Ethical Subjectivism: Part 3

Judgement, Motive, Intention and Act

Much has been made of the connection between moral judgment and action. It is usually held in traditional philosophy that the making of moral judgments immediately compels action. There is something about an 'ought' that is supposedly more than a mere 'should;' an order or imperative, not just a recommendation. Most moral philosophers feel the need when laying down an 'ought' to go out and do what is prescribed or not do what is proscribed.
 

I believe such views are erroneous. I take it that judgement is more like a 'should' than that traditonal 'ought,' a recommendation to oneself. If the moral agent acts according to the judgement, we can attribute the appropriate moral value to the act: 'he did a good (the right) thing' or 'he did a bad (the wrong) thing.'  Moral judgements set up a Moral Universe of possible outcomes, but they do not compel behavior. In other words, I separate the creation of moral value from its implementation. Value and act are connected by motive and intention, which may or may not have ethical overtones.
 

Josef Stalin, for example, was born in Russian Georgia and spent time in a monastery where he was educated in the practices and theology of the Russian Orthodox church. He was well aware of the usual Christian commandments and moral injunctions. Nonetheless, when he became dictator of the Soviet Union, he ordered thousands of immoral acts, and was involved in the murder of millions of Russians. So it appears that Stalin was aware of one set of ethical standards which prohibited his behavior, but did not observe them. He actually applied another set of standards, probably a combination of principles including the 'end justifies the means' and various Marxist-Leninist doctrines, all of which come down to "I'm the Boss!" Stalin seems to have been primarilly motivated by megalomania, so adjusted his moral maxims from time to time according to what was necessary for political survival. Thus, during World War II, he portrayed himself as the patriotic Russian leader, but at other times put on the many masks of Stalinism, a cult of personality.

Stalin illustrates the fact that people are always making moral judgments they do not carry out. There is a disconnection between moral judgment and what people do. If that were not so, criminal behavior would become impossible as soon as the would-be criminal was apprised of right moral judgement. To hold that moral judgement is in itself motivating is similar to beliefs expressed in vampire and horror movies, such as a silver bullet kills the undead or a Christian cross (garlic, etc) wards off evil. What we believe is good or evil, right or wrong, is one thing; what we do is quite another. In short, hypocrisy is the normal condition of human morality.
 

Perhaps the correct use of 'judgement' is only a matter of words. Judgement could be taken as the commitment to act; i.e., the decision to do something. In that case, there still remains a moral reference, the value underlying the decision. I prefer to divide up morality in a different way, using 'judgement' in another of its senses; viz., the assignment of value. This sense of judgement is similar to the establishment of law or declaration of a higher Court which sets the meaning and application of a law. In this useage, execution is the carrying out of judgement. It is usual to think of judgement as the cause of execution, which is to establish a mechanical and logical connection between them. It is this connection which suggests confounding the decision and the act in one word, :"judgement."
 

There are several components to a moral event. There are moral judgements, which I interpret as the decisions made about applying values: 'this is right,' 'that is wrong,' etc. There are decisions to act; that is, engaging the process which results in doing or not doing something. There are intentions leading to that decision; that is, a conception of the situation which connects doing this to accomplishing that. There are motives which energize the decision to act; i.e., action begins with motivation. Finally there is the act itself, which has an arbitary beginning and end. As I understand ethical behavior, neither motives nor intentions nor acts are of themselves moral unless moral judgement assigns value(s) to those elements. Because most of the behavior of those suspected of having moral capabilities is automatic or amoral, moral behavior is actually hard to find.

What is an act is the same sort of question as what is a fact. My answer is that facts are imbedded in theories. They are the molecules from which humanly made stories are concocted. Facts do not exist anywhere except in our minds; i.e., they are what we make of our experience. It is the same with acts, which are one kind of fact. Acts are what people do. They take many forms, but they always involve an intelligent agent who is also aware of what is done. In this technical sense, acts are not performances or utterances or any other behavior which is not voluntary. Acts are knowingly chosen. If, as happens to me a lot these days, I run to the bathroom, I am driven by my physical condition and toilet training. The same is true of eating, sleeping and all the other behavior demanded by our bodies. These are not acts because they are not voluntary, certainly not in the moral sense, even if we have a certain amount of control over the time, place and manner of fulfilling our needs. (When writing about ethics, I prefer to call them behavior or performances or something else, not acts, to avoid confusion.) On the other hand,. if I decide to contribute to a charity or drive so as to endanger, donating or driving are probably significant acts.

