The Power of Care: Reply to Sliwa

I. THE GOOD INTENTION ACCOUNT

Sliwa’s summary of her account, which she calls “The Good Intention Account,” is as follows:

Here is the account, in a nutshell. When someone commits a wrong, we may generally infer that they lacked a morally adequate present-directed intention. Excuses block that inference. Excuses are considerations that show that the agent’s wrongdoing does not reflect her lack of a morally adequate present-directed intention.¹

Sliwa follows Bratman in taking intentions to be “mental states characterized by their distinct functional role in action and planning.”² Intentions are stable: once formed, they tend to persist. Intentions are controlling: unless revised, intentions tend to lead to action. Sliwa further assumes that intentions are coherent: one cannot have “two simultaneous conflicting present-tense intentions and act on one of them without giving up or revising the other.”³

Supposing one thinks, as Sliwa does, that having an excuse is always a matter of what one’s motives are, one option is a lacking a bad motive view. Another option is a having a good motive view. Sliwa highlights this distinction and stresses that she is going for the second option. She writes: “I suggest that excuses point to the presence of a morally adequate motive, rather than the absence of a reprehensible one. Second, I suggest that it’s a particular type of motive that matters for excuses: a morally adequate present-directed intention.”⁴

Sliwa fleshes out “present-directed” as requiring that the intention “concern what to do right now.”⁵ Present-directed intentions thus contrast with intentions targeted at specific points in the future, like the intention to wear black tomorrow, or general resolutions, like the resolution to only ever wear black.⁶ In support of the focus on present-directed intention, Sliwa says: “When it comes to excuses, it is present-directed intentions that matter. When confronted with wrongdoing, we care about the wrongdoer’s motivation at the moment of action—not her general resolutions and plans.”⁷

Sliwa makes the colloquial notion of “good” intention more precise by reference to the idea of moral adequacy. Regarding intention adequacy in general, she writes: “To assess an intention for adequacy is to assess it as a plan with respect to a given goal. How adequate a plan is with respect to that goal depends on how conducive it is to realizing it – for example, how conducive my intention to go to Japan is to getting me there.”⁸ So, adequacy goes with conduciveness, and the primary barrier to conduciveness Sliwa highlights is lack of specificity. For example, the intention to go to Japan is highly non-specific, leaving open as it does all details of one’s route.

Sliwa says that a morally adequate intention is conducive to some relevant moral goal and that it’s for the ethicists to say what moral goals there are.⁹ Merely having the intention “to do the right thing” is not morally adequate, even assuming that doing the right thing is one moral goal, since it is so non-specific. It is analogous to the intention to go to Japan. Sliwa thinks that to have a moral-ignorance-related excuse one needs something more like the intention to go to Japan by taking a train to Heathrow.¹⁰ This seems very plausible, and very separable from Sliwa’s intention-centric framework. But the key takeaway for the moment is that “morally adequate” doesn’t mean morally “not bad.” Moral adequacy of intention requires positive conduciveness towards a relevant moral goal.

II. NEUTRAL INTENTION CASES

I think you can be excused, and not have a morally adequate present-directed intention (a “good intention”) that excuses you, because your only present-directed intention is morally neutral rather than good. That is, I think, often the case with what Sliwa calls “I didn’t do it on purpose” excuses. Sliwa sets out her account’s story about such cases in this passage:

Consider a common way of making an excuse: “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to offend,” or “I didn’t intend to give away a secret – I thought this was common knowledge,” or “I was just trying to…”. They take the form of an appeal: yes, I did act wrongly – I broke the promise, gave away the secret, caused the offense – but unintentionally so.

The Good Intention Account explains why one’s wrongdoing being unintentional can constitute an excuse. To say that it was unintentional is just to say that it did not reflect the lack of a morally adequate intention. Rather, something went wrong in putting my morally adequate intention into action: I slipped, tripped, lost my balance, or I was ignorant about some crucial feature of the situation.

