St Thomas Aquinas and The American Postgrad

I went looking for philosophy blogs recently. Which is another subject. I found the top ten philosophy blogs on blogs.com and took a look at Think Tonk. Where its author Clayton Littlejohn discusses a thing called the Doctrine of Double Effect. This is Aquinas' solution to the problem of bad things you didn't intend happening as a result of you doing something good. Aquinas' criterion has four parts and is: the nature of the act is itself good, or at least morally neutral; the agent intends the good effect and not the bad either as a means to the good or as an end itself; the good effect outweighs the bad effect in circumstances sufficiently grave to justify causing the bad effect; and the agent exercises due diligence to minimise the harm.

Before going any further, remember that this was put forward by a man who was born in 1225 and died in 1274. That was an age so different, they didn't even have syphilis, the first recorded outbreak of which was in 1494. He saw the introduction of at least one devastating military technology in his lifetime: gunpowder. Printing was two hundred years away and America was undiscovered. They had decent steel swords and the deadliest weapon was the longbow. He wasn't thinking about carpet-bombing, prescribing drugs with spirit-sapping side-effects or building dams which would deprive the tribes downstream of water. No-one could do that then. I doubt he intended his criterion to be used to debate the permissibility of precision-bombing munitions factories placed by cynical insurgents next to schools. In fact, it's very hard to work out what he could have had in mind. Sawing off limbs to prevent gangrene, maybe; diplomatic fibbing, most likely.

Today, we understand that even the simple act of breathing has a downside: it creates the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. People are not carbon-neutral. (I'm not a carbon-facist, but like rats, there's always one within ten yards of you.) It's no problem for us to do something knowing that there will be bad, undesirable, wish-we-could-avoid-it-but-we-can't consequences. Perhaps any significant action cuts both ways, and the only ones that don't are trivial gestures. Maybe the issue is not a formal one about when we can commit actions with downsides, but a substantive one about which downsides should make us re-consider the desirability of the proposed action. Now there's a challenge for a modern St Thomas.

Well, except Think Tonk doesn't look at the DDE itself, but at the comments of another contemporary philosopher, one "Thompson", who doesn't like the idea that we should look at someone's intentions when judging their actions. Then Think Tonk walks straight into the Fallacy of Supplying The Right Assumptions (see later entry) and afterwards heads off into a discussion of intentions and intending as abstract as any you will find this side of... anywhere. I am not going to discuss his argument, because, well, here's the conclusion: "thus, the fact that we do not look inward in deliberating about what to do is not a reason to think that intention has no bearing on permissibility." (This pile-up of negatives reminds me of Rae Langton at her worst.)

So let's look at intention. It seems to me that the question is: can I claim that I intended for the good thing to happen, but not the bad thing that seems to go with it, if I knew that the bad thing did go with it? St Thomas obviously thought that the answer was "yes". St Thomas' world had an idea of foreseeable consequences, but back in 1260, they couldn't see very far. (I'm not sure that St Thomas's world had many "side effects" either - they simply didn't have enough understanding of what caused what to have "side effects". Their world was much more random, and hence much more God-directed.) There was no idea of testing medicines, or food additives, or consumer goods, or anything much. Today, a doctor prescribing metformin, which causes nausea, loss of appetite and diaorreah in about forty per cent of the people who take it, knows very well there is a high probability that the next patient will wish they had never been given the stuff. Here's the question: can the doctor claim she didn't intend the nausea, but did intend the cure, given that both are as probable? (Metformin only provides significant benefits to about a third of the people who take it.) If so, why can't the murderer say they did intend the attack, but not the death?

Well, maybe "intending" means, in these circumstances, nothing more that "wanting to happen"? The doctor wants to reduce your blood sugar and doesn't want you to feel nauseous: she's just chosen a very ineffective way of achieving those two hopes at the same time. (Bad drugs make good doctors look incompetent.) I suspect that's all St Thomas meant by it. "Intention" sounds too subtle, and verges on the logically private: "wanting" has the right common-ness about it. The murderer did want to attack their victim (to scare them) but didn't want to kill them: since the attack was malicious and with a very large knife, I'm going for murder and the I bet the jury agree. I still don't know what the difference between the doctor when prescribing and the doctor when waving knives at her cheating husband. Let me know.

The catch then is that the "intention" clause is pretty weak: everyone can get the right answer to it. And that's why intention should be left out of "permissibility" - it's way too easy to fake. St Thomas could scare people with the knowledge that God would know if they were faking it. Now we know God is AWOL, we're not so bothered about spinning our answers. And that's another difference between St Thomas' world and ours.

Which is a much neater way of getting to a result than paragraphs like this: "While acting for some intention rather than another is something that happens and happens just when we do something, it is not itself something done. To see this, remember that the agent who decides to V could potentially V from any number of intentions. If she were obliged to V from one intention as opposed to another and this was something she did, it too could be the sort of thing that could be done from one intention as opposed to another. Again, if this is a doing, to be done from one intention rather than another, the agent would have to select between possible intentions. A vicious regress looms. It would seem that doing something from one intention rather than another would require completing an endless series of prior acts, something we cannot do. So, since doing something from one intention rather than another is not something we do, it is not something that we concern ourselves with in practical deliberation."

Let me know if a) you understood that the first time you read it, and b) if you think he's right. This is the kind of stuff that gives philosophy a bad name. It's confined to academics, however. Real philosophers tend to be quite snappy writers. (Except Hegel, but he was prolix so that stupid university Chancellors wouldn't get what he was really saying.)