Notes on choice and intention

last edited 2024-11-05

Here I'm going to discuss a few concepts relevant to the analysis of moral merit and guilt.

The axiom of inseparable motivation

When there are multiple incentives for an action, it's impossible to do it "for" only some of them. If they were all there, they all affected the difficulty of the decision, so you by definition were motivated by all of them. In other words, if someone does something good that they also get a monetary reward for, you can't say "but they didn't do it for the money, they did it only because it was right".

The axiom of necessary motivation

Every choice made is either what was most tempting, most moral, or a compromise between the two. No one ever does what is both less tempting to them and less moral than another option they were aware of. Put another way, no one does something for no reason, and every reason falls under either conscience or self-interest.

You might think there are lots of cases where someone acts in a way that seems both less enjoyable and equally or less moral than another action. Of course, the most tempting thing isn't necessarily what will make the agent happiest, because the agent can misjudge that, and probably also because of time preference. But the other thing you're likely missing if you make that objection is the concept of ideals. We have *beliefs* about what we consider right and wrong, and admire people who follow our beliefs - including ourselves. This creates an emotional incentive to act according to one's own ideology that is separate from the necessarily correct guidance of conscience, because we want to feel proud of ourselves.

Intention

The notion is common that you can "intend" to do something you haven't actually had the opportunity to do yet, and that this has moral weight. This may seem strange, so I'd like to explain why it's true: "intending" to do something is a choice to maintain a state of mind more likely to do it, which has a fraction of the moral weight of actually doing it.