What is an act depends on one's perspective. Each observer delimits it in a uniquely personal way. That variation has been shown in studies of eye witnesses who tell different stories of the same event at different times. Eye witnesses are unreliable because they are not passive cameras making a record  of what happened. Instead, human witnesses interpret the event from the moment its starts until an arbitrary time considered the end. Witnesses differ about when an event starts and ends, and about most details of the event. When multiple witnesses to an event are examined in Court, clever lawyers try to bring out the version of the story that favors their clients while casting doubt on the version favored by the opposing counsel. The Court is supposed to find the truth - what is held in common - by weighing different stories, or by deciding what must be true or false. In order to make such a legal judgement, the Court must rely on theories of human nature as well as physical reality to determine the facts. In science, experimental repetition and verification are used to reduce the varying reports of observers to a lowest common denominator. Those procedures of the Courts and the sciences are intended to overcome the inaccuracies of witnesses.
 

What defines an act is intention in the actor or the pattern perception in observers. As already stated, different observers apparently have quite different perceptions of an act as suggested by their different accounts of it. The actor's view of what is done is again altogether different, conditioned by the actor's intentions; i.e., the act involves the actor's plan. Quite apart from any moral content, the actor does something which is the result of an internal process: the intention. In order to eat, I must have a conception of the world in which food becomes available before I eat it. Eating lunch may require a series of steps of food acquisition leading up to eating, each of which could be considered a separate act, or the entire process could be seen as an indivisible, single act of eating lunch. However the details are conceived, an intention is a plan for carrying out an activity.

Motives are what cause intentions to go forward. Motives are the energy feeding into intentions which culminates in an act. In humans, motives are usually emotional, hormonal or, generally, physiological. There are a few occasions when people are motivated by so-called rational decisions. Recent brain research has identified more and more occasions of "free will" as events in the brain. The importance of that research is that decisions are often made in processes unknown to the agent; i.e., we do things unconsciously. It is only later, during or after the act, that we become aware of our decisions. Our monitoring process - our consciousness - deceives itself by time-stamping the decision and act, and then remembering the decision as something done consciously. Associating the decision with a subsequent act suggests the causal relation, 'I did it.' Our brains are very good at inventing patterns, especially causal patterns (probably because that favored survival), one of which is a hypothetical "me." So, most of the time,  the explanation that "I did it" is ex post facto,  a delusion or invention of the brain that I decided to do something in the sense of making a voluntary choice. In fact, most of the time, there is no voluntary choice, even if there is an intelligent choice among alternatives. The reductionism supported by ongoing brain research need not be the mechanical Newtonian sort; brain choices are possible in the same way that computers can make choices. Both of them rely on programs (software) that evaluate data and select a path (branch) accordingly.
 

I can attest to the unconscious making of decisions in my daily life. I have found myself washing dishes or cleaning the fish tank without ever having made a conscious decision to do those chores. I believe I have thought about the things I end up doing beforehand, but only passively. I never have a discussion about washing dishes; it just happens, even when I expect to set myself to some other task. On the other hand, I found it takes a conscious, forceful decision to get up from the couch late in the evening, rather than sleep, and take my pills, brush my teeth, etc. Those are things which I know I have to do and which I do not dislike doing, but which are sometimes hard to do. I have no idea what motivates me to wash the dishes, but I do know why I take my pills. The fact that I, and I suppose most people, are aware of the reasons for doing some things makes "rational" decisions more easily examined and discussed. But that does not illuminate in any way all those other acts which just happen, motivated by the unknown workings or our bodies and brains.
 

Motives are sometimes rational, despite science chipping away at what is "rational." By rational, I mean consciously reasoned. Moral judgements fall in this domain, if they have any existence and validity at all. Moral judgements are embodied in voluntary choice; they are a framework within which a motive might be selected. Thus, 'I did it because it was the right thing to do.' For such a report to be meaningful, there had to be a prior commitment to what is right which was applicable to the situation at hand. The commitment need not have been made in the remote past; it might be the result of immediate consideration. In rendering the dichotomy between what is moral and what not, it should be clear that unthinking dish washing is not a moral act. But those are the simple cases; there are much more difficult problems about what makes a voluntary choice moral.
 

