The Ethics of Intentionality
This article will be devoted to differentiating between actions which we can call “intentional” and action which we can call “habitual.” This article will consider the usefulness and problems with both kinds of actions. In doing so, we can try to create general rules on when to call upon each kind of action, as well as how to differentiate between the two kinds of actions based on their consequences. The main focus of this article will be the consequence of these different kinds of actions in the area of morality. Prior to that analysis, however, we should start by clarifying what we mean by both “habitual” and “intentional” action. Our primary emphasis when employing both of these terms to describe an action is upon the knowledge that the actor gathers (or tries to gather) prior to taking the action.
When we describe something as an “intentional action,” we mean an actor taking an action based on beliefs about the character of that action. In this case, the actor thinks about the action they are taking before taking it, looking precisely at the moral character of the action and why it might be right or wrong. For instance, prior to saying something, the speaker may think about whether they “should” say it, and, if they decide that saying it is the right thing to do (and if they believe that what they gain from taking the moral action overwhelms any contrary considerations), they then decide to take the action. In this case, the decision to take an action is deeply considered, and thus the decision itself is imprinted upon the actor’s mind. In the case of intentional action, the actor’s appraisal is the deciding reason behind taking the action, and reasons other than those specifically and logically considered by the actor do not factor into the actor’s action. Further, the decision to act involves the decision maker thinking deeply about a pending action, which thus requires yet another action (that of thought).
“Habitual action” is the exact opposite of intentional action. Rather than being based on a deep consideration of an issue, habitual action is based on having done something before. The question of whether to take an action never even enters into the actor’s head; the only thought that the actor needs is that they ought to do something since they have done it before; that is, if they think about the action at all. This has a further consequence: the actor will often not view the action as something they must ever reconsider. With habitual action, the actor takes the action without thinking about it. Since thinking about the action involves an external factor (whether through the general reflection behind any initial action or through thinking about the external consequences that emerge from the habit), without that outside factor, a habitual action will not be reconsidered (which is in direct contrast to an intentional action, which might be further reconsidered). Certainly, the character of a habitual action will never be reconsidered, as the action will never be examined so precisely that each individual element can be discerned from the composite action. An example of this would be someone who brushes their teeth each morning – they do not consider why they do so every time they brush; they simply brush because they had brushed before and they do not reconsider that decision daily or otherwise infringe upon their already established habit.
Most actions do not have such a clear distinction between intentional action on the one hand and habitual action on the other. Indeed, it would be quite impossible for an orthodox intentional action to be pursued at every junction, for that would require someone to constantly ask themselves about every detail of an individual action in judging its rightness. That requirement would eventually cause an infinite (or near-infinite) regression, as more and more questions would have to be asked and answered (in unrealistically rapid succession) as to the rightness of every single element of an action. For example, imagine someone playing a game of chess. When they ask themselves, “Why is moving the pawn a good move?” their movement of the pawn can be deemed intentional, as it is only because of their thoughts about the quality of that move that the actor decides to move the piece. Yet, the actor probably does not think, “Why am I playing chess in the first place?” between every single move, and they certainly do not think something like, “What is desirable about winning as opposed to losing?” or, “What is desirable about a feeling of victory in the first place?” Rather, in moving the pawn, the chess player assumes that it is right for them to move the piece which will likely cause them to win the game. This presumption is likely based on habit, either because they have previously asked the questions we are posing now and they are simply following the answers which they decided were true before, or they never considered these questions in the first place and have simply presumed a goal based on their habitual beliefs. (That being said, there could hypothetically exist actions which are completely intentional. Imagine, for instance, someone has a group of ethical principles which do not fundamentally rest upon habits which they follow, a doctrinaire Kantian, for instance. If they were to completely reconsider their entire ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological system prior to taking a specific action, that action could hypothetically be considered entirely intentional, although an action with those characteristics occurs very rarely, if at all.)
