The American Journal of Jurisprudence, (2017), pp.

1–21
doi:10.1093/ajj/aux021

Distinguishing Between What is Intended and

Foreseen Side Effects
Patrick Lee *

Abstract: On the strict view of intention, one intends only what is included in the
plan of action or proposal adopted by choice. According to broader views of inten-
tion what one intends includes that plus some known features of the selected physical
action that are not included in the proposal adopted by choice. I defend the strict
view of intention, reply to important recent objections to it from Steven Jensen,
Alexander Pruss and Luke Gormally, and examine concrete applications in light of
those different views of intention.

Keywords: Intention, Side Effects, Double Effect, Natural Law

The thesis that there is a real and morally relevant distinction between effects of
one’s action that one intends and other effects that one causes and foresees but
does not intend, is presupposed by a set of positions loosely labeled the doctrine
of double effect (DDE). That there is such a distinction is most often defended by
those who also hold that there are certain kinds of acts, such as killing innocent
persons, adultery, lying, and so on, that one ought never choose to do. One
explanation of why such acts are wrong is that they are instances of intending
the destruction, damaging, or impeding of a fundamental human good—for
example, the death of an innocent person, the defacement of a marriage, or the
diminishing of integrity and community.1
On the other hand, it is sometimes (not always) morally permissible to choose
to do something that brings about significant harm to a fundamental human good
as a side effect. One might use force to stop an attack, foreseeing that the force
used will result in the death of the assailant, or one might administer analgesics for
pain relief, foreseeing that this will hasten death as a side effect. But of course, in
many cases people disagree about whether the harm caused is a side effect or,
instead, part of the means that one intends.
The main purpose of distinguishing what is intended from what is foreseen-
and-knowingly-caused is to be able to identify the act, or the kind of act—what

* John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Professor of Bioethics and Director, Institute of Bioethics,
Franciscan University of Steubenville. Email: plee@franciscan.edu.
1 Two places where this is clearly explained: Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, vol. 1,
Christian Moral Principles (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), Chapters 5-7; John Finnis,
Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth (Washington DC: The Catholic University of
America Press, 1991), 67-83; see also 20-24, 37-40, and 54-59.

ß The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame.
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 2 of 21 P. Lee

kind of thing is being done—so that, in turn, the act can then be assessed morally
(as a kind of act) in relation to moral norms that prohibit certain kinds of act.2
So one must be able to draw a distinction between what one intends and a side
effect. The strict definition of intention has been set out most prominently by
proponents of what is often called—especially by opponents who hold that it departs
from the sound natural law tradition—the New Natural Law theory, most notably
by Germain Grisez, Joseph Boyle, and John Finnis. According to that definition,
what one intends is only what is included in the proposal for action that one adopts
by choice, one’s plan of action, and one’s proposal or plan of action includes only
one’s end—that is, something desirable for its own sake—and those states of affairs
one chooses to bring about because they are conceived to be desirable as helping one
bring about one’s end. These latter are the adopted or chosen means.3
Others have proposed, in various ways, broader, or more physicalist, definitions
of intention.4 Such broader interpretations assign larger roles to the physical
relationship of cause and effect, so that what one intends includes more than
what is included in one’s proposal or plan of action. While they hold that one
does not intend all of the foreseen effects of one’s action, proponents of such
views hold argue that the means chosen is a physical action, and that choosing the
physical action one does entails committing oneself to certain essential elements
not included in one’s proposal or plan of action. These different positions on the
nature of human action in some cases result in different conclusions in regard to

