A morality experiment: Actions versus motivations

[Purple]

Why?

Morality refers to what it is good to do, not just to what happens to occur as a semi-foreseeable result of what you do.

Because any judgment is by definition going to be rendered after the fact. Thus it makes sense to have a system suitable for making a decision in such a setting. The answer to "what should I do?" is supposed to be based on the expected consequences, not on any abstract system.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that this invites ethical debate, which you claim not to want, because it means different people will naturally disagree and discuss that disagreement.

No not at all, because the exact "moral actions" and "immoral thoughts and motivations" are completely irrelevant to the thought experiment of "is a person with 100% moral actions and 100% immoral thoughts and motivations a moral person or an immoral person?" What actions, thoughts, and motivations those are specifically don't matter at all.

Except that this is itself a topic of ethical debate. Different ethical systems produce incompatible answers. Now, it may not be a topic of moral debate, insofar as morality and ethics are different... but there's not much practical difference if you're trying to avoid philosophical arguments.

Why?

Morality refers to what it is good to do, not just to what happens to occur as a semi-foreseeable result of what you do.

Because any judgment is by definition going to be rendered after the fact. Thus it makes sense to have a system suitable for making a decision in such a setting. The answer to "what should I do?" is supposed to be based on the expected consequences, not on any abstract system.

Who says that a judgment is rendered after the fact?

I routinely use ethical standards to judge other people's proposed or contemplated actions as a hypothetical exercise.

Moreover, you just used the word expected in "expected consequences." That's a big point you're skipping over- because it raises the issue that not all consequences are logically predictable or controllable.

I mean, think about it. When saying my actions are ethical or unethical, you have to at least be able to define which actions are mine. You cannot say that Alice is unethical because of an action Bob is ethically responsible for, or vice versa.

So there has to be a mechanism for tracing responsibility. And for that to work, we have to delineate which of the good or bad consequences of an action are foreseeable (and therefore your responsibility) or unforeseeable (and not your responsibility).

And in turn, for that to work, we have to define certain categories of thoughts which it is reasonable for you to have, ideas you can and cannot foresee based on your current access to information and your current mental state... in which case we're already back to making decisions about what is and is not ethical in terms of your intentions as well as the consequences of your actions.

[Alyrium Denryle]

The rightness or wrongness of an action ought be judged entirely by its consequences. The person taking those actions however can be judged on their motivations and the information they had at the time they made the choice. A doctor for example can kill someone because they prescribed the wrong medication when the patient lied about their medical history in order to save face.

This is obviously bad, and it is obviously ethically preferable that the patient had not died. However, the doctor's intent was to help their patient and they were acting on incomplete information that they had no way of knowing was incomplete. As a result, we would not judge the doctor to be a bad person.

The converse is also true. Good actions taken for bad motivations can still render the person taking said actions a terrible terrible person.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, Alyrium, that ties back into my argument that before we can say whether actions are ethical or unethical we have to know whose actions are whose.

If an action is seen as "subject-verb-object," and requires an agent to act upon some other object, then I cannot say that an action is ethical or unethical without knowing what agent committed the action. In the same situation the same act might flip from 'ethical' to 'unethical' if committed by different agents.

If the action is simply seen as "verb-object," it becomes possible to judge whether actions are ethical regardless of which agent is involved... but such an ethical system is useless for telling agents what to do unless there is also a system for allocating responsibility from each action to a corresponding agent.

[Purple]

Who says that a judgment is rendered after the fact?

Causality. It's kind of hard to see something and than travel back in time to make a call on it before it occurs.

I routinely use ethical standards to judge other people's proposed or contemplated actions as a hypothetical exercise.

And the principal you apply to them is: X is proposed => let's see what results it would have => let's see if those results are good or bad. So you are judging the results from an after the fact perspective even though you are physically not after the fact.

Moreover, you just used the word expected in "expected consequences." That's a big point you're skipping over- because it raises the issue that not all consequences are logically predictable or controllable.

Why does it matter? Such things only matter when deciding how to react to a deed not when examining the deed it self. We can say "he could not have predicted X therefore we are not going to punish him for X happening." but we won't say "therefore X is not wrong.".

I mean, think about it. When saying my actions are ethical or unethical, you have to at least be able to define which actions are mine. You cannot say that Alice is unethical because of an action Bob is ethically responsible for, or vice versa.

You are overstepping the bounds of your mandate. We are discussing the morality of actions where as you are crossing into reaction. An action is what you do and how it ends up playing out. A reaction is how we as a society assign blame or not to react to said action. Morality exists to tell us about actions, law exists to define reactions.

So there has to be a mechanism for tracing responsibility. And for that to work, we have to delineate which of the good or bad consequences of an action are foreseeable (and therefore your responsibility) or unforeseeable (and not your responsibility).

And that mechanism is law. As I said, morality defines if we think an action is good or not. Law defines if we punish or forgive an action. That is why we can for example have self defense laws that say "X has killed a man which is wrong but since he was defending him self we'll let him get away with it." without said laws ever implying that killing another human being is not in fact always wrong.

[salm]

Ok. So what if you do something that isn´t irresponsible (like firing a gun in the air) and something bad happens?
Lets say you trip and fall on to a toddler, killing the toddler vs deliberately strangleling the toddler. Are these actions morally equal? The end results are the same after all.

Morally yes, they are equal. The toddler is dead. Our treatment of you as reward/punishment for the act should of course take intent into account. But fundamentally the act you have described evil. That's how stuff like self defense laws work. "You did an evil deed, but we forgive you because X, Y or Z make it desirable for us to do so."

If we take intent in to account we are rendering an act morally better/worse. There´s no difference in my eyes between calling an act morally better/worse and systematically punishing less/more because of intent.
In fact it is the fundamental question: Should intent influence our opinion about an act or not. Which you answer with no but in the following sentence you answer with yes.
It seems to me that you are contradictory.

[Purple]

It seems to me that you are contradictory.

Not at all. I'll simplify it to the max for you.

Intent should not influence our opinion about an act but it should influence our reaction to that act.

EDIT: Let's not complicate things.

[salm]

In your opening statement you treated "people" and "actions" as the same thing. Or so it seems. You say that an incompetent wannabe baby killer is a good guy. If we take intent into account we should punish this good guy because his intent was bad. But then we have to punish a good guy which seems rather contradictory.

I think "opinion about" and "reaction to" is nothing else than "assessing result" and "assessing intent" in other words.

[Purple]

In your opening statement you treated "people" and "actions" as the same thing. Or so it seems. You say that an incompetent wannabe baby killer is a good guy.

Yes. Because a human is morally speaking nothing more than the sum of his deeds.

If we take intent into account we should punish this good guy because his intent was bad. But then we have to punish a good guy which seems rather contradictory.

You are lacking a step there. We only take intent into account when the deed it self is already bad and we are assessing if we should punish it. To use an alghoritm:

Code: Select all

if( results == evil)
    if( motivation == unacceptable to our standards
       punish
    else
      do not punish

if( results == good)
    if( motivation == unacceptable to our standards
       do not reward
    else
      reward

I hope that clears it up.

I think "opinion about" and "reaction to" is nothing else than "assessing result" and "assessing intent" in other words.

It's more complex than that. But again, basically look at the code I wrote. The 1st IF concerns morality (is the deed good or bad) the 2nd IF concerns our reaction (do we think the deed should be rewarded or punished).

[salm]

Your code is not correct imo.
We take intent into account with good results all the time.

[TOSDOC]

The rightness or wrongness of an action ought be judged entirely by its consequences. The person taking those actions however can be judged on their motivations and the information they had at the time they made the choice.

These sound a bit antagonistic, so I just wanted to clarify. Do you believe the doctor ought to be disciplined/prosecuted automatically for the consequence of the patient's death, or should the lacking medical history be taken into account for an acquittal?

Good actions taken for bad motivations can still render the person taking said actions a terrible terrible person.

I just want to throw this out for discussion: doesn't this depend on the results observed by other individuals/community/society?

In trying to think of specific examples of the OP's opening statement, I thought of what even a picture of certain individuals invokes in others' minds as to whether they are good. People like Mother Teresa. Gandhi. Dr. Martin Luther King. All of them human, and possessing internal doubts and insecurities which can lead to questionable motivations for their behavior, yet they are perceived by society and history as "good" anyway, even if closer scrutiny might suggest otherwise to some.