Similarly, just as intentional actions rarely if ever exist without being accompanied by habitual foundations, habitual actions could not coherently exist without some kind of intentional action preceding them. For instance, take the teeth-brushing example from earlier. It is not so much that the actor did not intentionally brush their teeth or that they did not think about any consequences of it, but rather that the endpoint of their limited consideration of the issue was to yield to habit. They still considered the question of, “Should I do x?” and they still used impromptu reasoning to answer this question of action. However, their reasoning involved connecting their situation to their habits, to which they then deferred. For any action, no matter how habitual, several variables (such as the object of the action and the fact that the action had not been done) must first be considered for someone to decide to take that action, except for cases of pure instinct. Even if an action is not deeply considered and is not understood to be the expression of anything other than itself, thoughts stating that the action is good (either in itself or for its intended consequences) are required before such an action is taken. (Again, there is a short caveat to this rule. Some actions, such as breathing, are done by pure instinct, although these kinds of actions rarely take place on the level which we are considering in this article. Very few people will sincerely wonder if breathing or similar purely instinctual action is right or wrong.)
The situations of habitual and intentional action, as previously described, seem to be nearly congruent, in spite of their being used as examples of opposites. Indeed, it would seem that both intentional and habitual action have the same relationship between habit and intentionality. Both start with an intentional action which eventually yields to a habit, at which point the consideration of an action ends. Indeed, the two simply seem to differ by degree: in the action we have described as intentional, there is more distance between the action and the habit than in the action we have described as habitual. Thus, it would be reasonable to amend the original quandary along which this article has been founded. Rather than focusing on an action being either intentional or habitual, we will instead focus on the consideration of an action as being more intentional or habitual. To put it specifically, this question asks where and when we should yield to habit with a given action. Within this is the other question of what the pros and cons of yielding to habit actually are and what is preferable about both intentional and habitual action.
In most cases, yielding to habit is something which probably should not be codified. When considering cases where all that matters is pure success in action, how much power should be given to habit rather than intentional action should probably be based exclusively (or at least mainly) on how much experience someone has, how much thought is required to do a given action correctly, and, generally, whatever will lead to the best consequences. Whether a soldier should base how they shoot on habit or intentional action is not a question anyone can answer other than with reference to that specific soldier – and it is not a question that can be answered with generalizable, objective metrics or really anything that requires much complex consideration. For the sake of this discussion, rather than focusing on actions in which competence causes either success or failure, I would like to focus on actions in which the main determiner of success or failure is not the quality of a given action but rather the perceived quality of such an action.
Actions which take perceived competence as their main focus are not so uncommon as they might seem. Take, for instance, someone giving a charitable donation (or otherwise acting altruistically). The actor’s fundamental goal is to feel (and believe) that they are an example of altruism, which they view as a positive trait. The belief that one is a good and righteous person is (for reasons I have expounded upon in “A Preliminary Philosophy of Morals,” paragraphs 44-46) a viewpoint which we should value quite highly. However, it does not follow from this assertion that we must actually be and act exactly how our moral views tell us to in every situation. It merely follows that we should try to make it so that our own perception of ourselves is that we are moral individuals who follow our own ethics. As the coming discussion of the moral virtues of more intentional or more habitual actions shall display, the tension between trying to seem ethical to ourselves and trying to actually be ethical creates a situation quite different from the non-perceptual assertion.
A commonsense approach to the question of habitual vs intentional action would be to say that people act more intentionally based on the importance of an issue (as well as if they have had enough time to think through that issue). According to this argument, people think more and more deeply about issues which have more of an effect than issues which have less of an effect. The reason they do this, the argument goes, is that more intentional action is more likely to create a situation that they will not regret, whereas more habitual action is significantly easier and takes less time to think about. Thus, areas of very minor regret are areas in which people will yield to habit, simply from a pragmatic perspective, whereas more important areas are ones in which people are more willing to act intentionally. However, this argument, which can be taken as a psychological argument about how people do act or as a moral argument about how they should act, is significantly less reasonable in practice than in theory.
From a psychological perspective, this argument fails to explain most real-world behavior. No definition of “importance” can make the amount of intellectual focus put on people’s viewpoints and actions make any sense at all. On the one hand, people tend to put significantly more intellectual effort into decisions which do not cause much impact than those decisions which do. Take, for instance, the general neurosis surrounding politics: millions of people focus on creating and figuring out how to apply an entire value system, as well as trying to make it reasonable and generally right, each time they are confronted with an action (voting) which has an ~0% of changing the consequence of anything. On the other hand, actions with larger consequences on others, such as actual day-to-day interpersonal interactions, tend to be made in a significantly more habitual manner. It is quite unlikely that a significant percentage of people think about their fundamental ethics when they purchase something from a retail worker – action in these cases tend to be based on a list of habits and rules more than a real case-by-case re-consideration of one’s beliefs.