Things have already got complex. As outlined above, there are 5 parts to a moral event: moral judgement, the decision to act, intention, motive and the act itself.  The first two parts of a moral event involve the notion of voluntary choice, but intention, motive and act are not inherently voluntary; i.e., we may treat intention, motive and act as amoral sub-systems capable of taking on moral characters and objectives. The critical  part of a moral event that makes it so is voluntary choice, which is found in moral judgement and the decision to act. A large amount of human behavior is directly controlled by neurological and physiological processes in which there is no immediate, overt conscious involvement. To the extent that moral agents perform involuntary acts, they are amoral. (However, we have to allow for the case in which moral events appear to be amoral as a result of learned behavior; i.e., of previous judgements.) So, in this ethical theory, moral judgement is always a matter of oversight, of superceding what the body would otherwise do. The important thing is identifying what we can and cannot control.
 

One long running philosophical dispute is about intentionality. I confess to being mystified by the wierd cases and arcane analyses philosophers drag into the foray, because I believe intentionality is best explained scientifically as a biological phenomenon. I think intentionality is closely associated with, or possibly the same as, our ability to discover patterns of experience; i.e., pattern recognition. I do not claim to know how our brains develop patterns, but it does seem pattern recognition is a central performance of neural systems in most animals. What we think of as "cause and effect" is essentially a reckoning that a certain type of pattern exists: this, then that. Most animals seem to have some sort of ability to recognize causal relations, which is advantageous to their survival. Implicit in causal relations is an ordering which we call time, but not all patterns involve time. When we reflect on the patterns flitting about our neural cortex, the ones not ordered by time seem ethereal, permanent; i.e., they are like concepts. The notions of set and class come down to identifying a pattern, as in x is a member of X, or x belongs to X. The simple act of instantiation involves pattern recognition. The foregoing are examples, perhaps cases, of pattern recognition, all of which have in common  the collection and ordering of observations. Intentionality begins with pattern recognition, and then zeroes in on part of the pattern that will become the aim or goal of an act.
 

When a hungry predatory cat sees a herd of wildebeest or gazelles, it first identifies the bodies as a herd and then sorts out possible victims. The selection of meat for dinner involves a specific kind of pattern recognition. Making a selection is motivated by hunger, and becomes an intention when a target is found that will satisfy and a plan is formed to acquire the target. The intention is the focal point of motive and plan. Intentions trigger the mechanisms which put plans into action: when a satisfactory target is found, the hungry cat's usual methods of hunting will begin. What confuses the explication of intention is the internal feedback loops that must be involved. In the case of hunting dinner, using pattern recognition the cat must evaluate whether there is a meal to be had, and also evaluate known plans of attack to secure proposed meals. A double filter is involved which acts like a combination lock: when the output is correct, the action mechanism is tripped. The intention is the lock-on, the fixing of attention on a target. Since, at least in the case of predators, that fixation is a fleeting moment, we may doubt the existence of intention or question how it operates.

Nonetheless, there is nothing at all mysterious about it since we humans use the same princples of operation in designing automatic equipment. For example, video processing is used on  production lines to identify and line up assemblies, which are then targetted for specific actions. Automobile production lines use robots which can be said to intend welding here or there. Electronics production lines use exactly the same methods to make complex circuit boards, mounting chips and components by repeated application of search, align and satisfy.  My claim is that human intentionality is not that much different from these mechancial and biological examples. Further, this explication of intentionality removes the "moral" component from it. Again, intentions are not the sine qua non of morality.

The forming of an intention of some sort precedes an act; i.e., intentions are "internal" states of the actor. We can sometimes observe intentions, as in cases where the actor's head turns or the gaze fixes on some object. There are other intentions which give us no clue until the act occurs, as when an ill person suddenly coughs or someone makes a gratuitous comment. Yet other appearances suggest to us an intention is brewing, but we don't know exactly what will happen. The main reason for thinking there are any intentions at all is that we, intelligent agents, apparently have them. People explain their behavior by saying, "I intended to do X," but the offered explanation may not be truthful. Even the actor may not be fully aware of what was intended. Despite inadequate self-knowledge, we project ourselves onto the external world. We attribute intentionality to other things that act; usually animals, but not plants. (Having a complicated brain seems a prerequisite of intentionality.) The assumption of intention in other beings like ourselves is closely associated with the notion that others are free agents; i.e., that they have a will. I think that assumption is an error.