Is the phrase "It's not who I am inside, but what I do that defines me" a good or a moral motto to live by?

[Purple]

Your code is not correct imo.
We take intent into account with good results all the time.

And my code shows it. Look up the 2nd cluster of ifs. We generally tend not to reward good deeds from bad intentions. We still consider them good deeds, just not worth rewarding.

[Simon_Jester]

I routinely use ethical standards to judge other people's proposed or contemplated actions as a hypothetical exercise.

And the principal you apply to them is: X is proposed => let's see what results it would have => let's see if those results are good or bad. So you are judging the results from an after the fact perspective even though you are physically not after the fact.

Except that I routinely base my argument for 'is this ethical' on deontological grounds.

[Please make sure you know what 'deontological' means, before continuing this conversation. It's an obscure word but important in base moral philosophy.]

Why does it matter? Such things only matter when deciding how to react to a deed not when examining the deed it self. We can say "he could not have predicted X therefore we are not going to punish him for X happening." but we won't say "therefore X is not wrong.".

Except that ethics is about what people should or should not do, not so much about which actions are good or bad results. An ethical system that judges only actions, but does not judge the people who commit the actions, is worthless.

You are overstepping the bounds of your mandate. We are discussing the morality of actions where as you are crossing into reaction. An action is what you do and how it ends up playing out. A reaction is how we as a society assign blame or not to react to said action. Morality exists to tell us about actions, law exists to define reactions.

But without ethics, we have no guideline on what laws to enact, or for that matter why to bother trying to enact them. Therefore, I disagree.

Ethics is about determining which laws humans should live by. Responsibility is a critical part of understanding ethics, and about understanding whether an action is praiseworthy or blameworthy.

It seems to me that you are contradictory.

Not at all. I'll simplify it to the max for you.

Intent should not influence our opinion about an act but it should influence our reaction to that act.

EDIT: Let's not complicate things.

But your opinion is itself a reaction! You can't segregate the part of your 'opinion' that influences whether you approve or disapprove of an action from the part that decides whether to reward or punish it.

[Purple]

[Please make sure you know what 'deontological' means, before continuing this conversation. It's an obscure word but important in base moral philosophy.]

Than please take the effort to define it for me. I can't really go into in depth research on philosophy right now. Not enough time on my hands.

Except that ethics is about what people should or should not do, not so much about which actions are good or bad results. An ethical system that judges only actions, but does not judge the people who commit the actions, is worthless.

At this point I think you are not even reading what I write. I am not saying that you do not judge people. Indeed I explicitly say several times that a persons moral value is measured by the sum of the moral values of his or her actions.

What you simply fail to realize is that I am talking about a disconnect between judgment and acting on that judgment. There are several steps that take place between thinking "this is wrong" and deciding what to actually do about it.

]But without ethics, we have no guideline on what laws to enact, or for that matter why to bother trying to enact them. Therefore, I disagree.

That is only true if you take the meaning of the term ethics to mean any system of values at all. Because if we use what we would conventionally consider the term to denote (some sort of humanistic system of right and wrong) you will find it to no longer be true. Laws are after all usually passed on the basis of a rather twisted morality system where "good" is defined by what helps the people in power stay in power and "bad" as what removes them from it.

Ethics is about determining which laws humans should live by. Responsibility is a critical part of understanding ethics, and about understanding whether an action is praiseworthy or blameworthy.

And again you are not reading what I am writing. At this point I am struggling to explain this to you. Maybe I am not clear or something. Try and understand what I am trying to describe. I am drawing a line of separation between the judgment you pass on the morality of an action and the remainder of the process where you eventually decide if and how to react to it.

But your opinion is itself a reaction!

No it is not. Thought is not action. What happens inside your head does not become action until it manifests it self through the motion of your limbs, words or some other means of effecting the world. And there are several more steps that take place in between.

You can't segregate the part of your 'opinion' that influences whether you approve or disapprove of an action from the part that decides whether to reward or punish it.

Yes you can and you do. You can very well approve of an action and yet condemn it (Every time you hear someone say: "yea, I get why he acted that way but he should still go to jail") and equally disprove of an action and yet praise it (Like when we approve killing in self defense.) Fact is we can and do keep those two separate. And this duality is necessary for a functioning social creatures.