2 To clarify this last point, these other points should be added:

1. In the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition, an act’s intention (intending, in-
tended etc.) in this sense is generally called not its intention but its “object,” and “intention”
and its cognates are reserved for further or ulterior purposes or motives that do not define the
act for the purposes of the aforesaid assessment. Nonetheless, the tradition also (confusingly
at the level of words) allows “intention” to be used in lieu of “object,” most famously in
Aquinas’s discussion that launches the DDE, in Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 64, a. 7 (in
relation to use of lethal means in self-defense).
2. Much discussion of the DDE—especially, but not only, among philosophers standing well
outside the tradition—is inattentive to the problem of defining the kind of act prior to
assessing its moral permissibility, and thus often critiques of DDE question-beggingly
assume both the identity of the act and even (sometimes) its permissibility before considering
(and denying) the relevance of intention to permissibility.
3. In this article I will use the word “intend” and its cognates to refer to the relation of the choice or
act of will to the means as well as to ulterior ends, and I will try to avoid the fallacy indicated in the
previous paragraph.
4. This article also leaves to one side the important fact that side-effects foreseen and knowingly
caused are within the acting person’s moral responsibility and may well be impermissible
because there are moral norms that bear precisely on such side-effects loosely called by the
tradition disproportionate (adapting a term used for a different purpose by Aquinas in the
aforementioned discussion) but capable of better specification.
3 See for example: John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and Joseph Boyle, “‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect:’ A Reply
to Critics of our Action Theory,” The Thomist 65 (2001): 1-44, reprinted in John Finnis, Intention and
Identity, Collected Essays: Volume II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 235-268.
4 I am indebted to Lawrence Masek for the terminology of the “strict” sense of intention versus
“broader” senses of it in his “Intentions, Motives and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” The
Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2010): 567-585, though many others—for example Jonathan Bennett
and Don Marquis—have noted that there are more or less strict ways of drawing the line between
what is intended and what is not.

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 Distinguishing Between What is Intended and Foreseen Side Effects 3 of 21

specific moral cases, such as in some life-threatening pregnancies (for example,

ectopic pregnancies).
In this paper I defend the strict interpretation of intention, and examine some
recent important objections to it. In section I I try to clarify the question and
mention three recent objections to the strict intention view. In section II I advance
three arguments in defense and explanation of the strict intention view, and in
section III I respond to the objections mentioned in the first section, including
recent ones from Alexander Pruss and Steven Jensen.

I
The basic issue could be stated as follows: what is the criterion for what must be
included in the description of what one does in the strict sense, one’s means? By
what criterion (or criteria) does one determine what is intended versus what is not
intended (but may be a foreseen side effect instead)? Stated differently: assuming
with much ethical thought that there are kinds of act that must never be done, in
what way if at all does intention count in the specification of the kind, and does it
always count in a way different from the way in which knowingly and immedi-
ately causing an effect might count?
One objection to the strict view is that it fails sufficiently to acknowledge the
bodily component in human action, that it is dualistic; by locating human acts
merely within the mind or will, it falls into a Cartesian view of the person.
Instead, it is argued, the human act has a structure similar to that of the
person as a whole, namely, a matter-form structure, and that this tells against
the strict intention view: in determining what belongs to the action intentionally
done one must take into account the essential physical components of the actions
selected in choice.5
A second objection holds that the strict intention view leads to a certain sub-
jectivism regarding human actions. If what one intends is only what one proposes
to oneself to do, then it seems to follow that for almost any action one performs
or wishes to perform, one could simply re-describe it and omit in one’s re-
described proposal for action any reference to the bad features caused or included
in it. For example, couldn’t someone who has intentionally killed a person re-
describe her action as “stopping a person’s heart,” or “causing this person’s bodily
functioning to cease”? If the structure of the action itself is not determinative of
what one does or intends, then doesn’t that pave the way to easy rationalization?6

5 Matthew O’Brien and Robert Koons, “Objects of Intention: A Hylomorphic Critique of the New
Natural Law Theory,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86 (2012): 655–703. They sum up
their objection thus: “In short, the relation between intention and behavior is a species of the general
problem of the relations between mind and body, and the NNL [new natural law theory] is schizo-
phrenic insofar as it endorses hylomorphism as a solution to the latter and pure planning intention-
alism as a solution to the former.” Ibid., 677.
6 See for example: Steven Long, “Fundamental Errors of the New Natural Law Theory,” The
National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13 (2013), 124; Austin J. Holgard, “Contra Craniotomy, A
Defense of William E. May’s Original Position,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 15 (2015):
683.

