Abstract
In this book Lawrence Masek makes a thought-provoking contribution to the vast literature on the doctrine or principle of double effect (PDE). He defines this principle as the claim that ‘the difference between intention and foresight is relevant for determining whether an action is right or wrong’ (p. 1). This is a ‘minimalist version’ of PDE (p. 117). Unlike many definitions of PDE, Masek’s does not list supposed sufficient conditions for an action with good and bad effects to be right. Morality, claims Masek, ‘is too complex to fit into [such] a list’ (p. 117). Masek’s strategy for defending PDE is also distinctive. He rejects the common approach of simply appealing to intuitions about cases because he follows Alasdair MacIntyre in holding that moral theories should explain and overcome the limitations of rival theories. Consequently, he argues that PDE follows from his general theory of morality, according to which moral rules direct agents toward human fulfillment. He then argues that PDE’s critics have too reductive a view of morality and mistakenly deemphasize the agent’s perspective in judging intention and assessing action (pp. ix–xi, 170).
Masek’s book addresses an impressive range of literature and topics. He engages prominent analytic philosophers, both critics of PDE (Judith Jarvis Thomson and Thomas Scanlon) and defenders (Philippa Foot, Thomas Nagel, and Warren Quinn), as well as the extensive discussion of PDE among Catholic moral theorists. He argues, for example, against Scanlon’s intention-neutral principles, which are meant to capture some of PDE’s intuitive plausibility, and he rebuts arguments against PDE that draw on Joshua Knobe’s experimental philosophy. My review cannot do justice to these many details. Instead, I will focus on Masek’s overall argument for his main theses: (1) that PDE is true because intending something forms the agent differently from just knowingly causing it, and (2) that intended effects should be defined from the agent’s perspective (p. 2).
Chapter 1 defends Masek’s first thesis by drawing on the ‘Socratic principle . . . that people can act wrongly by corrupting their own character, as well as by mistreating other people’ (p. 17). He justifies this principle by claiming that moral rules should be understood as directing people to what is good for them and that it would be arbitrary to deny that it is wrong to corrupt oneself even though it is wrong to corrupt other people. The Socratic principle requires that an action’s corrupting effect on the agent can make it wrong even if it is not wrong for any other reason. To satisfy this requirement, Masek defines corruption by claiming that an action corrupts the agent’s character when it ‘blocks the agent from some good that human beings characteristically can achieve’ (p. 15).
This definition faces some challenges. First, being an excellent mathematician or rugby player are goods that ‘human beings characteristically can achieve’. Striving to achieve one of these goods often blocks someone from achieving the other, however. Counterexamples like this suggest that Masek should refine his definition by glossing ‘characteristic’ goods as something like the set of goods constitutive of a flourishing life. Second, when Masek says an act is wrong if it corrupts the agent, does he mean it must actually corrupt the agent? That would be counterintuitive because actions often have no appreciable influence on their agent, especially when they conform to the agent’s firmly established character. Ironically, this fact suggests that Masek’s definition, on this interpretation, implies that an action could be wrong for good people but not for very bad people. But it would seem too expansive to claim that an act is wrong if it potentially corrupts the agent, so perhaps Masek should say that an act is wrong if it tends by its nature to corrupt the agent. One might worry, however, that if an act naturally tends to corrupt the agent it must already be wrong—which would undermine the Socratic principle.
Setting these problems aside, let us return to why Masek thinks the Socratic principle supports PDE. The key claim is that intending an effect can corrupt the agent even when knowingly causing it would not. That is because agents ‘have a closer relation to intended effects than to foreseen side effects’. By ‘closer’, Masek means that if I intend an effect I am ‘internally’ related to it as its seeker rather than just ‘externally’ related to it as its cause (pp. 19–20). He claims that mundane examples suggest that this difference in relation results in a different formative effect on the agent’s character. This is intuitively plausible, but the reasoning in this section is somewhat unclear and Masek’s overall argument would be stronger had he elaborated these claims further.
Chapter 1’s Socratic defense of PDE requires that the agent’s perspective determines what she intends. Consequently, chapter 2 defends an agent-based definition of intended effects, according to which ‘[a]gents intend an effect if and only if the effect is their end or is part of their plan to achieve their end’ (p. 43). To illustrate, consider, on one hand, a terror bomber who targets a hospital so that the patients’ deaths will weaken the enemy’s morale and, on the other hand, a strategic bomber who targets a weapons depot to weaken the enemy militarily but who foresees that the explosions will kill some patients at a nearby hospital. According to Masek’s definition, the terror bomber does—while the strategic bomber does not necessarily—intend the patients’ deaths. Masek replies to the common objection that making intended effects dependent on the agent’s plan renders intention problematically subjective by insisting that according to his definition there is an objective fact about what an agent intends and about whether having this intention is wrong. Finally, Masek argues that his agent-based theory of intention has the advantage of avoiding the familiar ‘problem of closeness’ that hounds theorists who define intended effects from an observer’s perspective.