Actions can and are inherently right or wrong. Killing is for example always wrong no matter what. However in order to function as part of a group we have to find ways to "justify" and compartmentalize it into categories where it's a wrong we don't act on or even praise.

[salm]

Your code is not correct imo.
We take intent into account with good results all the time.

And my code shows it. Look up the 2nd cluster of ifs. We generally tend not to reward good deeds from bad intentions. We still consider them good deeds, just not worth rewarding.

Then you are contradicting yourself again. You said:

"We only take intent into account when the deed it self is already bad"

Now you are saying the oposite.

[Purple]

Then you are contradicting yourself again. You said:

"We only take intent into account when the deed it self is already bad"

Now you are saying the oposite.

It's not a contradiction. I was just being short for the sake of not including the good/evil duality in every post. Sort of how you don't always say "he, she or it" when you are talking about generic individuals of unknown gender.

[Elheru Aran]

[Please make sure you know what 'deontological' means, before continuing this conversation. It's an obscure word but important in base moral philosophy.]

Than please take the effort to define it for me. I can't really go into in depth research on philosophy right now. Not enough time on my hands.

Whining about how you don't have time won't wash. You obviously have enough time to go into a lengthy formatted post with quotations on a discussion forum on the Internet; therefore, you either have a computer or some other mobile device that you are currently using; therefore, Google is a few taps of the mouse away. Look up the bare definition of the word if nothing else. Simon is a teacher IRL (IIRC), but it's not his job to educate *you*.

[Knife]

I'm also having problems with Purple's proposal, mainly due to the fact that he seems to assign an absolute morality to an act.

[Purple]

Whining about how you don't have time won't wash. You obviously have enough time to go into a lengthy formatted post with quotations on a discussion forum on the Internet; therefore, you either have a computer or some other mobile device that you are currently using; therefore, Google is a few taps of the mouse away. Look up the bare definition of the word if nothing else. Simon is a teacher IRL (IIRC), but it's not his job to educate *you*.

That would be fine and well in any other field but this is morality, a branch of philosophy. Nothing is ever simple or straightforward when it comes to those. It's not like engineering where you can just look a term up and immediately get the one and only accepted definition. Instead every philosopher and thinker has his or her idea of what certain things are, represent and how they are viewed. And reading different sources gives you wildly divergent and often contradictory results. So when it comes to things of that nature I'd much rather err on the side of caution and refrain from just looking a word up in the dictionary in favor of asking him to explain exactly what version he is talking about. It helps ensure we are all on the same page.

[Zeropoint]

We can say "he could not have predicted X therefore we are not going to punish him for X happening."

Entirely reasonable.

but we won't say "therefore X is not wrong.".

Well, I would say that. I'd say that X is unfortunate, or that X is a bad and undesirable outcome, but I certainly wouldn't say that it's morally wrong to cause a bad outcome that can't be reasonably foreseen.

For a specific example: Let's imagine that I'm at my university, and I walk down a corridor and turn left at a T junction, and then spot a classmate in the hall and call out to her. Unbeknownst to me, just on the other side of the junction is someone unwisely standing on a wobbly table to try to read the model number of a fire sprinkler. Startled by my call, this person jumps a little, loses their balance, tips the table over, and falls, sustaining a fatal head injury in the process.

I would agree that this is a bad result.

I would feel horrible about it.

I would not accept that it was therefore immoral of me to call out "Hey, Jane!" when I saw my classmate--and not just out of self-interest; I'd say the same no matter who the actor in the example was.

Purple, I feel like you've explained your position adequately (except the part about how you're too busy to take 30 seconds to Google "deontology" and read a few of the definitions that come up). I just don't agree that your position is correct.

Edit: Voted "other" because both intent and results matter. The law recognizes this, as both manslaughter (result without intent) and attempted murder (intent without result) are punished, but murder (both intent and result) is punished more severely.

[Simon_Jester]

[Please make sure you know what 'deontological' means, before continuing this conversation. It's an obscure word but important in base moral philosophy.]

Than please take the effort to define it for me. I can't really go into in depth research on philosophy right now. Not enough time on my hands.

Please note that you NOT knowing what the word means and not bothering to look it up undermines your credibility pretty badly...

