A question of intent

Last week, I raised the issue of how intent colors our actions. This sprang from readers who said that whether it is wrong to "tailor" resumes depends on what we intend. That may not be as easy as some people seem to think it is.

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Intuition leads us to think that intent should count. That seems to make sense, but as in many other things, intuition takes us only so far here. Determining intent, if we can do it at all, is a highly complex undertaking.

At the heart of the problem, we find multiple layers of what constitutes intent. Imagine that I accidentally brush up against a hot stove. Involuntarily I jerk my arm away and, in the process, knock over an expensive vase. I didn't intend to knock over the vase. In fact, I didn't intend to move my arm at all. It just sort of happened. Here we have a failure of intent because the act was involuntary. (For argument's sake, let's assume that in all of the examples there's nothing else at work to complicate the scenario.)

Now, let's assume that I awake in the middle of the night to find that the electricity has gone out. I start wandering through the house, waving my arms to avoid obstacles and, in the course of my travels, hit the vase and knock it over. In this case, I knew I was waving my arms and doing it voluntarily, but I had no intent to knock over the vase. I was operating without sufficient knowledge. Perhaps the worst that could be said about me was that I should have been more careful.

In another scenario, it's raining heavily and I need to practice for the upcoming golf tournament. Unable to go outside, I start practicing chip shots into the fireplace in the living room. One of the golf balls glances off the mantel and bounces across the room, breaking the vase. In this case, I certainly intended to hit the golf balls, but I didn't intend the outcome -- although I should have been able to foresee its possibility. Here, you might want to say I had greater responsibility for breaking the vase, even though I didn't intend to do it, because I should have known better than to hit golf balls in the house.

But it's not only the short-term objective we look at when considering the role of intent. We also take into account the long-range goal. For example, if I reluctantly, but purposely, break the vase to free little Johnny's arm after all other methods have failed, people consider that in a different light than if I simply throw the vase against the wall in a fit of pique.

But even that distinction can blur easily. In the above example, we could say that my goal of freeing Johnny either excuses or justifies the action. What about actions that aren't justifiable in either case, but that we want to treat differently?

For example, suppose my laundry establishment angers me by putting too much starch in my socks, and I retaliate by going down and throwing a bomb through their window. I would most likely be seen as a criminal, and the seriousness of the charge would be determined by the damage and injury I caused. But if I bombed the laundry to achieve some political aim, I would be considered and treated as a terrorist -- which in today's climate would be strikingly different from being treated as a criminal.

In both cases, my actions were the same, and the outcomes might even be the same. However, my intent -- the long-range goal I was trying to achieve -- would be different. In the first, I was lashing out and retaliating. In the second, I was terrorizing. It all turns on what I intend or what people think I intend.

But even this approach has problems, as we've seen recently. Many people object to making the same distinction in cases commonly called "hate crimes." Here a type of schizophrenia sets in. The very same people who want to distinguish between criminals and terrorists based on motivation don't feel that distinction should hold in cases where the motive is hate. That attitude doesn't seem to be consistent. But it is just such a distinction in motive that dramatically separates Sept. 11 from mass murder, or the Holocaust from other war crimes.

But even in more mundane things, we display a remarkable split in whether or not to count intent. When someone does something that has a bad outcome, we will often excuse it by saying that he or she "meant well." At other times, we don't care and will look only at what the person did and not what the intention was. We lack a good rationale for determining when we count intention and when we don't.

The biggest fly in the ointment when it comes to intent, as many people have written to me and noted, is that sometimes determining what someone else intends is extremely difficult. Even if they tell us, their assessment might be unreliable. After all, we have hundreds of thousands of psychotherapists who spend most of their time helping people understand why they do what they do. If I don't know why I'm doing something, how can you?

But the connection often becomes blurred, and this blurring can lead us astray. A large part of ethics is forming a structure to evaluate how others act, and if we don't have a good handle on their intent, we're left with only the actions as a basis for out decision and intent is left to take a much smaller role than we might like.

The bottom line? We want intent to count. Except sometimes we don't; we want to consider only the actions. And, even when we count intent, we have trouble figuring out what the intent was. Other than that, it's all crystal clear.

One thing that's important to remember is that our actions, regardless of intent, create what we call a "moral residue." This means that we may incur some responsibility toward others for the result of what we do. In all of the vase examples above -- assuming they took place in someone else's home -- I would be obliged, by ethics as well as etiquette, to at least offer to pay for the vase. In some of the more flagrant cases, that obligation is considerably stronger than in others.

I've put some more problems with intent in our Ethics Matters forum at www.infoworld.com/forums/ethics . If you have any other ideas, write to me at ethics_matters@infoworld.com.