Book

Intention and Wrongdoing: In Defense of Double Effect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

The principle of double effect (PDE) is an important and controversial ethical principle. It says that there is a strict constraint against bringing about serious harm to the innocent intentionally, either as an end or a means, but that it is sometimes morally permissible to bring about harm as a non-intended side effect. For example, many people believe that in fighting a just war it is sometimes permissible to cause harm to noncombatants as a side effect of destroying military targets, though it is wrong deliberately to attack noncombatants in order to help procure victory. The PDE plays an important role in just war theory and international humanitarian law, and in the twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot invoked it as a way of resisting consequentialism. However, many moral philosophers regard the principle with hostility or suspicion. In the face of the emerging philosophical orthodoxy, this book aims to provide a comprehensive defense of the PDE. I situate the principle within a region of morality structured around the concept of human solidarity and I respond to the major objections that have been raised to it. 

Intention and Wrongdoing makes three contributions to the philosophical literature. First, it extends the recent revival of interest in Anscombe and Foot into an area where their contributions have not been thoroughly explored. Most of the recent work on Anscombe has focused on her seminal monograph, Intention. Yet one of the main reasons Anscombe wanted to get clear about the notions of intention and intentional action was her belief that these concepts have a central place in normative ethics. And while Foot’s theory of moral goodness as a form of natural goodness has been widely studied, her ideas about how specific nonconsequentialist features of common-sense morality should be ethically grounded have received less attention.

Second, the book illustrates the significance of the philosophy of action for normative ethics. I elucidate an Anscombian account of intentional action and practical reasoning and I argue that this account can be used to respond to objections to the PDE, such as the complaint that it is difficult to see why an agent’s intentions in acting should make a difference to the moral status of her bodily actions and the objection that the PDE requires deliberating agents to focus their attention on their own intentions rather than on features of their environment. I also argue that other objections to the PDE can be met by drawing on Robert Audi’s notion of conduct, where an agent’s conduct does not consist merely in her instantiating an act-type but is three-dimensional: it is an agent’s doing something in a certain manner and for a certain reason (or set of reasons) or with a certain intention (or intentions).

Finally, my book makes a contribution to the growing literature at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science. One of the leading theoretical frameworks of contemporary moral psychology is Joshua Greene’s dual-process theory of moral judgment. Greene claims that moral psychology has implications for normative ethics; in particular, he believes that empirical findings cast suspicion on deontological moral philosophy. I argue, however, that my rationale for the PDE provides a way of overcoming Greene’s deontological debunking argument in relation to the constraint against intentional harm.