A "deontological" ethical system is one that uses rules. Deontological ethics are based on the idea that our conduct should be guided by rules, rather than being decided on a purely case-by-case basis of "what will make people happy right now?" A "make people happy right now" system is known as 'act utilitarianism.'

There are a lot of fundamental problems with act utilitarianism.

Deontological systems avoid these problems. But the consequence is that they no longer just judge each action by "does this specific action produce good results?" They also judge "does this action comply with rules, defined as [insert rules here]?"

Except that ethics is about what people should or should not do, not so much about which actions are good or bad results. An ethical system that judges only actions, but does not judge the people who commit the actions, is worthless.

At this point I think you are not even reading what I write. I am not saying that you do not judge people. Indeed I explicitly say several times that a persons moral value is measured by the sum of the moral values of his or her actions.

What you simply fail to realize is that I am talking about a disconnect between judgment and acting on that judgment. There are several steps that take place between thinking "this is wrong" and deciding what to actually do about it.

Without a system of allocating responsibility for actions, you can't sum the moral values of a person's actions, because you don't know which actions are theirs in the first place. Without a concept of responsibility, things just... happen. There's no concept of moral agency, no one capable of taking moral decisions, because there's no distinction between things that I can take credit/blame for, and things I can't take credit/blame for.

But you can't have a system of allocating responsibility, or at least not a meaningful one, unless it takes into account knowledge.

But without ethics, we have no guideline on what laws to enact, or for that matter why to bother trying to enact them. Therefore, I disagree.

That is only true if you take the meaning of the term ethics to mean any system of values at all. Because if we use what we would conventionally consider the term to denote (some sort of humanistic system of right and wrong) you will find it to no longer be true. Laws are after all usually passed on the basis of a rather twisted morality system where "good" is defined by what helps the people in power stay in power and "bad" as what removes them from it.

On the contrary, the majority of the laws that remain consistently in force over long periods do tend to align with what most people view as 'moral' within the context of that society. Immoral or amoral laws exist, and laws that are immoral by our standards but were accepted in the past exist. But law books do not begin with "you know what people think is right and ethical? Let's throw it out the window!"

There's a reason why the most common, universal laws regard things like killing, stealing, and cheating others, which are also the things most commonly prohibited in ethical systems.

Ethics is about determining which laws humans should live by. Responsibility is a critical part of understanding ethics, and about understanding whether an action is praiseworthy or blameworthy.

And again you are not reading what I am writing. At this point I am struggling to explain this to you. Maybe I am not clear or something. Try and understand what I am trying to describe. I am drawing a line of separation between the judgment you pass on the morality of an action and the remainder of the process where you eventually decide if and how to react to it.

But you can't even make the judgment if you don't know whether the "act" you're judging is the result of a deliberate action, or a random accident, or some combination of the above. Or if you can't tell which of multiple people is responsible for the 'act'- because then you can't tell whether the 'act' was intended or random from that person's point of view.

You can't say an act is equally 'good' regardless of why it happened, unless you are deliberately creating an ethical system that has no application to actual humans and has no concept of moral agency... in which case you'd be engaged in pointless intellectual masturbation.

You can't segregate the part of your 'opinion' that influences whether you approve or disapprove of an action from the part that decides whether to reward or punish it.

Yes you can and you do. You can very well approve of an action and yet condemn it (Every time you hear someone say: "yea, I get why he acted that way but he should still go to jail") and equally disprove of an action and yet praise it (Like when we approve killing in self defense.) Fact is we can and do keep those two separate. And this duality is necessary for a functioning social creatures.

Except that to do that, you have to have a construct equivalent to 'responsibility.' You have to be able to say "it is good to do this when it is forced on you by circumstances and when you are in a position XYZ, but bad to do this when you are not forced to do it and are in position ABC."

Which, again, undermines your original position because it means you simply cannot make meaningful ethical judgments in a context-free environment. You have to know why someone did something- that matters, because intent affects responsibility and responsibility is the only thing that ties acts to the people that commit those acts.

[Channel72]

Most ethical systems* outline prescriptive tenets - i.e. they dictate what you should do - not what you should think.** But then, I said most ethical systems - some moral systems, including some very mainstream moral systems, such as certain tenets of Christianity (e.g. just about everything written in the Sermon on the Mount), as well as basic Buddhist tenets (8 noble paths, etc.) also prescribe what/how you should think.