Chapter 3 responds to Judith Jarvis Thomson’s objection that PDE conflates agent and action assessment. She illustrates her point by contrasting the real Eisenhower, who ordered the invasion of Normandy to liberate Europe, with a fictional Eisenhower, who ordered the same invasion to kill American soldiers. Fictional Eisenhower’s intention reveals him to be a bad person but does not make ordering the invasion wrong. Masek considers this the strongest objection to PDE because it tries to show why the principle is plausible yet mistaken. He concedes that ‘the agent’s intention is irrelevant to judging whether the action mistreats others’ (p. 76). But he rejoins that an action can be wrong because it corrupts the agent and that intention is relevant to this. Further, agent and action assessment remain distinct for him because judging that an action corrupts the agent does not address how much it corrupts the agent, how good or bad the agent is, or how the agent compares to others.
These replies to Thomson are strong, provided one accepts Masek’s Socratic view of morality. More interesting to me is how this chapter develops chapter 2’s theory of intention. Masek holds that ‘different intentions make different actions’ (p. 79). He consequently denies that the real and fictional Eisenhowers perform the same action when ordering the invasion. But it is not clear that his argument, which appeals to the difference between a birder moving her head to track a bird and a gangster moving his head to order a ‘hit’, supports this conclusion. The Eisenhowers order the invasion to cause the liberation of Europe or the death of Americans. These are remote ends of their orders. By contrast, tracking the bird and ordering a hit are not remote ends of the birder’s and gangster’s head movements. Their head movements count as performing these intentional actions, just as making certain noises counts as performing a certain speech act. Here I simply want to highlight that Masek’s theory of intention privileges intended effects and that his examples often equate these with remote ends. This contrasts to other theories of intention, like those of Anscombe and Aquinas, which privilege intentional action. I will return to this below. For now, let me suggest that, if Masek wants to maintain that the Eisenhowers perform different actions, he should distinguish with Aquinas between an action’s natural and moral species (Summa Theologiae, I-II 18). But this raises the difficult question of how remote an end can be while still specifying an action’s moral species. This is part of what is at issue in moral theological debates about ‘pagan virtue’.
Chapter 4 discusses the trolley cases that feature prominently in recent discussions of intention and ethics. Masek uses his agent-based definition of intended effects to defend the controversial view that someone could push a fat man in front of a runaway trolley to prevent it from hitting other people without intending the man’s death. (Masek acknowledges this act would still be unjust.) The chapter’s primary argument, however, addresses critics who try to debunk PDE by claiming that it depends on intuitions about contrived trolley-like cases—intuitions that neuroscientific evidence suggests are unreliable. Masek responds persuasively with a genealogy of trolley cases that shows PDE’s proponents have not used such cases to argue for PDE. Instead, they often have used common-sense examples from everyday life to illustrate the principle. Further, he reiterates his view that the Socratic principle provides the fundamental justification for PDE.
Chapter 5 applies Masek’s agent-based definition of intended effects to a host of examples from medicine and war. He begins with an extensive analysis of craniotomy performed to collapse a fetus’s skull to end an obstructed labor and save the mother’s life. According to Masek, this course of action does not require the surgeon to intend the fetus’s death because the surgeon would not need to change her plan if the fetus was already dead. Masek then briefly extends this analysis to cases involving ectopic pregnancy and dilation and curettage (like the 2009 ‘Phoenix abortion case’ that is controversial among Catholic ethicists). He carefully notes that although these procedures do not necessarily involve intending death, they could still be wrong if they involve mistreating the fetus.
Masek’s analysis here follows from his agent-based definition of intended effects. Indeed, his discussion of craniotomy closely parallels his defense of his theory of intention in chapter 2. But he considers a new, Thomistic objection that the object of the surgeon’s action includes the fetus’s death (p. 149). Masek’s reply is somewhat dismissive, but this objection is salient because it raises the issue of theories of intention that prioritize intentional action. One way to interpret Aquinas’s view is that he agrees with Anscombe that an agent’s chosen means and manner of acting in her known circumstances determines what her action properly tends toward. This determines the action’s intention, which in turn determines its species. On this view, since a surgeon surely knows that collapsing a fetus’s skull tends as such to cause its death, her performing a craniotomy counts as intentionally killing the fetus. This is so regardless of the surgeon’s plan. Masek thinks that theories like this cannot sustain a morally significant difference between intended and foreseen side effects. This is debatable. That view could claim that foreseeing a side effect makes it voluntary but that the norms governing causing or allowing harm voluntarily are less strict than those governing intentional acts of harming. This is so especially when the agent, through no fault of her own, cannot but voluntarily cause or allow harm (as in some trolley cases).
My point is not to assert that this theory of intentional action is correct but to note that Masek’s treatment of intention presupposes several decisions in action theory that he does not explicitly discuss. As a result, I suspect, his defense of an agent-based theory of intention will fail to persuade those not already sympathetic to it. Despite this concern, and those outlined earlier about his defense of the Socratic principle, Masek’s book is a valuable contribution to the specialist literature on PDE. His defense of PDE is novel and creative, and he expands our conception of how it can be related to wider issues in ethical theory.