Foreseen but unintended

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Sorry to burst in before reading the rest of the thread, but I have little time and don’t know the name of the thread as I got here by mistake.

The problem seems to be that you are looking at religion, particularly the Catholic religion, as though it were a government. They are different.

The Catholic religion is all about having a relationship with God, one which deepens throughout one’s life so that one can spend eternity with God.

It’s more like a marriage manual than it is a legal book.

Imagine if you gazed longingly at a person of the opposite sex: what would your spouse think? Would he/she think, looking is not a problem, it’s only a problem if s/he does something? or would s/he think that looking could easily lead, if not this time, to doing something else?

so today I give your son a tetanus shot with gladness at his pain, what might I not do tomorrow? And if I follow that path, where will I end up?
 
Scowler said:
If you can foresee the result of an act, and perform the act, then you cannot defend it by saying that it was “unintended”.
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Sure you can. I think the problem lies with the meaning of “unintended”, which, as it is used here, means undesired, not caused deliberately, but accepted as an unfortunate and inescapable consequence of another act that had consequences that were intentional and desired.
 
Ender said:
Sure you can. I think the problem lies with the meaning of “unintended”, which, as it is used here, means undesired, not caused deliberately, but accepted as an unfortunate and inescapable consequence of another act that had consequences that were intentional and desired.
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That is not relevant. If you know that an action WILL have a specific result, then you may “desire” that it would not be so, but that is just another “wishful thinking”. If you drop a stone from the tenth floor of the building, and see that it WILL hit someone on the head, then it does not matter if you did not “desire” that outcome… you know what the result will be and you did it.

Of course all this “twisting” is only necessary for the catholic ethical system, in order to deny that certain actions are fine under certain circumstances, and not acceptable under others. This is why this nonsense of “foreseen but unintended” was developed. It is much simpler, and more honest to say: “I did it, and these are my reasons that I did it. The act, the result and the means together form a justifiable course of action” Or not, as the case may be.
 
Scowler said:
That is not relevant. If you know that an action WILL have a specific result, then you may “desire” that it would not be so, but that is just another “wishful thinking”. If you drop a stone from the tenth floor of the building, and see that it WILL hit someone on the head, then it does not matter if you did not “desire” that outcome… you know what the result will be and you did it.
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Do you believe that there are counterfactual facts? Such as: “If my daughter had not been held at gunpoint, I would not have attacked the man”. Could there be a fact like that?
 
Prodigal_Son said:
Do you believe that there are counterfactual facts? Such as: “If my daughter had not been held at gunpoint, I would not have attacked the man”. Could there be a fact like that?
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What is your point? Of course I am aware of counterfactual propositions, but I would not fall them “facts”.
 
Scowler said:
If you know that an action WILL have a specific result, then you may “desire” that it would not be so, but that is just another “wishful thinking”. If you drop a stone from the tenth floor of the building, and see that it WILL hit someone on the head, then it does not matter if you did not “desire” that outcome… you know what the result will be and you did it.
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Your answer evades the essence of the situation. We all accept that intentionally dropping a stone on someone’s head makes us responsible for the consequences; that’s not the issue. The real question is what is one’s responsibility for an act that has both a positive and a negative consequence? That is, may I defend my own life by grappling with someone on the 10th floor even if I know that in the process we may accidentally knock a stone off the roof, and that it may hit someone? Clearly there is a different level of responsibility even though the result might be the same, or do you hold that knowing a rock may fall off the roof in the act of defending yourself makes you as culpable as someone who aims a rock and deliberately drops it?
Of course all this “twisting” is only necessary for the catholic ethical system, in order to deny that certain actions are fine under certain circumstances, and not acceptable under others. This is why this nonsense of “foreseen but unintended” was developed.
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One side of this argument is that Catholics are mindless automatons who simply do what they are told. This is the other side which condemns any nuance and complexity in the application of moral guidelines as “twisting” nonsense. Neither argument recognizes - or deals with - what is actually involved in making moral judgments.
 
