Abstract

This dissertation is fundamentally concerned with the conceptual tenability and applicability of the distinction between intention and foresight. This distinction, I argue, is embedded in ordinary language, assumed to be of moral import in common morality, at the center of a vigorous jurisprudential debate regarding the proper legal conception of intention, and at the basis of the Doctrine of Double Effect. With respect to the latter, the intention/foresight distinction has relevance for a wide variety of moral issues including, among other things, abortion, euthanasia, sterilization, organ donation and transplantation , self-defense and murder, suicide and self-sacrifice , and strategic bombing in war . Detractors of the intention/foresight distinction have advanced a number of arguments against it. The challenges typically take one of the following three tacks: gainsaying the tenability of the distinction at the conceptual level, denying that the distinction can be formulated and applied in a consistent and intuitively satisfying manner, or impugning its moral significance. The first two challenges are conceptually prior to the third, and, as such, pose the more formidable threat. If the conceptual distinction between intention and foresight cannot be maintained, then there can be no debate regarding its moral import. So much the worse, critics might argue, for moral frameworks that rely upon this conceptually untenable distinction. Furthermore, even if the intention/foresight distinction turns out to be conceptually defensible, there is no point to discussing its moral significance if it cannot be interpreted and applied in any very reliable fashion. Once again, critics could argue that moral frameworks which require an inapplicable distinction should be held suspect on that grounds alone. Lastly, the moral import afforded a particular distinction will almost always be largely a function of the sort of moral framework within which the distinction is supposed to operate. Challenges to the moral significance of such a distinction are more properly challenges to the moral framework which affords the distinction significance. The focus of this work, then, is the conceptual tenability and applicability of the intention/foresight distinction