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 4 of 21 P. Lee

And a third objection—raised recently by Alexander Pruss—is that there are

certain instances (real or hypothetical) in which the sort of being acted on is
outside the agent’s intention according to the strict intention view and yet the
identity of the being acted on is essential to the kind of act being done. Examples
are certain types of killing and of sexual acts.7
The central issue concerns how the physical and the moral orders are related,
and more specifically, how the action one performs to carry out one’s choice is
related to that choice or act of will. An action of whatever sort is specified—made
to be of that sort rather than another—by its object, that is, by the acting person’s
close-in purpose, end, goal. According to broader views of intention some elem-
ents of the physical set of movements and outcomes that are not included in the
proposal adopted by choice are intended. There are various ways of specifying
which elements must be included in what is intended. But one claim often
advanced is that if one knows that the physical behavior one selects more imme-
diately causes the bad effect than it does the good effect, then one must intend
that bad effect as a means; it will not be a side effect of what one does in the strict
sense, but part of it. For example, sixteenth century moral theologian Jean-Pierre
Gury, an influential source of thinking on the DDE, included the following in his
explanation of that principle: “If the cause directly and without intermediary
produces the evil effect and if the good effect comes about only by means of
the evil effect, then the good is sought by means of evil. And it is never lawful to
do evil, no matter how slight, in order that good may come of it. For according to
the biblical maxim adduced by the Apostle in Rom. 3.8, Evil should not be done
that good may follow.”8
Matthew O’Brien and Robert Koons expressed such a view as follows: “If
realizing condition A in and of itself entails, by virtue of the laws of nature,
the realization of condition B, and an agent knows this, then B is certainly
included in his intention to bring about A.” And their examples are as follows:
“Thus, the death of an infant is an essential constituent of performing a craniot-
omy upon it, and the death of the victim is an essential constituent of shooting
him in the head with a large-caliber firearm.”9
Another example: in an emergency ectopic tubal pregnancy, where the unborn
child is growing within the Fallopian tube (and where the tube will burst and the
mother die if some type of surgery is not performed), proponents of broader views
of intention generally say that an act of removing the unborn child from the
fallopian tube is by its nature—as a human act, and regardless of the proposal or
plan of action of the agents involved—a lethal act, a direct (intentional) killing.
The idea is that if an action physically causes a harm directly—that is, causes the
harmful effect without first causing an intermediary cause—then choosing this

7 Alexander Pruss, “The Accomplishment of Plans: A New Version of the Principle of Double
Effect,” Philosophical Studies 165 (2013): 49-69.
8 As cited in: Christopher Kaczor, “Double-Effect Reasoning From Jean-Pierre Gury to Peter
Knauer, Theological Studies 59 (1998): 302-303. As Kaczor notes, this causal relationship could be
easily discerned by a third party observing the agent and so this idea seemed to help forestall arbi-
trariness in the principle’s application.
9 O’Brien and Koons, “Objects of Intention,” 668.

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action entails intending this harm. Proponents of broader views of intention do

not claim that we intend all of the foreseen effects of our actions (the view of
Sidgwick and Chisholm for example). But they do hold that some actions have
features in virtue of their physical nature that are not included in the proposal for
choice (or plan of action), but are, if known, necessarily intended, that is, parts of
the means chosen,10 though they do not all agree on how to specify those add-
itional elements.

