More About the Limits of Intentions

In my previous post, I posed the question whether a well-intentioned albeit ignorant individual is acting morally when he gives his friends gifts that violate their religious beliefs.

Maybe we could say that every person has a duty to be reasonably educated about the things that are morally offensive to others.  Therefore, if I have knowledge that my friend is a devout Muslim, then it is incumbent upon me not to violate a religious taboo that he holds sacrosanct.

However, imagine that I buy a samurai sword for my friend, who always wanted to own one.  My intention is wholly good: I just want to make her happy.   Completely unbeknownst to me, however, my friend is struggling with mental illness, and she uses that particular sword to commit suicide.  

In this case, it's not an issue of education.  I could not have reasonably known that my friend was suicidal.  You might say that I have a duty not to give people weapons that can do harm, but what if I gave someone a chemistry set or a kitchen instrument?

These scenarios illustrate why I'm skeptical about intentions.  It is certainly true that sometimes our intentions bring about the consequences that we desire, but life is much too complicated for that.


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Mr. Bumbles and The Limits of Intentions

Many people like to think that their intentions matter.   If you buy someone a gift that they might not end up liking, it's "the thought that counts."

How much do intentions really matter, though?  Let's imagine a person named Mr. Bumbles.  Mr. Bumbles is an extremely well-intentioned albeit ignorant person.

Mr. Bumbles loves wine, pork, and beef, and has three friends who are religiously observant, a Muslim, a Jew, and a Hindu.  When he's invited to dinner at his friends' respective houses, he gives a bottle of wine to the Muslim, a package of pork rinds to the Jew, and a box of beef jerky to the Hindu.

Suffice it to say, these gifts are just a tad problematic.  Is Mr. Bumbles acting amorally by giving these gifts even though his intentions were good?

White Privilege Redux

Here's an interesting rejoinder to use when someone tries to lecture you about white privilege:

According to the CDC, whites are 20 times more likely than African-Americans to get skin cancer, the most common form of cancer in the world.

They might claim that you're missing the point, but so are they.

Any physical attribute that one receives at birth can be both a blessing and a curse.  No one attribute gives someone an absolute advantage over others who lack that attribute.  

Most critical race theorists claim that they're talking about a net advantage in society that the group in power enjoys.  In the United States at least, you are usually exempt from many types of discrimination if you are white.  However, other minority groups such as Chinese-Americans share many of these same privileges.  For example, most Chinese-Americans need not worry about being surveilled in convenience stores, brutalized by police, or suspected of having benefited from affirmative action.

Critical race theorists often claim that whites have "adopted" Asians as a model minority and somehow given them the same privileges that they enjoy.  Does this claim stand up to logic though?  As some researchers point out, different Asian groups have different levels of status in American society.  Chinese-Americans tend to be more successful in the U.S. than many groups of Southeast Asians, for example.     Why would whites arbitrarily  only "adopt" some Asian groups and not others?   Is there a good reason to adopt the Chinese but not Thais and Vietnamese? If this is a systematic effort by the white majority to somehow pit groups against each other, then why wouldn't they allow Chinese-Americans to become one of them, just as they "allowed" the Irish, Italians, and Jews?

If critical race theorists believe that "Asian" is an unfair descriptor of ethnicity, then they ought to be consistent and say that so is "white."  Do the Uighur minority of Western China, who are literally Caucasian, benefit from white privilege?

Is God All-Good? An Ethical Examination

I have no beef with religion, but my interest in ethics leads me to an exploration of the virtues of the Judeo-Christian Old Testament God.   

The Judeo-Christian God is presumed to be all-good, a moral agent who does no evil even if He permits it to happen when He otherwise could have averted it.  Let us assume that the Bible is a literal account of God's actions.

It has often been observed that the God of the Old Testament has a short temper and often kills needlessly.  For example, God is guilty of infanticide in the Book of Exodus when he carries out the Tenth Plague, which kills all first-born Egyptian children, most if not all of whom have no moral responsibility in the enslavement of the Jews.God is clearly not following one of the cardinal commandments that He expects humans to abide by: "Thou shalt not kill."  As the lawmaker and lawgiver, is God above his own commandments?  How could God still be a moral agent and not follow his own commandments?  Let us give Him the benefit of the doubt and assume that He is a consequentialist.


The idea of consequentialism is that an action is moral if and only if it produces consequences that maximize some conception of the good.  When God caused the Great Flood, He wiped out the vast majority of humanity, the wicked 99.9%, so that the virtuous would remain and propagate their own kind.  I will grant that this action could be viewed through a consequentialist prism and deemed morally acceptable.  Perhaps it was necessary to smite the wicked in order to maximize overall utility?   Maybe everyone else at the time was simply bad to the bone.


It's much harder to give God the benefit of the doubt knowing that He killed innocent or morally neutral agents in order to punish an unjust regime.  Again, perhaps the liberation of the Jews had such a powerful knock-on effect that it maximized utility throughout the entire Levant, but this is doubtful.If God does not abide by His own rule-based ethic and can scarcely be called a consequentialist,  then is He really all-Good?

Agreeing and Disagreeing on Justice

In the college reading course that I taught last semester, I introduced students to the two types of justice, retributive and distributive.  

Retributive justice is the issue of how crimes should be punished. In order to illustrate this, I used the Code of Hammurabi, which is where at least some of our notions of proportional punishment ("an eye for an eye") come from.  Notwithstanding the absences of gender and class equity in the code, this document puts forth the ideas, still widely accepted in many parts of the world, that a murderer should receive the death penalty and that a thief should have his hand cut off.  

It's interesting to note that conceptions of retributive justice are still highly controversial between different cultures and even individuals within the same culture.  Western Europe has banned capital punishment, and many Europeans believe that the United States is barbaric for still permitting it.  Americans generally find it repulsive that Saudi Arabia permits public stonings.  Within the United States, Southern states tend to condone varieties of the death penalty that appall people in the North.  

In contrast to retributive justice, distributive justice is the issue of how a society allocates goods to its members.  In today's world, even countries that are nominally Communist or socialist allow some degree of inequality among members of society, and generally speaking, Scandinavian countries permit less inequality than is present in many Mediterranean countries, which permit a lot less inequality than the United States does.  Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement (even among the 1%) that it's simply not fair for income inequality to approach the levels that it has in the world's two largest economies, China and the United States.  The world's two largest religions, Christianity and Islam, are partly founded upon and strongly committed to the idea of social justice, including some form of redistribution ensuring that the poor are not left behind.  

So, it's noteworthy that people are in complete disagreement about how to (or even whether to) punish a certain kind of crime, and relative agreement about the need to reverse the trend of income inequality.  Why is this?  We're willing to tolerate discussing a fairly wide range of potential punishments for those who we feel are morally undeserving, but we're less willing to neglect those whom we feel are innocent.  

A Moral Dilemma

A Schema of Privileges

In the spirit of the new year and counting blessings, I've created a schema of "privileges" that people may enjoy in life.  It's divided into four quadrants.

1: forfeitable and intrinsic (endowments):  things that are part of your identity, which can be lost or given up

2.  forfeitable and extrinsic  (blessings) : things that are not part of your identity, which can be lost or given up

3. nonforfeitable and intrinsic (immunities): things that are part of you that cannot be lost or given up, which often advantage you in terms of not being discriminated against

4.  nonforfeitable and extrinsic (rights): things that are not part of your identity, which cannot be lost or given up


Endowments: beauty, able-bodiedness
Blessings:  shelter, family love
Immunities: whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality
Rights: education, birthright