. 

Just now, OldGimletEye said:

Nope. Under the fact pattern I gave, the driver wouldn't likely be found liable because there was no negligence.

You  the one not "getting it".

The driver would be likely found liable because in most states in the US the driver is liable for any accidents with pedestrians, since it's their property. This varies from state to state, but it's a very common case. Negligence is immaterial here any more than it is when you rear end another car; only the fact of the action matters in those cases. 

Now you could argue that this SHOULD NOT be the case, but that isn't the point; the point is that this is legally currently the case in most states. More important to this, it really depends a lot on the actions taken before intent actually matters. There are plenty of crimes where intent matters not in the least.