Yet another GRE essay.

Claim: An action is morally correct if the amount of good that results from the action is greater than the amount of bad that results from the action.
Reason: When assessing the morality of an action, the results of the action are more important than the intent of the person or people performing the action.

The consequences of an action is but one small part of the action itself, and the extent to which one ought to keep consideration of the consequences of the action as the focal point of ethical and moral judgment is itself up for some degree of debate. Whether or not the intent of the action ought to prefigure some modicum of judgement before which the actions are judged in terms of their consequences is a moral question that is best stated in the form of a dilemma. Here, I will seek to argue that while judging actions on the basis of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ is important, in measuring the totality of the action and sizing it up for judgement, intent is a necessary bedrock upon which we must hoist our flag.

Claims of garden variety consequentialism bring out an important question which is worth addressing: are the means and intent that bring forth an action into existence part of the action itself? If they are, then there is no way of separating the consequences of an action from the means and intent of those who seek to act in that manner. If they are not, there will be an artificial separation of means and ends, one which is untenable and does not reflective how moral judgement and reasoning actually takes place. Take, for example, a rather simple decision: should I have a burger or not? If the individual concerned is obese or the consumption of the burger poses a health risk to the individual partaking in it, then the consequences would deem the action to be undesirable and avoidable. But why is the individual wanting to eat a burger? In other words, what is his intent? If he is facing a degree of privation and the burger is the only option available to him that he can effectively procure without using such means as may not be sanctioned by the law, then it is the only option he has. If he seeks to have a healthier meal, which would inevitably be more expensive, he would have to find funds from somewhere, and if the means used to acquire those funds are less than noble, then the moral harm he causes prefigures his action. In other words, many actions that we seek to pronounce moral judgements on might merely be means to ends, instrumental actions, but the instrument wielded and the intent is important if one needs to look at the action as a whole. In both the cases above, it would be rather naive to remove the context, the intent, and the means of the individual looking to eat such a simple thing as a burger from the end itself. Ends, means, and intents cannot be separated with the ease that the claim supposes, for intents presuppose means, and means presuppose an option of ends. The reason provided in the prompt, therefore, is only a subspecies of the claim insofar as the ideas being spoken of are really only various substrata of a more complex world.

The law, Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Summa Theologica, applies only to rational beings. If we are to choose a legal standard of moral judgement — the law is merely the codification of moral norms necessary for society to function, as we must assume in this case — then the intent of the crime is as important as the effect. In the USA, temporary insanity is a viable defence for serious crimes, even though it might be less popular in real life than what the television show Boston Legal might lead the outside observer to believe. Negligent homicide and involuntary manslaughter carries a much lower sentence than culpable and conscious murder: intent is important, and while these crimes deal with a similar end, namely justice for the loss of a person’s life, the intent of the action is increasingly important to the manner in which guilt and moral judgement is pronounced upon them. Those who suffer from ‘temporary insanity’ or are incapable of making reasoned decisions about their actions, such as ‘crimes of passion’ and crimes arising from negligent conduct, are treated differently in most legal systems around the world than those who commit crimes consciously. In the same vein, many countries will refuse to indict those who steal because they face privation and do not have any other option: their intent is to save human life, not to violate someone’s private property. However, in all the cases above, it is nigh impossible to show that the action is discrete from the intent of those who have acted in that manner; to create an artificial separation of ends, means, and intents is neither fruitful nor possible.

There are other famous cases where an examination of the intent is key to understanding the action. The use of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of the war in the Pacific during the Second World War is one of those actions, along with the carpet bombing of Dresden and the firebombing of Tokyo. To be clear, the Nazis must be condemned. The Japanese drew the USA into a defensive war. But the means used to achieve the desirable aim — an Allied Victory — caused wanton destruction and the deaths of at the very minimum, hundreds of thousands of civilians who had nothing to do with the war effort. The Nazis did this to England with the V1 and V2 rockets and the ‘Blitz’ bombing raids which almost levelled London. On both sides, the intent was the same: ‘to win the war.’ But at what cost? The intent, upon closer examination, was to use civilians as foils and use the deaths of innocent civilians to achieve a larger goal, and assuming that the goal was achievable through other, less perilous and fraught means for the civilians involved, is hard to condone. The intent was coloured with vengeance and retribution as much as it was influenced with admittedly nobler goal of achieving an Allied victory. To seek, then, to separate the influence of intent on means and therefore on results is to separate actions into arbitrarily divisible entities which can be recast upon will: it can be just as easy to preclude Allied retribution as it can be to preclude the horrors of the Japanese PoW camps or the vicious Nazi Holocaust. The philosopher Socrates told his pupil Crito on his deathbed that to suffer an injustice is better than to commit one because the soul is more important than the body. By laying the way for instrumentalism, we condone tit-for-tat retribution in the name of artificial separations.