Intentionality is made a difficult subject by confusing it with choice. There are decisions to act and moral judgements, which are the locus of choice, whether voluntary or not. Intentions are targets, directions or trends, not choices. If one looks at a map posted on the wall, one might select a point - mentally mark it - but not actually put a sticker there or do anything else about it. Intentions are a projection of a pattern, the end of a causal connection.

I think we must make intention subjective, or at most something going on "in" the actor even when objective clues are present, for otherwise we would have to posit the existence of values or forces in the external world that act on us. If intentions were a feature of the objective (real) world, physical agents would be mere puppets. Of course, in a world of spirits and ghosts-in-machines, such a view of intentionality maybe makes more sense.

Considering all of the foregoing as a physiological system, what we have is a complex interaction of different bodily subsystems. Actions observable by others are carried out by the muscles and skelton of the body, under the guidance of the neural system. There are other actions internal to the actor, such as a beating heart, breathing lungs and metabolic processes, which are only indirectly controlled by the nervous system. Actions are generally of two types: voluntary or involuntary. Involuntary actions happen without any direct, conscious supervision of the neural cortex, although they may be subject to cortical oversight; e.g., we usually breathe without thinking about it, but we have the ability to hyperventilate or hold our breath by choice. Actions are driven by many different kinds of motives. We are motivated by hunger, fatigue, full bladders and bowels, sex hormones and hundreds of other biological signals. We are also motivated by "reasons," which are generated by evaluative processes in the brain, some of which are involved with moral judgement while others are the result of desires; e.g., most of us want to live and do good. Many of our motives are directly linked ("hard wired") to action, so they don't go through the brain's analytical and pattern recognition mechanisms; e.g., the demand for sugar and protein is directly mediated by interactions among  the various food processing and distribution organs (stomach, intestines, liver, kidney, pancreas, spleen, blood, etc). We are aware of being well fed or hungry, but all the things that happen to food in our bodies is not usually brought to our conscious attention unless something goes radically wrong.

When the brain gets involved in what we do, intentions appear as the result of analysis that often involves pattern recognition. Intentions are targets, the focal point of a pattern. The sort of focussing that we call intention can result from motivation, but those are two different things. Our gonads distribute sex hormones, urging us into some some sort of sexual activity, which has the effect of our brain picking out sexual objects in our perceptions. Sex objects are detected by sight, sound, touch, smell and taste, as well as by more complicated clues. Out of these perceptions, our brains determine the presence of sex objects due to the urgings of our hormonal system; i.e., the hormones act as a trigger for loading sex programs in our neural circuits. Our sexual "drives," in the psychological usage, are motives for brain activity, which may result in selecting a target; i.e., developing an intention. Motives are the beginning of the process of selection which ends in intentions. When the brain decides to implement the intention, the act follows.
 

It is obvious to me that intentions and decisions are disconnected from motives and acts; i.e., we have four different kinds of things. (Moral judgement is a fifth kind of thing.). The subjective evidence for this position rests on the degeneration of my nerves caused by diabetes.  I can get cut in several places without noticing it. (This is a major danger for diabetics, as it may result in infection and amputation.) My body will go about its business in clotting the bleeding and attempting repairs, all without my noticing it. Since my nerves are ruined, whatever happened may as well have occurred in a tree or rock. If, however, the injury comes to my attention - for example, if I happen to notice blood on my hands or feet - then I might decide to do something about it. Whether I do something about the injury depends on my recognizing it, which does not always happen instantly and automatically. The other day, I had a small  blotch of blood on my face, possibly the result of shaving or scratching an itch. While I saw the spot of blood, I didn't know "what it was" and, so, did nothing about it. It was just there. I took most of the day before I understood that I had a bleeding spot on my face, and then I treated it. I was able to reecognize the pattern - bleeding - and my body went about clotting it. But, no activity resulted from the observation until, somehow, I recognized the bleeding as an injury. That recognition brought into play various strategies for treating the wound. In order to clean and disinfect the area, I had to be motivated by a conscious decision to do so, based oin my desire to live. That is, in this case, intentions toggled self-protection programs. This example shows that we have multiple feedback loops among the various bodily parts, so it is hard to distinguish intention, motive and act. Nonetheless, intention, at least for me, seems to form as a result of pattern recognition, and action  followed only when coupled with some sort of motive.

