There are a few things I don’t quite understand about the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE). I think most of them boil down to my own confusion about when it’s true of a person that they intend to bring about some effect. In this post, I simply want to present a case. I’m not sure what proponents of DDE would (or would have to) say about it. When I first thought about it, it seemed like a decent puzzle case for DDE.
The doctrine is employed to do a lot of philosophical work. One common place where you see it invoked is in the ethics of killing in war time. Often soldiers will perform actions for what seem like reasonable military objectives, but they know (or have good strong reasons to believe) that there actions will result in the killing of innocent civilians.
People who defend these kinds of actions by appealing to the doctrine of double effect claim that there is a difference between intending to kill civilians and intending to acheive some justified military objective but forseeing that acheiving this objective will result in the death of civilians. The basic idea is that, as long as you don’t intend to kill the civilians when you carry out your actions, but rather intend to acheive the justifiable military objective (and merely forsee their deaths as an inevitable consequence), then your action is permissible. Some proportionality requirement has to be met too, of course, but I hope the idea is clear enough.
I’m not sure this is really a counter-example to DDE, but I’m just curious what proponents of DDE would (or would have to) say about it.
The General and The Intention Changing Pill
Suppose a general wanted to kill a lot of people in three different villages, just because he didn’t like them. He knows that there are good military objectives that would require blowing up the three villages, but he could care less about those objectives. He just wants to kill people.
For whatever reason (perhaps to avoid detection from higher ups) – he hires a neuro-surgeon to give the general a temporary intention changing pill so that for the next three months he only has the intention to achieve justifiable military objectives. He’s reasonably confident that this will result in the slaughter of many people in the village.
He takes the pill. He ends up slaughtering lots of people in all three villages with a bombing campaign that did achieve valuable military objectives. At least the way that the traditional doctrine of double effect is stated, I think these actions come out to be permissible.
Those who know more about this than me…Am I correct in this assessment?
I certainly don’t know more about this than you, but doesn’t the fact that he had the surgery knowing that, in all the circumstances, he would likely achieve his THEN murderous ends put him in a different moral class to those who only ever intend to acheive military objectives?
Hi David,
I think I agree with you. I take it by put him in a different moral class you mean that there is something intuitively still wrong about his actions. I have that intuition too.
What I’m wondering is if DDE (at least as it’s traditionally stated) can accommodate this intuition. I assume that according to DDE it would be the general’s drug-induced noble intentions that are relevant to the permissibility of the action. (Although this is not something I’m sure about).
If those are the relevant intentions according to DDE, then DDE gets the General case wrong. If we Chisholm away at DDE so that it entails that the intentions the General had prior to the drug-inducement are relevant, then it will handle the cases. But I’d have to see how that theory gets spelled out – so we can see what consequences this way of spelling out DDE has for classic cases that DDE is supposed to handle.
It should be noted that intentions are a vast morass. It’s not at all clear how something like your intention-changing pill would have to work (as in, not that it’s not clear in the biological sense, which is obvious but irrelevant; it’s not clear in an intuitive sense exactly what would have to change about a person for us to say that an intention-changing pill had had exactly the advertised effect). This makes it much harder to sensibly appraise any intuitions about the effects of such a mysterious thing.
Doing my best to evaluate the case despite the difficulties, I feel about the same about your general as I do about a general who simply likes the killing people part of his work, but doesn’t let that interfere with his decision making (he doesn’t kill extra people when he has the chance; that sort of thing could lose him his job and then he wouldn’t get to kill any more people). And I think this latter general is pretty sketchy, and worry about whether he can be trusted to remain so professional in the long term, but if the things he does would be justified if done by some more reluctant general, I don’t think they become unjustified just because they’re done by someone enthusiastic.
I guess that shows pretty clearly that I don’t believe in DDE, since presumably my enthusiastic general does intend to kill innocent people, and I don’t think that makes his actions more wrong than they’d be if the innocent people were killed as an unintended consequence. At least, if I’m right about who intends what, but to return to my first point, I’m never sure about that sort of thing.
Hey. I’m not quite sure what to say about your case, but if you’re interested in DDE, check out Scanlon’s new book, “Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame”. I’m going to be going through it in a reading group that Gary Watson is leading pretty soon. I may have something to say after that.
In that book, Scanlon argues that agent’s intentions, in general, don’t matter for the permissibility or impermissibility of an action (and so argues against DDE).
Aaron,
I share your concern that intentions are a vast morass. That’s why I noted at the start that I think my real problem with DDE is that I don’t quite understand intentions. I also share your intuition about the two generals you imagine.
Justin,
Thanks for the heads up on that book. Let me know what you think.