(*pre-Socratic systems in the Near East/West, at least)
(**also, since thinking is itself an action, this is ambiguous anyway)

So the answer to the OP question is "... it depends", obviously. It depends on what ethical system you subscribe to, and whether you think prescriptive ethics should apply to thought. Christianity holds that even bad thoughts - hating someone else (as opposed to actually doing anything that indicates you hate them), unforgiveness, etc, are major sins on par with actual physical crimes. And of course, various sci-fi dystopias have explored the potential for enforced "thought-crimes".

So the hypothetical dude in the OP is totally guilty of all sorts of thought crimes, under various ethical systems, including mainstream ethical systems such as Christianity and Buddhism. Whether or not you care about any of these ethical systems depends, obviously, but the point at least is that a great deal of human thought regarding what constitutes right/wrong behavior includes both actions and thoughts/motivations.

[biostem]

To me, someone is moral if and only if they are a moral agent. A moral agent is one who considers their actions using reason and empathy, thus taking the other party or parties into account. If a person acts without caring about these other parties, then they are simply following orders/rules and/or simply working toward some end gold, irrespective of the impact their actions have on others.

In short, if the person takes actions, even if those actions are considered good or moral, but for their own reasons, without consideration for others, then they are not a moral agent, and thus cannot truly be considered moral.

It'd be like someone who plays a sport professionally, is fully willing to cheat, but doesn't solely because they don't want to get caught; They aren't truly interested in fair play or genuine competition, and if some method were to come around that could avoid detection, they'd eagerly adopt it.

[Alyrium Denryle]

These sound a bit antagonistic, so I just wanted to clarify. Do you believe the doctor ought to be disciplined/prosecuted automatically for the consequence of the patient's death, or should the lacking medical history be taken into account for an acquittal?

No, and possibly.

Patients die. This is obviously bad. An undesirable outcome we can consider Wrong using a consequentialist framework, and inevitably these sometimes happen due to mistakes in technique (hands slip, the wrong syringe gets grabbed. People are not perfect) or lack of knowledge (say, incomplete medical history).

If a doctor lacked medical history due to negligence they should be prosecuted or otherwise sanctioned for that negligence if it caused the death.

If they lacked a medical history because there was no way to get that medical history (say, no way of knowing if a patient admitted for septic shock was allergic to penicillin derivatives because they had never had so much as an ear infection before presenting to the hospital), then they should not be faulted one iota.

In trying to think of specific examples of the OP's opening statement, I thought of what even a picture of certain individuals invokes in others' minds as to whether they are good. People like Mother Teresa. Gandhi. Dr. Martin Luther King. All of them human, and possessing internal doubts and insecurities which can lead to questionable motivations for their behavior, yet they are perceived by society and history as "good" anyway, even if closer scrutiny might suggest otherwise to some.

Mother Teresa is only considered "good" because her PR machine kept the sum of her actions out of the public eye... But that is beside the point.

It is much harder to find or construct a scenario in which someone's actions are good but their motivations generally bad because we so often dont know people's intentions. In cases with bad actions and good motivations, we typically know what they were trying to and the information or tools they lacked that lead to their error.

[Nephtys]

There's 3 components really, not 2.
Intent, Action, Result.

Jerkwad moving to save a baby from a car and succeeding is a 'good' deed
Jerkwad moving to save a baby from a car and failing is still a 'good' deed.
Jerkwad ignoring a baby and the baby dies due to inaction is 'very bad'.
Jerkwad ignoring a baby and the baby narrowly makes it by luck is 'bad'
Paragon ignoring a baby and the baby narrowly makes it by luck is 'bad'.

In this case, the action is what primarily matters in the moral assessment: But the result has a modifying effect. Good results from good actions are praised. Bad results from good actions are still 'good', but less praiseworthy as the result was not positive. Good try. Any bad action is bad, but it being the sole cause of a bad result is deplorable.

The internal factor has no measure in this, save for how the person will behave afterwards. If the jerk is a hero and saves the child, then acts like a jerk and is reviled, then that tarnishes the goodness of the action as being done for the wrong reasons.