II
The following arguments provide some evidence for the strict view of intention.
Argument 1. Concrete Cases: In the first place, several concrete examples can
be more clearly and simply explained by the strict intention view than by broader
interpretations.
Suppose I have severe osteoarthritis in my left knee. And suppose the cartilage
in that knee has worn down to such an extent that now any walking at all further
damages it and even damages the bone. Continued walking will eventually com-
pletely wear out the knee and lead to inability to walk. One evening, nevertheless,
I decide to take a walk. My purpose is to exercise and enjoy the outdoors. But my
daughter (a nurse) replies: “What? What are you trying to do, wear out your
knee?” I reply that I am not trying to do that at all. Rather, I only want to go for a
walk, and though I realize it will cause harm to my knee, I am not trying to wear
out my knee.
Surely this reply makes sense. But if the fact that a physical action directly
causes—that is, causes without any intermediary—a significant harm entailed that
choosing to perform that action included intending that harm, then it would seem
that my daughter’s (implied) argument would be correct. My decision to walk
would be a case of attempting to harm my health. However, it seems that my
claim regarding my intention must be correct. The strict intention view has a
good explanation of that point: the harm to the knee is not part of the proposal I
adopt by choice; although the physical action of harming the knee is included in
my physical act of walking, bringing about this harm is not a reason for action
(either intrinsic or instrumental). By contrast, since the harm to the knee is
equally immediate, physically speaking, as the good effect I am seeking, broader

10 Some proponents of a broader view of intention have argued that in addition to the physical
structure of the action selected, an action may have a built-in structure coming from a society or
profession, inasmuch as certain acts or practices are recommended or adopted by groups. On this
view a practice—such as a certain type of surgery, medicine, or pattern of behavior, for example
teaching a class, or directing automobile traffic—may contain pre-established elements that one
necessarily becomes committed to if one selects that practice. See for example Kevin Flannery,
S.J., Acts Amid Precepts, the Aristotelian Logical Structure of Thomas Aquinas’s Moral Theory
(Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), Chapter 7; O’Brien and
Koons, “Objects of Intention,” 667. I do not discuss this notion further. If what I argue about
the physical structure of the act is true—namely, that only those elements also included in one’s
proposal or plan of action are intended—then the same point will apply a fortiori to socially defined
practices. On this issue, also see: Christopher Tollefsen “Response to Robert Koons and Matthew
O’Brien’s ‘Objects of Intention,’” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 87 (2013): 760-763.

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 6 of 21 P. Lee

views of intention will have difficulty explaining how this action would not be a
case of acting intentionally against the good of health.
Of course a proponent of a broader view of intention might argue that walking
is not essentially, or per se, an injurious action, and so the case can be explained
away. But why describe the act in this situation so abstractly—as merely walking,
instead of as walking with a severely worn knee? Walking is an act of placing all of
one’s weight, through one’s upper leg (femur), onto the cartilage covering one’s
lower leg (tibia); and when that cartilage has been severely worn down, this just
is—one might say—an act that directly damages both the cartilage and the bone.
If one actually chose precisely to damage the cartilage and bone in one’s worn-
down knee, pressing on it with such weight would be an effective way of doing so.
Though the same motions performed by people with healthy knees may not
involve injury, in someone with a severely worn knee, this physical action
seems directly or per se to damage the cartilage and bone. And so this action
seems to fulfill the criterion for directness laid down by Robert Koons and
Matthew O’Brien: “If one exercises a basic power P in circumstances such that
one who exercises P in those circumstances normally knows that the occurrence of
C is an essential constituent of that exercise of P, then one intends to bring about
C, even if one does not plan to do so.”11 (Let the basic power P = walking, the
relevant circumstances = one’s knee is severely worn down, and C = crippling.)
Another example worth considering is a case often used to illustrate the
doctrine itself of double effect. A live hand grenade is thrown into a soldiers’
camp. One of the soldiers jumps on the live grenade to shield others from its blast.
Suppose that the end the soldier intends is to save his friends and the means he
chooses to bring that about is the blocking of the shrapnel with his body.
He foresees that this blocking of lethally fast-moving shrapnel will also shred
his internal organs and kill him, but those are side effects: neither his death
nor the shredding of his organs saves his friends, but his blocking of the shrapnel.
However, if the physical directness of the act in relation to an effect entailed that
one intends that effect, it is hard to see how his being ripped internally by
shrapnel and his death could be side effects. It would seem that these would
be “parts of the nature of the act.” It is hard to see how proponents of more
physicalist views of action could avoid classifying such an act as suicide—and yet
it seems clearly different from a suicide.
Another case: Suppose a soldier during battle sees his General at a distance with
a small red light shining on his forehead, indicating that an enemy sniper has the
General’s head in his sights. The soldier cannot hope to attract the General’s
attention, but he then realizes that he can save the General by shooting him in the
shoulder and thus knocking him down and outside the aim and range of the
enemy sniper. Would shooting the General be morally permissible? It seems so.
But it is wrong intentionally to harm someone as a means of preventing another
evil from happening to him. (It would be wrong to kill myself to prevent being
tortured, or to shoot myself in the foot to prevent being conscripted in an unjust
war.) Instead, it seems that the injury is not intentional. But then the best