A broader and perhaps more reasonable description is that actions that have some kind of relationship to more important topics are more intentional than those which don’t have a clear relationship to any important topic. This view would indeed seem to clear up the earlier issue of voting – sure, someone’s vote may not matter, but voting in general does, and thus, their vote in specific makes them seem like they are a righteous person. However, here, too, we arrive at a large roadblock. The importance of charity, according to this assertion, should be objective and equivalent for all. A charitable action which affects the same people in the same way should seem just as righteous to any one person as another. And, thus, people should apply the same level of intentionality to charitable actions. However, empirically, that is certainly not true. It is quite certain that some patrons of a charity focus more on the particular aspects of the charity’s competence than others – and yet, both give to the same charity which affects the same number of people. Indeed, the assertion of relationship-based importance would require us to say that someone giving a million dollars to a charity considers that gift with the same intentionality of someone who gifts that charity five dollars. As such, a psychological route to the commonsense approach is quite unreasonable.
The ethical perspective on the commonsense approach (that one should focus more on what is more important) runs into more pragmatic trouble than the psychological approach, and indeed, the ethical approach seems quite impossible. To decide which actions should be focused on more intentionally would require us to already know which actions are more or less deserving of intentional action. That would require us to know how much import can be attributed to a given action’s consequences. This then requires us to look at the precise consequences of an action. Already, we are forced to look at an action through a mainly intentional lens. As such, we have completely avoided habitual action, and instead we require every single person to look at every single action intentionally before looking at any individual action. That would be extremely unreasonable. A short amendment could be created that would seem to patch up this problem: the amount of intentionality with which we think about something could be based on a group of categorized kinds of action, which would give us an easy, habit-based end to our quandary. However, for this kind of action, we would have to know (from a theoretical point of view) the exact quality and import of each decision in practice. Such a requirement would not just exclude any amount of local knowledge, it would also require us to look at every possible action perfectly – and if any individual part of our moral system changed, we would have no way of knowing if any other action might as well. Therefore, this viewpoint would require us to constantly look at every single belief we have whenever we change our mind about anything, morally speaking, which is quite unreasonable.
Rather, I think this argument (at least the psychological version of it) has the issue exactly backwards. Rather than the importance of an action determining how intentional an action is, it seems that the amount of intentionality with which one takes an action is the source of how much import we attribute to it. Thinking through an action’s consequences is the only internal way (that is, without information coming from the world around us) in which we can realize the existence of those consequences in the first place. Most of the consequences of our actions are opaque and nearly impossible to expect or perceive without thinking about the action itself. Indeed, this seems to explain why actions of charity can be given drastically different levels of importance by different people – some have simply thought more than others about the consequences of giving to a given charity, and thus, they view that charity as doing more or less important things for those around them. Therefore, the attribution of more or less intentional thought to a given action is the attribution of more or less import to that same action.
Giving more or less import to an individual action creates that very action’s morality, at least in the immediate sense. The question of “is what I just did right?” is asked along the lines of, “Does what I just did cause any consequences which are bad, by my morality?” In cases where an actor doesn’t know of consequences which are bad, they do not know whether that action they just did is bad, and thus, their action is not “morally bad” from their perspective. It therefore achieves our desired effect, creating exactly the kind of self-established moral rightness (according to the actor) which we are trying to achieve. This would seem to favor more habitual, uninformed action, as the actor doesn’t know of any of the effects or characteristics of their actions. Indeed, the consequences of a habitual system would seem to constantly lead to the best perceived possible outcomes (no matter the quality of the ethical system), as it would lead us to constantly asserting that, since we followed our rules – rules which we established since we believe them to be the best possible – that all of our actions are the best possible. Indeed, in a mind that is only affected by internal influences (that is, a world in which one’s thoughts are not affected by what occurs in the world around them), this would seem to be the logical outcome, and in such a world, habitual action would seem to be the only reasonable kind of action we can take (from an ethical perspective). However, in the real world, where there are other people who affect our own perspective on things, this simple conception of habitual action is not an accurate one.