Ender said:
The real question is what is one’s responsibility for an act that has both a positive and a negative consequence?
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Yes, that is the question. And it needs to be evaluated by considering all the available information. Sometimes the available information is insufficient. But let me make a correction to your next sentence:
Ender said:
That is, may I defend my own life by grappling with someone on the 10th floor even if I know that in the process we may accidentally knock a stone off the roof, and that it may hit someone?
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We do not talk about “MAY”, it needs to be replaced by “WILL”. So your sentence should read: “may I defend my own life by grappling with someone on the 10th floor even if I know that in the process we WILL accidentally knock a stone off the roof, and that it WILL hit someone?” Of course the answer is simple: “Yes, you may”. There is no need to refer to “foreseen but unintended”. All you need to say that you were protecting your own life, and that justifies the accidental killing of the stranger.

Using the oft-repeated example of the ectopic pregnancy, the justification is also simple. Without the intervention both the mother and the fetus will die, with the intervention the mother survives. Generally speaking, if the circumstances force you to choose between non-optimal solutions, then choose the one, which causes the less harm.
 
I would call any true proposition a “fact”. That’s just what I take facts to be. But whatever, that’s just semantics!

I ask about counterfactuals because I want to consider the counterfactual, in the trolley problem, “If five people had not been tied to the track, I would not have flipped the switch.” If any counterfactual statement is true, this one is. And this is just what I mean when I say that there is a foreseen but unintended consequence. I mean that there is a counterfactual that removes the INTENDED consequence from the equation, and that under that counterfactual, I would not do the thing that leads to the bad effect. That is the meaning of “unintended”, as I take it. Does that make things any clearer?
 
Scowler said:
We do not talk about “MAY”, it needs to be replaced by “WILL”. So your sentence should read: “may I defend my own life by grappling with someone on the 10th floor even if I know that in the process we WILL accidentally knock a stone off the roof, and that it WILL hit someone?” Of course the answer is simple: “Yes, you may”. There is no need to refer to “foreseen but unintended”. All you need to say that you were protecting your own life, and that justifies the accidental killing of the stranger.
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Yes, that’s a valid correction, but having said that, is my responsibility the same if I deliberately drop a rock on someone’s head as it is if I know that a rock will fall on someone if I commit an act that is otherwise defensible? Surely you don’t judge those actions the same even though the consequence is the same. Identical levels of accountability cannot apply to both.
 
Ender said:
Yes, that’s a valid correction, but having said that, is my responsibility the same if I deliberately drop a rock on someone’s head as it is if I know that a rock will fall on someone if I commit an act that is otherwise defensible? Surely you don’t judge those actions the same even though the consequence is the same. Identical levels of accountability cannot apply to both.
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You are correct. The two actions are not the same, and they should not be dealt with equally. Precisely because the circumstances are different. I think that is a very good example against the concept of “intrinsically evil”. The action cannot be separated from the circumstances.
 
Prodigal_Son said:
I would call any true proposition a “fact”. That’s just what I take facts to be.
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Not a good idea. The word “counterfactual” means exactly contrary to the facts. 🙂 And semantics is pretty useful here. Unfortunately I still don’t get what you intended. As I said to Ender (in the post directly above), all the circumstances of the action must be considered before one can make a judgment.
 
Scowler said:
Not a good idea. The word “counterfactual” means exactly contrary to the facts. 🙂 And semantics is pretty useful here. Unfortunately I still don’t get what you intended. As I said to Ender (in the post directly above), all the circumstances of the action must be considered before one can make a judgment.
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The phrase “counterfactual facts” is all over the philosophical literature; google it, if you like.

And this is what I meant, in formal language:

Suppose that an action has two consequences. We will call one consequence “bad” and one “good”. (The good could be “saving five people” and the bad could be “causing the death of one”).

A consequence is a foreseen but unintended consequence to Agent S if and only if there exists a true counterfactual under which Agent S would not pursue the bad consequence if the good consequence was not capable of being accomplished.

I hope that clears things up.
 
And please understand that Ender and I both agree that “all the circumstances of the action must be considered”. That is the proportionality requirement in the Principle of Double Effect. But proportionality is not the only consideration.

(Hope my claim there wasn’t presumptuous, Ender.)
 
