Rationality and Bias: Intentions, Reasons, and Motives

Abstract

As shown in discussion of the dimensions of responsibility, a person will be judged increasingly accountable for the production of harm as that person’s causal participation and knowledge of the consequences of action increases. This attribution of responsibility will be reduced if the person is thought either not to possess the capacity to know that the action was wrong or to have been forced into taking the action. Our most severe moral criticism, like the most serious criminal penalties, will be reserved for those individuals who are thought to have produced harm intentionally. But how can we determine a person’s intentions with any certainty? Are those intentions evanescent phenomena that arise as if by whim, and disappear just as quickly? Or do intentions reflect more enduring dispositions within the actors? If such underlying dispositions really exist, by what mechanism do. they create behavior? How are our judgments as perceivers likely to be affected by our own intentions and motives? The purpose of this chapter is to suggest answers to these related questions.