Habitual action has two major weaknesses: it causes significant problems for reflections and re-calibrations of moral views, and it is constantly at mercy of external threats posed by seeing the consequences of one’s actions. First, let us focus on reflecting upon our actions. As time passes, our goals necessarily change, and one will necessarily (at some point) have to re-calibrate our morality. Without this re-calibration, we would constantly be trying to achieve undesirable goals using undesirable methods that are outdated for our current selves, since we are now quite different in character from our past selves. (For more on this, I would refer the reader to “A Preliminary Philosophy of Morals,” paragraph 25.) This occasional re-calibration is not simply needed for our morality; it is needed for our every desire. It is especially needed when comparing different forms of desire, for instance, “I want to be happy,” vs. “I want to feel like a good person.” Thus, if we never re-calibrate the ethics-side of our actions, we will never be able to re-calibrate any of our habitual actions, and our actions will become increasingly undesirable. However, if we consider our actions and the value of them in a more introspective way than mere habit (as we must when our desires change underneath our feet), then we must consider the actual moral quality of our actions, and whether they do actually help others. And, alas, the lies which we had told ourselves (or had avoided telling ourselves) about the actions we had been taking beforehand all collapse like a house of cards when we remember them in detail. Suddenly, when we consider our flawed actions, we are considering hundreds of them at once, and, as we had not previously considered them at the time, we had not changed our actions after any of them! Thus, re-calibration becomes extremely undesirable and a quite negative experience in-itself, something which can be overwhelming to an extent that any individual action cannot conceivably be. And, so, all of the “good person”-ness which we had thrust upon ourselves dissipates – and right at the time it was most important, too (as described in paragraphs 44-46 of “A Preliminary Philosophy of Morals”).
The second weakness of habitual action, that of external threats, is one which applies in a significantly less universal way than the first (although with a similar consequence). When someone does something morally wrong based on a habitual ethics, they do not seem to themselves to have acted poorly. They simply see themselves as having acted as their ethics tell them to. However, other people do not necessarily see it that way, particularly those people who are affected by that very same action. To someone else, an action which may seem benign to the actor could have a very large effect. That effect is not disruptive in cases in which the affected person does not come into contact with the actor. However, it may be substantially more disruptive when the actor can see the effects of their action on others. In that case, a wrench is thrown into the actor’s entire view of right and wrong. Somehow the actor must recognize that their actions (or lack thereof) have led to less-than-desirable results, and sometimes they must even recognize that their actions have harmed another person! If so, they must suddenly realize that their action in this case was wrong. And if their action in this case was wrong, they can presume that similar habitual actions in previous cases were equally wrong. Indeed, since they did not learn this lesson after the first or second instance, they must now perceive their many previous actions which were wrong. And so, the house of cards collapses and the entire ethical edifice which the actor has built up is revealed to have been merely an elaborate artifice.
However, neither of these vulnerabilities underlying habitual action require us to completely reject it in all circumstances. Indeed, based on these considerations, habitual action is actually quite useful in some situations. With respect to the first weakness, the main problem with habitual action was that we could realize it had been poorly considered and its intended consequences were not what we now wished them to be. With respect to the second weakness, we could realize that our actions’ consequences were not what we actually intended. In both cases, the main problem involves a disconnect with reality. And yet, much of what we do has nothing to do with “reality.” With many of the people that we interact with, we can safely assume that we will never actually see the consequences of that interaction. Certainly, we will never be able to see or guess at least some of the consequences of our actions. When that is the case, it might be extremely reasonable for us to act as if these consequences do not exist, and thus to follow the habitual model. Even if it does not lead to the best possible consequences, it certainly would seem to, and that would be enough to allow us to feel ethical. The house of cards we had built would remain just as artificial; however, there would be no pressure bearing upon it to make it fall. (As a quick sidenote: This portion of the theory should not be adopted without giving significant thought to its pragmatic applications. Many actions have consequences that are unpredictable, and people often exist in a closed loop. Prudence is important when deciding what will and will not be considered in the future. The question of how much prudence depends on how perceptive one is, as well as the quality of one’s memory.)