Consider Jones who stirs a heaping spoonful of poison into Smith’s tea. Since he has every reason to believe that the white powder is sugar, the poisoning is unintentional. In light of this, the wrongful deed does not reflect a lack of morally adequate present-directed intention. Jones is guided by the present-directed intention to sweeten Smith’s tea; there is nothing untoward about that. The poisoning reflects Jones’ ignorance about the content of the sugar bowl.¹¹

I’ll discuss the Smith/Jones case, and I’ll focus on two candidates for what morally adequate present-directed intention might be excusing Jones. The first candidate, which Sliwa considers, is the intention to be sweetening Smith’s tea. The second candidate, which she does not consider, is the intention to not be killing Smith.

I’ll argue that the problem with the tea-sweetening intention is that Jones’s intending this benefit for Smith is incidental to his excuse. We can easily think of a relevantly similar case in which the goal the agent is working towards is morally neutral, in so far as it doesn’t involve a benefit for anyone other the agent themselves, yet the agent is still excused. I’ll argue that the problem with the intention to not be killing Smith is that there is no reason to think Jones has this intention. That’s because not killing Smith is not the motive or point of anything Jones does.

Any putative “good intention” that Sliwa’s theory might appeal to in the Smith/Jones case will have one or the other of these two problems. Which problem a candidate intention has will depend on whether the intention is directed at producing a small benefit or avoiding a great harm. There is room for variation in how we specify the benefit and the harm. For example, we might focus on “benefiting Smith,” generically, rather than “sweetening Smith’s tea.” Or we might focus on “not poisoning Smith” rather than “not killing Smith.” But the basic problem, I think, is that it’s irrelevant to Jones’s excuse that he intends to be producing the small benefit, and there is no reason to think that he intends to not be producing the great harm. The most illuminating description of Jones’s present-directed intentions as he heaps in the poison is that there is “nothing untoward” about them (to use Sliwa’s own revealing phrase), not that they are good.

III. BAD INTENTION CASES

In this section, I discuss a different kind of problem for Sliwa’s account. It involves a kind of case where someone is excused (partially) despite the fact that the only relevant intention they have is a bad intention. As in the previous section, I draw on one of Sliwa’s own examples: “The agent who gives in to police interrogation and falsely testifies against an innocent person acts wrongly under duress.”¹³ Intuitively, police duress can be some kind of excuse for giving false and damaging testimony. Since the only kind of excuse the Good Intention Account can allow for involves good intention, Sliwa has to treat the case as one in which the testifier retains a relevant good intention – e.g., to not testify against the innocent person – even as the duress leads them to act against that intention, and on something that is not an intention. Sliwa calls this a “momentary desire” (2019:55). She fleshes out the case by imagining the momentary desire the false testifier’s good intention is circumvented by is a desire to “just make the interrogation stop” (2019: 55).

No doubt Sliwa’s testifier has an excuse based on their good intention. But does good intention have to be on the scene in a case of false testifying where there is an excuse? The candidate excused testifier I am interested in never gets as far as forming the good intention to not testify against the innocent person. A fortiori this intention is not present-but-circumvented while they give the false testimony. They testify against the innocent person. But they are, even as they testify, highly conflicted: they testify despite strongly desiring not to, and they strongly desire not to because they care about the bad consequences that testifying against someone may have for that person. Why then do they testify? Because they care about something else even more. This other thing is something that it’s morally entirely permissible for them to care about, but not permissible to prioritise over the extremely weighty moral goal of not testifying against an innocent. ¹⁴ For example, they care even more about not being beaten up. This leads them to decide to testify falsely, which they then do.

It’s obvious that there’s a morally relevant difference between the action on this occasion of this person, and the action of the person who testifies against an innocent because it just doesn’t bother them in the least to do so. The action of the first exhibits something that falls in the range of normal human weakness (where exactly it falls will depend on the details); the second exhibits chilling callousness. But if there is a morally relevant difference between the two agents’ actions, and neither agent is justified in doing what they are doing, then there’s nothing for the difference to be other than the one having an excuse (a partial one, intuitively), and the other not.