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Prodigal_Son said:
And please understand that Ender and I both agree that “all the circumstances of the action must be considered”. That is the proportionality requirement in the Principle of Double Effect. But proportionality is not the only consideration.

(Hope my claim there wasn’t presumptuous, Ender.)
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Not presumptuous, just not quite precise. Consequences are part of the circumstances, but it is obviously not possible to foresee all of the consequences of any act, so it is not that all of the (circumstances) consequences need to be considered, only that all of the foreseeable ones be taken into account. It may seem a small point but someone has already (correctly) pointed out that we can never know all the effects an act will have, so I would rephrase your statement to be: “all the circumstances of the action (including all the foreseeable consequences) must be considered.”
 
Scowler said:
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Ender:
Sure you can. I think the problem lies with the meaning of “unintended”, which, as it is used here, means undesired, not caused deliberately, but accepted as an unfortunate and inescapable consequence of another act that had consequences that were intentional and desired.
Click to expand...
That is not relevant. If you know that an action WILL have a specific result, then you may “desire” that it would not be so, but that is just another “wishful thinking”. If you drop a stone from the tenth floor of the building, and see that it WILL hit someone on the head, then it does not matter if you did not “desire” that outcome… you know what the result will be and you did it.

Of course all this “twisting” is only necessary for the catholic ethical system, in order to deny that certain actions are fine under certain circumstances, and not acceptable under others. This is why this nonsense of “foreseen but unintended” was developed. It is much simpler, and more honest to say: “I did it, and these are my reasons that I did it. The act, the result and the means together form a justifiable course of action” Or not, as the case may be.
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The thing you say is “more honest” than the Catholic ethical system is just using different words to describe the same concept as “foreseen but unintended.” You aren’t really proposing anything different than the concept you are attempting to criticize. Perhaps you think the Catholic concept is that anything that is unintended is okey dokey. That would be a mischaracterization of the Catholic concept. The actual Catholic concept includes the necessity of the good to be achieved outweighing the bad that was the unintended consequence. The implementation of “forseen but unintended” would not justify me to kill you in order to achieve the good of riding the world of rhetoric that might lead others to question their faith. But it would justify me (if I were a police officer) to kill you if you were engaged in a mass shooting. In both cases your death would be foreseen and unintended, but in the first case the good to be achieved does not outweigh the bad of killing you. In the second case it does.
 
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LeafByNiggle said:
The thing you say is “more honest” than the Catholic ethical system is just using different words to describe the same concept as “foreseen but unintended.”
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Let me explain with simple words. If you
  1. raise a gun,
  2. aim it at someone’s head,
  3. and pull the trigger - knowing full well that it will result in the death of the other person,
  4. then you cannot use the defense that the death was foreseen, but unintended. If the killing was justifiable, it remains justifiable even if you “intended” it.
It is not the intent - ALONE - or lack of it what decides if the deed was justifiable or not. The phrase “foreseen, but unintended” is just hypocrisy.
 
Scowler said:
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LeafByNiggle:
The thing you say is “more honest” than the Catholic ethical system is just using different words to describe the same concept as “foreseen but unintended.”
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Let me explain with simple words. If you
  1. raise a gun,
  2. aim it at someone’s head,
  3. and pull the trigger - knowing full well that it will result in the death of the other person,
  4. then you cannot use the defense that the death was foreseen, but unintended. If the killing was justifiable, it remains justifiable even if you “intended” it.
It is not the intent - ALONE - or lack of it what decides if the deed was justifiable or not. The phrase “foreseen, but unintended” is just hypocrisy.
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You are still not saying anything different from what I am saying.
 
Scowler said:
It is not the intent - ALONE - or lack of it what decides if the deed was justifiable or not.
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The Principle of Double Effect agrees that actions may be made wrong by their consequences being bad, not just by one’s intent. There are actions that are clearly wrong, no matter how innocent the intentions of the actor were.
 
Prodigal_Son said:
The Principle of Double Effect agrees that actions may be made wrong by their consequences being bad, not just by one’s intent. There are actions that are clearly wrong, no matter how innocent the intentions of the actor were.
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So how do you reconcile this with the concept of “intrinsically evil”, where only the action is considered, regardless of the intent and the outcome?
 
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