As I see it, what my accounting leaves as mysterious is the making of decisions, which come by two methods, voluntary and involuntary, in two classes, moral and amoral. Moral judgements (decisions) are, in this ethical theory, always voluntary. Why is decision-making a separate process from pattern recognition, intentions or motives? I think the answer is simple enough, at least in the voluntary case: we may do or not do what is intended. I could be strongly motivated to seek the sexual favors of a nearby sexual object, but choose to do nothing about it. I could feel hungry, but not eat. My hunger may bring to mind the various delights arrayed before me - ice cream, cake and candies, not to mention healthier alternatives.- as targets of my hunger, but I may defeat an intention to gorge on sweets and actually eat a salad. The attraction of a giant ice cream sundae with all the fixings will disappear as soon as my stomach is filled enough stuff. Except for compulsuive eaters, our bodies shut off the motivation when we are satiated, which effectively moves the pattern recognition and target selection processes into storage for the duration. (Our attention is diverted by other needs to more pressing concerns, so we forget about that luscious feast.) It's not that the intention to enjoy an ice cream sundae has gone away, it just not important right now. Of course, that intention might be modified by our eventual choice of rabbit food, so, when it is revived, it will be less prominent. In the same way, involuntary decisions may be modified by learning from experience; voluntary decisions may override or modify initial, unthinking responses. As I found out, we can teach ouselves not to smoke (despite the desire) and not to eat (despite previous intentions). While learning is not always effective, it does change seemingly involuntary (habitual) behavior in many cases. For almost everyone, learning does not change those involuntary behaviors such as breathing which are hard-wired features of our bodies; i.e., many of the motive-intention-act circuits and their monitors and feedback loops are rarely or never brought to conscious attention, so are beyond voluntary control. To the extent that such behavioral patterns can be changed, it is usually and only because of physical change; e..g., injury, surgery or phases of life (as in sexual behavior or diet changing with age).
 

But not even decisions are mysterious. Those familiar with machines will appreciate that decisions can be made automatically by mechnical or electrical arrangements. Recent automatic transmissions, such as the one in our Toyota Prius, are capable of smooth and sensitive up- and down-shifting, depending on multiple factors. Computers are critically involved in that transmission, and in the anti-skid and anti-sway features of most new cars. Hundreds of sensors throughout modern vehicles sense velocity, acceleration, tire slippage, engine loading, vibration and damping, temperature and many other conditions. A well designed computer program takes all those measurements into account when deciding how to handle the vehicle in real time, usually making better decisions than all but the most expert human drivers. Similarly, chess programs now routinely beat Grandmasters, and do so while manipulating their robot familiars who sit in chairs opposite the human players and move the pieces. Japanese chess players can even have the luxury of a robot with some conversational abilities to keep them company during the tedious wait for an opponent's move. All of the decisions involved in driving and chess are made by using programmed models which suggest possible moves; i.e., the computer has intentions and selects among them. One of those intentions is selected - that is the decision - and implemented by triggering an actuator. The connection between decision and actuator - the signal or trigger - is implemented as a piece of hard wiring connected to the instruction processor; i.e., what is commony known as a switch. All that a decision instruction has to do is enable or disable the switch; the rest is taken care of by the actuator. In simple animals such as nematodes, we can trace the reflex arcs from start to finish. Human decisions may be more complicated, involving and weighing more factors, but at their core they are not different in kind from machine decisions.
 

Thus, it seems to me that all the traditional components of individual morality and intellgence are explained by physiology in analogy to mechanics and electronics. What we call an intention or motive or decision is largely a matter of how we identify portions of processes that are interconnected in actual individuals. It is no more surprising that a person makes a decision and acts on it than a crash sensor determines conditions that result in inflating air bags. The car is designed that way. After many billions of trials and errors, we have evolved to be that way.

Next: The Social Conscience