Excuses with the “strong but outweighed morally positive motivation” structure that this person’s excuse exemplifies are plausibly common. For example, they seem common in addiction, because addictive desires can be so strong. Suppose an addict steals from a family member and to do so they engage in protracted and planned activity that exhibits some finesse and even ingenuity (e.g., trying out various birthday-related password combinations on their family member’s computer, sending the right amount of money to their dealer’s account and remembering to add the extra fee for urgent deliveries). It seems implausible, in a case like this, that they could be acting against present-directed intentions: e.g., that, even as they try the fourth birthday combination, they have a sustained intention “to not be stealing” that is circumvented by something that is less than an intention.¹⁵ But their action nevertheless seems morally better than that of an agent who steals from a family member without it bothering them in the least. The addict’s extreme desire to use is plausibly overpowering a weaker, but still strong, desire to not steal, and the fact that they have this strong desire to not steal that needs to be overpowered is morally in their favour, compared to the other agent. Granted that their action is not justified, what kind of point in their favour could this be if not an excuse?

IV. CARING AS ONE OUGHT

There is an account that can deal with problem cases I have been discussing. Here it is:

CARE: An agent has an excuse when, and to the extent that, their wrong-doing does not reflect a failure of care.

Caring goes with being motivated generically as opposed to having one specific kind of motivational state (e.g., intention). If something is motivating to one, then one cares about it. Sometimes one has a corresponding intention. Sometimes one doesn’t.

I don’t take a position on some tricky questions one might have about care. To care might just be to be motivated. Alternatively, caring might be a state that is distinct from and explains (by grounding, or causing) being motivated. Caring might be exhausted by its motivational aspect, or it might have aspects additional to motivation. These are interesting questions, but not ones I think that need to be answered to see that CARE does a better job with Jones, and my false testifier (the one who acts on, not against, intention), than the Good Intentions Account does.

Caring can be, and mostly is, dispositional. It’s not that, at the moment he stirs in the white powder, there is something it’s like for Jones to care about not killing other people, to care about not killing Smith, to care about not poisoning Smith, and to care about not now poisoning Smith by moving his right arm thusly. He cares about at least some of these things in virtue of the fact that if, as he put the powder in the tea, someone grabbed his arm and said the powder was poison, he would be shocked, he would unhesitatingly stop doing what he is doing. These dispositional tests constitute Jones as someone who cares about not poisoning Smith (but, notice, they don’t constitute him as someone who has formed an intention to not be poisoning Smith).

Failure of care has two subtypes. One is not caring about something one ought to care about (at all or as much as one ought). The other is caring about something one ought not to (at all or more than one ought).¹⁶ It’s the first kind of failure that is relevant to Jones and to my false testifier. An example of the second kind of failure would be someone using a racially offensive term in a second language, having been told that it is the respectful term for the relevant group of people. Their use of the term is excused because it fails to reflect their being positively motivated by the goal of giving racial, or any, offence.

CARE says that Jones is excused since his action does not reflect a failure to care about killing Smith. In fact, there’s no level of care about not killing that Jones’s killing Smith reflects his failure to attain, precisely because he’s unaware that what he is doing is killing Smith. Hence, he seems like he might have a complete excuse, depending on how the details of the case are filled in.

CARE says that my false testifier is excused if, and to the extent that, their false testimony fails to reflect a failure to care about not testifying against the innocent person. But there is some level of care about not testifying against an innocent person that this person does not have. If they had that level of care they wouldn’t have testified falsely. CARE therefore predicts that their excuse is a partial excuse, which it intuitively is.

