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Two people in a car, one kidnapped the other:

Person 1: What do you intend to do?

Person 2: Why do you care? Intent is a Kantian notion!

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May 11Liked by Richard Y Chappell

I think this is a significant point of disagreement between you and me (including your openness to "fittingness" as a relevant concept).

I think consequentialists absolutely should care about intent, just as we should care about skill, full tanks of gas, clean energy, and lots of other things that are empirically instrumentally relevant to lots of things that matter. But I don't think there's any sort of principled special weight to put on intent.

One helpful point I've seen emphasized in some trans and disability activism is the point, "I don't care if you mean well and intend to be an ally - I care about whether you repeatedly harm me". It's true in many cases that someone with good intentions and a good will is more likely to do good things in the future. But empirically, there are some people who mean well and yet, through poor information or poor skill, keep doing things that are harmful. And there are other people whose intent is not particularly positive, but have internalized habits that ensure they keep doing things that are helpful.

In the case of your fund managers, if there is one manager who really thinks hard about what will make the most profit, but is bad at it, and keeps buying at the peak and selling at the dip, and another manager who subjectively feels like they're just guessing, but is subconsciously reliably tracking future performance, then I'd rather have the second going forward.

Intention is a useful heuristic for future action, but it's not especially different in this way from various skills and abilities.

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I agree with a lot of that, though. For example, if someone is anti-reliable, we should prefer them to be vicious/ill-willed, so that good results are actually achieved.

But that's just a fact about preferability (which then feeds into rational choice, if you're able to act upon it). It's still a separate question how you should *regard* the bumbling angel. If they're truly intrinsically ideal, and just cursed by an evil demon to have this yield bad results (in a way they cannot possibly foresee or forestall), it would be unreasonable to blame them for this, or indeed to have any hostile feelings towards them at all. Your anger should be directed at the external curse, and you can *lament* that the angel exists and unwittingly causes such harm. But that's all different from (e.g.) hating the angel.

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I think this is a much, much more plausible account of what consequentialism consists of, but I do worry that any sufficiently robust version like this basically becomes isomorphic to virtue ethics. And that's not a bad thing (I say as a virtue ethicist, haha) but it does seem to undercut the motivation for adopting it as a form of consequentialism. If you accept that virtues are inherently valuable, that moral character matters when it comes to assigning value to welfare, that intentions figure centrally in the evaluation of actions, etc then I guess I don't see why the consequentialist framework is helpful. But maybe it's just a good example of how all sufficiently plausible moral frameworks ultimately converge!

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Yes, just wait for my follow-up post arguing that a suitably "beneficentric" virtue ethics is a terminological variant of utilitarianism :-)

The crucial claim, for my purposes, is that we have most reason to choose the action that helps people the most. Few existing virtue ethicists accept that claim. But I think more should.

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It sounds like you don't care about Mill's distinction between intent and motive? It looks to me like you're using the two interchangeably. As I recall, for him, intent was important and motive was not - intent being *what* you intend to do (whether or not you succeed at it) and motive being *why* you intend to do it. It sounds like you reject that distinction?

I agree myself that motive is important (as you may have gathered from our other conversation), just clarifying where your position differs from the guy who wrote the book on utilitarianism. (Which might be a source for the PHIL 101 position that annoys you.)

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It's fine to draw such a distinction; I'd just insist that *both* sides of it have obvious moral significance (for the reasons indicated).

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Have you never heard of motive utilitarianism... of the sort discussed by the late Robert Adams in his classic J of Phil paper?

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Of course, I'm not sure why you'd imagine I haven't. But I wouldn't recommend it. Adams' view was badly confused, for reasons I briefly gesture at here:

https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/12/adams-critique-of-global.html

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My point was a simple one: You said that the utilitarian literature had in the main neglected any real consideration of intention, and that you would be redressing that lack.

My point was that a prominent article did address the role of motive in a possible kind of utilitarianism. Whether Adams was confused or not is not to the bibliographical point.

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I wrote that "consequentialists can say perfectly plausible things here (even though many, traditionally, have failed to do so)."

I stand by that claim. (I confess I still don't understand what "bibliographical point" you are trying to make. I agree that the article in question exists, and I am familiar with it. If you are suggesting that I ought to have referenced it in my blog post, then I disagree.)

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