Abstract
Is there a morally significant difference between a terror bomber and a tactical bomber if they cause the same number of deaths? If so, what is the basis for that distinction? Double Effect Reasoning (DER) provides an account of the conditions under which an action that causes harmful effects is permissible (the examples usually involve death), even if the bad effect would prima facie fall under a prohibition (such as the prohibition on murder). One of the four conditions of traditional versions of DER is the claim is that an agent’s intentions can be morally determinative, and provide a way to draw intuitively attractive moral distinctions between cases. This thesis offers a critical analysis of the role intention plays in DER.There is a long history of double effect type reasoning, and in Chapter 2 I argue that it goes back at least as far as St Augustine, but not quite as far as Aristotle. After considering the central cases and traditional formulation of DER along with its history in the first two chapters, this thesis examines disputes over the role of intention in DER. In Chapter 3 I make the case that the philosophy of action, and in particular the way intention is understood in relation to action, is more important to the interpretation of DER than previously acknowledged. If the formation of an intention is an action and an instance of agency, then there are better prospects for intention to have some sort of fundamental moral significance. In Chapter 4 I consider T.M. Scanlon’s influential view that intention has only derivative or secondary moral significance, and drawing on chapter 3 I argue pace Scanlon that intentions can and should be taken into account when deciding what to do. Chapter 5 addresses another difficult puzzle for proponents of DER, the ‘problem of closeness’, which arises because a very fine grained description of what an agent actually intends counter-intuitively appears to allow agents not to intend harmful effects, even effects that are very close to what they do intend. E.g. a terror bomber who only intended to make the civilians appear to be dead is not obviously captured by DER’s intention condition. I argue that solutions to closeness that rely on coarser grained accounts of intention are difficult to sustain, but that we should move beyond a narrow focus on deliberate killing to include other ‘close’ prohibitions. Finally in chapter 6 I consider the application of DER, as developed in previous chapters, to the law. I argue that, in spite of philosophical debate, DER is not too conceptually complex or confused to be applied in that context.
| Date of Award | 1 Nov 2019 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Thomas Pink (Supervisor), Andrea Sangiovanni (Supervisor) & Shalom Lappin (Supervisor) |