Likely not. Suppose I attempt to murder someone, but due to extreme incompetence I spectacularly fail to do so. Strict consequentialism has little to say on the matter, unless we resort to expected consequence rather than actual consequence. But here’s where I lift up the rug, point at the dust, and ask, “Do we not expect certain consequences from actions because intention determines that expectation?” Which is to say that we have the expectation because any reasonable person that did that action must have intended something other than what happened. I don’t think the epistemological issue can be reduced to mere causality because it removes the essential nature of choice from action. Why do I choose to do an action? Because I intend a result to satisfy my motivations. My contention is that we cannot short-circuit this chain and acheive the results we desire.
Well, yes. That’s why I used the phrase ‘expected first-and-direct effect consequentialism’ in the text you quoted. 
I think an intention based system is going to run into the following tension.
If it lets people ignore what reasonable people could infer as consequences of their actions, it gives license for idiots with good intentions to cause a lot of trouble.
If it mandates that people consider reasonable (high probability or low probability, high-effect) consequences of their actions, it’s (for me) hard to distinguish from consequentialism.
If Joe Dunderhead intends to kill me by squirting me with a regular watergun, no one in their right mind would consider that my death is even a possible or expected consequence… except to JD. So do we then consider the matter settled and head to the bar for beer and conversation?
Ignore it? Why would we ignore it? You can’t intend nothing. No intention is no consequence, but intention needn’t imply the intended consequence, so it is hard to place a moral component on something that isn’t and perhaps could never be realized (last paragraph’s example).
As an aside, the schism between intention and consequence is quite similar to the is ought gap. What we intend may not be realized through uncertainty, incorrectness, etc., and what happens maybe not be what was intended, but when everything goes right, what happens is what was intended.
But I assume you’d think it inappropriate to charge JD with attempted murder, yes? So, we’re veering away from intention-based thinking towards ‘reasonable expectation of consequence’ thinking. I assume that was your point?
To take the opposite tack, suppose JD shoots a real pistol at your foot, thinking both you and he would enjoy reenacting one of those Western scenes where the villain makes someone dance. His intention is to provide both of you with a good laugh. Surely the fact that JD is a Dunderhead whose intentions were good shouldn’t keep him from some punishment when he accidentally shoots your foot off.
Perhaps I’m dense. I certainly didn’t understand this sentence
Isn’t the charge of Attempted Whatever exactly this? Placing a moral component on something that wasn’t and perhaps never could have been realized?
I do agree that it’s often difficult to divine the probabilities of consequences that could follow from someone’s acts, but didn’t. It’s also difficult to divine someone’s intentions (1st vs. 2nd degree murder, self-defense) after the fact.
Our current legal system punishes people for risky behavior that didn’t end up harming anyone (drunk driving) and for intention-inferred behavior. As the case in Cinncinati illustrates (where a sick man died after being manhandled into police custody), it even demands that the legal authorities rule whether a multi-cause death is a homicide or natural causes.
What’s your assessment of these attempts to infer things probabilisitically. I’m confused.
You puzzle me greatly, erislover. We talk and are so close and then you say something that goes completely over my head. I begin to suspect that I do not understand my own native toungue. It is a very unique experience.
I can think of no cases of moral views which do not lead to consequences of one sort or another. If I accept a certain moral precept, it will color all of the choices I make which I consider relevant to it. That is, everything I percieve as increasing the value I will choose to aquire or keep, and anything I percieve as hindering my enjoyment of that value I will shun or discard. At an appropriate level of abstraction the initial moral choice could be life and death. That is no other choices will fall outside the help or hider catagories of this moral value. Perhpas I am misunderstanding you. But it seems that most choices have or at least apply to some moral precept.
Can I assume you mean that government should not judge the moral worth of citizens seperate from thier actions? I think as individuals we are certainly allowed (required in some cases) to judge the moral worth of other individuals so long as we do not seek to enforce this judgement.
Well, it would be difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. But when we philosophize we have the privilege of hypothesizing the conditions. So if we knew he was trying to kill me, I think it is reasonable to say that what he was attempting to do was immoral, even if the action could never have succeeded. Just as ought does not imply an is, an immoral intention does not imply a successful, or even possible, realization.
Perhaps now one critic would say, “But erl, killing you is a consequence! So how have you left consequentialism?” Because I believe I have shown that in the ideal case consequences are irrelevant to the judgment we make when we say someone acted immorally. We negatively value death, so say it is immoral to intend it (in certain contexts if we accept contextual morals). The consequences are only necessary because of the limits of human understanding, we use them to get at intention.
Intention is the conceptual act meant to satisfy a motivational desire. His motivation was to make us happy, but his intention (how he means to satisfy his motivation) was misguided.
Necessary, but not sufficient, to answer a moral question (to me, of course), are three questions: 1)Why? (motivation); 2) What? (intention); 3) Did it? (consequence/action)
What is missing from this triune account are the answers to other questions. For example (not meant to be exhaustive), do moral facts exist? How do we discern them? What is the purpose of a moral system? How far does it apply (individuals, cultures, absolute)?
Sure.
Absolutely.
Probability makes its way into decision processes all the time, but to account for that we need to consider intention (subjective probability). The alternative is estimating how likely a particular outcome is based on behavior regardless of intention (objective probability). Both are indispensible in understanding human action, the former accounting for our intuition, and the latter accounting for our knowledge.
Let’s go to Stanford again, in their entry on moral epistemology.
True.
Yes, but I would like to note that the more contextual our morals are, the less like precepts they are. Deontology is down the hall. 
My point was that it is a rare to nonexistent case where the entire motivation is satisfied by a successful intentional act.