The second important application of habitual actions involves cases in which the focus is not on the consequences of an action but on its intrinsic moral character as an action. This occurs when an action has elements that are morally objectionable (or which would make someone feel as if they have done something morally bad because parts of the action in-itself seems offensive), yet the action as a whole either does not have tangibly negative effects or in fact has tangibly positive effects. In these cases, as discussed earlier, an act becomes cognizable not through its constituent parts but rather through its characteristics as a whole. This is because the taking of a habitual action is seen not as “I shall do x, causing y,” but rather as simply, “I shall do y,” as the intermediate steps are not considered in-depth. Consider our earlier teeth-brushing example. The actor doesn’t think, “I will now put toothpaste on a toothbrush, and then I will brush my teeth with that toothbrush”; rather, they simply think, “I will brush my teeth,” and thus, even if putting toothpaste on a toothbrush is a terrible, evil action, the brusher doesn’t think about it as an action, merely as a part of one. Thus, actions which are positive overall but may require morally questionable steps are better served by habitual action than intentional action, as they avoid having to deal with those moral quandaries.
However, in cases in which an actor’s action involves possibly negative consequences which they might perceive, the action should be done intentionally. First of all, actions done intentionally are more prone to reevaluation and change and consequently to becoming more positive and less harmful over time. Thus, intentional action allows us to avoid and decrease the number of negative actions we see ourselves doing, as well as decreasing the number of disagreements between our expectation of what our “right” action will cause and what our “right” action does in fact cause in reality. Secondly, and more importantly, intentional action allows for people to see their mistakes one at a time rather than all at once. With intentional action, doing something wrong does not involve the realization such an avalanche of mistakes as it does when we follow our habits. Rather, someone who makes an single wrongheaded action can do many things to mitigate the effects of that individual action on their view of themselves – avoid thinking about it, change their behavior based upon it, decrease the extremity of its negative results, and so on – which someone who habitually followed a rule into frequent and repeated failure cannot. Thus, even an incorrect action taken intentionally can be either neutral or barely negative, while a negative habit can lead to extremely undesirable and disastrous consequences.
Thus, we have arrived at a group of ethical rules to follow, broadly speaking. However, we then must ask ourselves how we actually implement these rules in the real world. How can we tell if an action should be taken more “intentionally” or “habitually”? I would argue that this evaluation should be conducted in the same manner as the revised commonsense approach from earlier. We should act first to categorize different decisions before we decide how to go about solving them. For each individual action, we should first ask if our concerns about it are caused by its intermediate parts or its possible consequences. If our hesitation to take a good action is due to intermediate parts, we should immediately refer the case to habitual rules that we can follow generally. If our concerns relate to the action’s possible consequences, we should then ask ourselves a second question: do we expect that we may possibly come into contact with the consequences of the action? If a prudential consideration of the question tells us that we certainly will not, then we should again implement the action by adopting an appropriate set of habitual rules. On the other hand, if at that point we think that we might perceive the consequences of an action in the future, then we should consider the action through a mostly intentional path, stopping the analysis only when we get to some kind of habitual rule that can apply equally to all or nearly all actions (“I should try to create the most happiness,” as an example). We should focus on trying to get to universal rules, as our major, universally applicable beliefs tend to be more precise, rational, and better considered than our beliefs about individual actions, simply because most people spend more time considering how they should act in general than how they should act in a specific situation.
And so, we finally have a full answer to our question of how and when to prioritize intentional or habitual action. To recapitulate the practical lessons of this article without jargon: When thinking about how to act, we should first ask ourselves how much we should think about possible choices. If an action causes positive consequences but requires us to do something that we find morally difficult for us to achieve that consequences, then we should ask ourselves what we have usually done before, and we should do that. If we find that there are no morally difficult things that we have to do to achieve the consequences we want, then we should ask ourselves if there is a reasonable possibility that we will see the consequences of our action. If we say no to that, then we should again act based on how we have acted before. However, if we can envision the possibility of seeing the consequences of our actions, then we should act more cautiously about acting. We should continually ask ourselves why we should do a given action until we arrive at some kind of belief that can be applied more generally to most actions. At that point, if the action we want to do is right according to that belief, then we should do it. If not, we should not.
Only through mixing intentional and habitual action can we put ourselves in a situation to achieve the positive aspects of both.