Andrew,
If the intentions are implanted, then (just like implanted desires, implanted abilities, etc.), the right conclusion seems to be that they’re not his intentions. Compare the person who takes a pill that temporarily makes him an outstanding gambler. Does he then deserve all of his winnings in the tournament? I don’t think so. Compare the person who takes a pill that makes him strongly emulate Mother Teresa. His intention thereafter to help the poor seems hardly admirable. There is a sense in which these are not his intentions, and simlarly for the General. In order for intentions to be your own, they have to be acquired in the right way (vague as that is!). Ish Haji has interesting things to say about this in his _Moral Appraisability_ (OUP, 1998).
Hi Mike,
Everything you say seems right to me, and it gives us a good explanation for why we should think that there is something still wrong (and certainly not admirable) about the general in the above scenario.
I guess I’m wondering how DDE proponents account for this. How do we state the theory to get the right results with respect to the general? (and then once we modify DDE to get the right results, I’m curious if the theory will handle cases that it was introduced to handle)
Cool case. I’m not sure what to say about DDE either. But I think Mike is on the right track with saying that the general’s intentions aren’t his own.
A similar idea could be that it’s important that the general’s pill-induced intention is merely instrumental to his ultimate intention to kill for joy (or whatever). I guess we could then just suppose the pill makes the military objectives one’s ultimate intention. But it does seem sort of plausible that the means-end relation among one’s intentions can’t just be created by taking a pill; they do seem necessarily regulated by reasoning over time in a non-artificial sort of way or something like that.
But I’m not sure. Maybe there are always pills to get around this, like one that makes one do a bit of reasoning to get to the ultimate intention to achieve the military objectives and then some instrumental reasoning to form the intention to kill the people. But then it does seem like the intention to get the military objectives was the person’s own, and if that’s so, then it seems more correct to say that it was permissible. But the permissibility would only cover the act of killing in order to achieve the military objectives, not the action of taking the pill in order to kill for joy.
So perhaps DDE could accommodate the example. It could remain the same and account for your case by simply characterizing intentions as necessarily formed in whatever particular sort of way (either so that they are one’s own or that they are ultimate and non-instrumental). Or DDE could be revised slightly to only apply to a certain subset of intentions (the ones formed in the particiular sort of way). Either way should also capture the kinds of cases they want (e.g. terror bombing vs. tactical bombing) since the normal tactical bomber’s intentions are clearly her own and do properly seem ultimate, etc.
This is good. If we’re going to start Chisholming away at DDE – perhaps we should get some formulation of DDE.
So DDE seems to get applied in cases where an action has two properties. One of those properties is the nasty one and the other is the noble one. As long as agent had the intention to realize the noble one (and the nasty one was merely foreseen). The action is permissible.
(DDE) For any person P and action A such that is has some NOBLE property and some foreseen UNFORTUNATE property, A is permissible for P to perform if and only if P intends to bring about NOBLE (and merely foresees UNFORTUNATE)
A proponent of DDE inspired by Mike’s suggestion could say that (DDE) requires that the intention be the agent’s…
(DDE*) For any person P and action A such that is has some NOBLE property and some foreseen UNFORTUNATE property, A is permissible for P to perform if and only if P intends to bring about NOBLE (and merely foresees UNFORTUNATE) — AND — the intention to bring about NOBLE is genuinely P’s
Of course we don’t want to say that anyone’s actions that are the result of intentions that are not their own would be impermissible actions – DDE* has that consequence.
I suppose we could tack on a “right sort of way” formation clause…
I’m not sure the best way to describe things is in terms of the action having such properties. If they have such properties, they’d be complex relational ones, since whether the action has NOBLE depends on whether the action is performed by P in order to achieve some noble cause or end. I’d rather characterize the schema of the situation more like the following. In DDE cases, there is an action (e.g. bombing) that a person (e.g. a tactical bomber) can perform for some purpose. That is, the action is instrumental to some ultimate end (e.g. the noble cause of securing the military objectives). One end is noble (NOBLE END), the other is ignoble (IGNOBLE END). The tactical bomber does A (bombs the facility) in order to achieve NOBLE END (the military objective of destroying a facility that’s key to the opponent). The terrorist bomber, on the other hand, does A (bombs the facility) in order to achieve IGNOBLE END (terrorize the people). So what about the following formulation?
(DDE**) For any person P and action A (such that A can be performed in order to achieve NOBLE END or IGNOBLE END), A is permissible for P to perform iff P *ultimately* intends to achieve NOBLE END (not IGNOBLE END) by A-ing.
This appropriately yields that the general’s action of bombing is impermissible because his pill-induced intention to attain NOBLE END (=military objective) is merely instrumental to his intention to attain IGNOBLE END (=joy). His ultimate goal is still ignoble, and he’s ultimately A-ing for that purpose. It also appropriately yields that the tactical bomber’s bombing is permissible since his bombing is instrumental to a noble ultimate end, which is to achieve the military objectives (rather than terrorize).
And this has the nice result of not committing us to saying “that anyone’s actions that are the result of intentions that are not their own would be impermissible actions.” But maybe there are still counter-examples to DDE**.