Yes. Now, remove your perception and intention from it and what activity are you left with?
If there are moral facts, yes.
†[sub]Our moral judgments by themselves necessarily give us some motivation to act, even without the accompaniment of already existing desires.[/sub]
I’m not at all sure. Some sort of activity that does not include me?
Well, what is a choice made without a judgement of value? An irrational choice perhaps. A random selection (although choosing to use a random coin toss is itself a choice)? Perhaps I have misunerstood what you mean by moral facts. Do you mean objective morals? Or do you mean simply that morals exist?
Certainly not by a single action. But a single action can be characterized by the moral it tends to suport, perhaps.
I say perhaps, becasue you whiffed me with that first sentence. A moral (choice, idea, or thought) becomes less abstract as it becomes more contextual. The morality of life is more abstract than the choice between poison and food, for instance. But it is still clear that (given the morality of life) that choosing food is moral and poison is imoral. I guess I am questioning the difference you are trying to suggest between a “precept” and a “contextual moral”. Perhaps I misued the word, but the comment yours was in response to simply used precept to indicate the start of the process. That is the moral which superceded the rest of the paragraph.
Then whence consequentialism? You suggest (perhaps in that vein),
How, without the intention that links various actions together?
As far as the last paragraph goes, I am assuming you are using “precept” like a moral code, a commandment of sorts, “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not.”
Check this Stanford entry for a good summary of moral skepticism, which will discuss in it what moral facts are. Roughly, a moral fact would take the form of “Is it true that [such and such] is immoral?”
pervert asks:
Supposing an agent whose rationality and intent-formation are not impaired (not a child, not insane, etc), it is my belief that the government should not reward or punish people except for their acts, attempted acts, or conspiracies to execute attempted acts. There’s probably some exception to this which proves the rule though.
Certainly, as individuals, we’re free to think and speak whatever we damn well please, including speculations as to other people’s character which is not based on evidence of acts.
Getting back to erislover, who says
I’m still having a hard time understanding this. If by ‘how he means to satisfy his motivation’ you mean his planned act or attempted act, how is intentionism meaningfully distinct from deontology?
Perhaps I’m just stuck in the boxes of deontology vs. consequentialism vs. virtue, but do you think intentionism fits in one of those boxes? Is it some kind of hybrid? Or is it some altogether different sort of thing?
I’m not sure I am implying that the intention is not the link. I am only suggesting that consequences and morals are not seperable. I suppose it depends on the context. You can have situations without intentions. Things exist sepreate from intentions, for instance. But morality applies to choices made by people. Consequences (as opposed to random events), it seems to me, are the results of choices, while Intentions, Motives, Morals are choices, and methods of choosing.
Not exactly, I was only using it in the sense of “lets start with this assumption”. I did not mean to imply that the moral precept I used had any other justification. I certainly do not believe in moral skepticism, but I was trying to avoid that discussion for now. I don’t think it is particularly germaine to the relationship between intentions and consequences. We can agree to disagree on the final source of morality if we can agree as to what a particular morality is.
On another note, perhaps we are getting confused with our definitions of motivation and intention. If a motivation is a desire to behave in a certain way, and an intention is a plan to do so in a specific instance, then perhaps there is some overlap. I may have used the terms interchangeably.
It seems easy enough to imagine desires without plans. But I think this is the exception rather than the rule. That is, if the thought “I want to be happy” does not imply a plan (or at least a desire for a plan ;)), it is only because I drop the context of what “I” is and what “happy” is. Furthermore, judgeing whether this thought is moral or not has to imply a certain context for both of those terms. So, if we believe that I am a brain floating in a jar, and happiness is a particular electrical impulse to a particular lobe, then that is the consequence we mean by “I want to be happy”. On the otherhand, if we believe that I am a sociopathic killer and that happiness means a plethora of torture victims, then that is what I mean by “I want to be happy”.
We judge the morallity of a choice system by the consequences it purports to favor. We judge a particular intention by the consequences it intends. Otherwise, our morality is too easily divorced from reality.
<When I say “we” in the preveious post, of cource, I mean “me”.>
Well, it doesn’t have to be. I’m trying to answer the question of where we should begin analysis on whether an immoral act occurred, not how we determine what is and isn’t moral.
It’s really just a question of what will gain the focus in our moral investigations. For example, in one of the New Testament books Jesus indicates that a man that has committed adultery in his mind has as good as done the deed itself. Of course we wish to avoid consequences we don’t value, but IMO the value of those consequences gain their status from the morality of the intentions that brought them about. They are not per se immoral or moral.
Well, I would likely agree with that in some sense.
And didn’t you indicate that’s what you thought morality was all about, a decision procedure?
All right, I understand. In this case we have a system of morality as a system of reason applied across myriad situations. Our precepts are, as it were, axioms and definitions (if we care to look at it that way). Is that a fair call?
Hmm. Well, when I say something like, “You just don’t kill people like that,” I mean, “In these circumstances, your intention was not appropriate.” Whether or not someone was killed, I want people to avoid these choices, and so I have to focus on their intentions. On the other end, desires and motivations that have no intentional acts (like a pedophile who never acts on his desires) seems just peachy to me. Well ok, maybe that’s an overstatement, but still, it is not strictly the consequence, or the potential consequence, but the intention to create a consequence that matters to me. We can’t have intentions without consequences, but only in the ideal cases of accurate knowledge do intentions and consequences line up. In the course of human activity, incorrect knowledge, guesses, probability estimates, and so on often play out, and we often intend consequences that couldn’t (or wouldn’t or didn’t or can’t) come about from our actions—even so, I don’t consider these people harmless, and so I feel that intention is the proper arena to focus on.