Why does CARE tie having an excuse to whether a wrong-doing reflects a failure of care as opposed, more simply, to whether the wrong-doer fails to care? Consider Jones* who would love to kill, but who kills Smith in complete ignorance of the fact that he is doing that, unaware that the powder is poison. A bad fellow no doubt, but not on account of what he has done on this occasion: he seems to have the same excuse in killing Smith as Jones has. That is because neither agent’s killing Smith reflects a failure of care, even though one of them does fail to care. When considering excuses, we usually don’t just care about which psychological properties someone has, at the time they act; we care about which properties are reflected in (or “expressed in” or “manifested in” or “in the appropriate way, causing” or “explaining”) their action.¹⁷

The primary goal of this paper has been to provide an assessment of Sliwa’s interesting project of tying excuses to intentions, which to my knowledge it has yet to receive. CARE is relevant to that assessment because, even if there were cases – e.g., Jones, my false testifier – that the Good Intention Account finds hard to deal with, that would be far less conclusive if those cases were hard for any account to deal with. That isn’t how things are. CARE seems to say exactly the right thing about these cases. I don’t claim that CARE is a particularly novel view. I think that the basic idea behind CARE is a natural starting point for a story about excuses that we would need to be argued away from. With a view to further clarifying CARE, I close by highlighting two points of contrast between CARE and an account in the literature that CARE has much in common with, Arpaly and Schroeder’s.

The first contrast is that CARE is non-committal on something Arpaly and Schroeder want to be committed about. Is the key thing – for having an excuse (my framing), or for blame being mitigated (Arpaly and Schroeder’s) – to be motivated by right-making features of actions, or by the fact that those actions are right? Arpaly and Schroeder commit to the first option. But there’s nothing in CARE that requires that, since one can care about the fact that something is right, just as one can care about features that are, in fact, right-making features. So, there’s no reason why someone who defends CARE has to say that moral ignorance is never an excuse. They can even borrow Sliwa’s nice story about when moral ignorance is an excuse. The story would be in terms of how specific the thing the agent cares about is (just caring about “doing the right thing” is never enough). What sort of attitude (e.g., intending vs. caring) is central in an account of excuses is one question. What sort of content (e.g., de dicto, de re) is central is another, on the face of it, orthogonal question. CARE is only addressing the first question.

Second, a natural way of framing the contrast between Arpaly and Schroeder and Sliwa is that the former praise (i.e., make central to theorising about some morally important phenomenon) desire and the latter praises intention. But there’s no sense in which CARE praises desire at the expense of intention. Desire and intention are on a par, as far as CARE is concerned, since they are both closely connected with caring, which is what CARE says is morally relevant. Furthermore, CARE is sensitive to degree of care (“to the extent that”) and in so far as outright intending is more correlated with caring a lot than merely desiring, CARE can even allow that knowing that someone got as far as intending, and didn’t merely desire, something morally positive they ultimately failed to do (e.g., to not testify against an innocent person) can be evidence relevant to the strength of their excuse.

V. CONCLUSION

Given the features intentions have (stability, controllingness etc), it makes sense that intentions play the distinctive role in planning that they do. But is there any reason to expect that the “planning role,” and the “excusing role,” should be played by one and the same part of the psyche? Aspects of mind other than how things are with one’s planning states seem like they ought to be potentially relevant to one’s moral status, to one’s credit or discredit, in a case where one does wrong. On my picture, this is because one may be excused by what one cares about.

Acknowledgements

This paper has been much improved by points made by Keith Allen, Lucy Campbell, Hannah Carnegy-Arbuthnott, Greg Currie, Stephen Everson, Alexander Greenberg, Alex Gregory, Owen Hulatt, David Ingram, Jess Isserow, Mary Leng, Chris Jay, Paul Noordhof, Matthew Ratcliffe, Louise Richardson, Léa Salje, Ashley Shaw, Rob Trueman, Pekka Väyrynen, Gerald Lang, Christian Piller and two anonymous editors for this journal. Special thanks are due to Owen Hulatt for commenting on a number of drafts.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.