Thông tin tài liệu
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND circumstances relevant to a particular consequence, and there is no missupposal of preventive circumstances, then the consequence is intentional ‘Advisedness, with respect to the circumstances, if clear from the missupposal of any preventive circumstance, extends the intentionality from the act to the consequences’ (P 10) Bentham makes a distinction between intentions and motives: a man’s intentions may be good and his motives bad Suppose that ‘out of malice a man prosecutes you for a crime of which he believes you to be guilty, but of which in fact you are not guilty’ Here the motive is evil, and the actual consequences are mischievous; nonetheless, the intention is good, because the consequences of the man’s action would have been good if they had turned out as he foresaw In discussing motives Bentham stresses the evaluative overtones of words such as ‘lust’, ‘avarice’, and ‘cruelty’ In itself, he says, no motive is either good or bad; these words denote bad motives only in the sense that they are never properly applied except where the motives they signify happen to be bad ‘Lust’, for instance, ‘is the name given to sexual desire when the effects of it are regarded as bad.’ It is only in individual cases that motives can be good or bad ‘A motive is good, when the intention it gives birth to is a good one; bad, when the intention is a bad one; and an emotion is good or bad according to the material consequences that are the objects of it’ (P 10 33) By ‘motive’ Bentham means what, described in neutral terms, he would call an ultimately and directly intentional consequence From his explanation it is clear that it does not supply a separate title of moral qualification of an act; the only mental state primarily relevant to the morality of a voluntary act is the cognitive state with regard to the consequences Bentham’s account of motive is in accord with the general utilitarian position that moral goodness and badness in actions is to be judged in terms of their consequences with respect to pleasure and pain His cognitive conception of intention brought his followers into conflict with the doctrine of double effect according to which there may be a moral difference between doing something on purpose and merely foreseeing it as an unwanted consequence of one’s choices These moral issues will be discussed in detail in Chapter In his Groundwork Kant exalted the importance of motive more than any other moral philosopher had ever done Bentham’s position stands at the 194
Ngày đăng: 29/10/2022, 20:29
Xem thêm:
