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PHILOSOPHY OF MIND intentional may be either ultimately or mediately intentional, according to whether the prospect of producing it would or would not have operated as a motive if not viewed as productive of a further event This distinction between ultimate and mediate intention corresponds to the scholastic distinction between ends and means Bentham illustrated his panoply of distinctions by referring to the story of the death of King William II of England, who died while stag hunting from a wound inflicted by one Sir Walter Tyrell He rang the changes on the possible degrees of consciousness and intentionality in the mind of Tyrell, and assigned the appropriate classification to each imagined case: unintentional, obliquely intentional, directly intentional, mediately intentional, ultimately intentional The effect of Bentham’s terminology was to define intention itself in purely cognitive terms: to find out what a person intended you need to ascertain what she knew, not what she wanted What she wanted is relevant only to the subclass of intentionality involved An act is unintentional only if its upshot was quite unforeseen; it is thus that ‘you may intend to touch a man without intending to hurt him; and yet, as the consequences turn out, you may chance to hurt him’ The cognitive slant that Bentham gives to intention is of great importance, since for him intention is a key criterion for the moral and legal evaluation of actions We should not think, however, Bentham tells us, that intentions are good and bad in themselves ‘If [an intention] be deemed good or bad in any sense, it must be either because it is deemed to be productive of good or of bad consequences or because it is deemed to originate from a good or from a bad motive’ (P 13) Now consequences depend on circumstances, and circumstances are simply either known or unknown to the agent So whatever is to be said of the goodness or badness of a person’s intention as resulting from the consequences of his act depends on his knowledge (‘consciousness’) of the circumstances In the ninth chapter of the Principles Bentham classifies the different possible degrees of such consciousness If a man is aware of a circumstance when he acts, then his act is said to have been an advised act, with respect to that circumstance; otherwise an unadvised act Besides being unaware of circumstances that actually obtain, an agent may suppose that circumstances obtain which in fact not obtain; this is missupposal and makes an act misadvised If an act is intentional, and is advised with respect to all 193
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