11 Koons and O’Brien, “Objects of Intention,” 662.

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explanation of why it isn’t is that the General’s death need not be part of the
proposal adopted by choice—it is not the harm to the General that saves him but
his being knocked down out of the sniper’s sights—the strict interpretation of
intention.
A last concrete case. Suppose I am a nurse in a hospital’s Intensive Care Unit,
and an elderly and very thin patient goes into heart arrest. I commence
Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, the first part of which is vigorously pressing
down on the patient’s chest (chest compression). The aim is to apply pressure
to the heart itself. But suppose I am certain that when I press down on this
particular patient’s chest the pressure will crack her ribs—probably even before
the pressure reaches the heart. However, it is clear that my aim—including my
proximate aim—need not be to crush the patient’s ribs. But how does one explain
that that is so? The strict intention view has a clear explanation: the breaking of
the ribs is not needed to bring about the end in view—breaking the ribs is not
part of the proposal or plan adopted by choice. But whatever explanation a
broader view of intention might propose, at best it will be convoluted.
Argument 2: Let us compare the following two cases. In case one, Smith is
being choked by an assailant who means to kill him, and Smith shoots the
assailant in the only place he can get a shot at him, which happens to be in
the head. But Smith shoots him only to stop his attack—though he foresees that
this will almost certainly also kill the assailant.
In case two, in virtually the same type of situation Robinson shoots his assailant
in the head, but Robinson does so to ensure that this assailant does not engage in
any possible future attacks—either on himself or on anyone else that assailant
might attack; and so, indisputably, Robinson wills to bring about that person’s
death as a means—a means of preventing future attacks.
On most broader views of intention both of these would be classified as “dir-
ect,” more properly speaking intended, killings. However, in case one, if the as-
sailant unexpectedly survives then Smith’s action would still be a success: for he
has attained everything he planned to do—the assailant’s death not being part of
his plan. However, in case two if the assailant unexpectedly survives, and unex-
pectedly has a sudden conversion and decides not to return for revenge against
Robinson, then, although Robinson’s end is achieved, it does not come about in
accord with his plan. His action is not a success; rather, he benefits from good
fortune. In other words, in case two the death of the assailant was related to the
agent’s will differently than how the assailant’s death is related to the agent’s will
in case one. And the difference in how their will-acts are related to the assailant’s
death is clearly significant in a moral way. And yet according to most broader
interpretations of intention in both cases the killing would be intended. A more
natural interpretation is that in case two the killing is intended, but in case one it is
not, in case one the assailant’s death is a side effect while in case two the assailant’s
death is the intended means.12
12 Notoriously, “intentional” in idiomatic English is much wider than the use of the word “in-
tended.” As John Finnis notes: “In formulating moral norms, it is especially important to distinguish
the meanings of ‘intentional’, in relation to what one tries to bring about as an instantiation of a good,
what one chooses as a means to something ulterior, and what one accepts as a side effect. In a loose

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So it seems that the broader views of intention entail the denial of a significant
distinction between two types of human acts, an important difference between
two ways in which the will can be related to a bad state of affairs.13 A proponent
of a broader view of intention must say, either that there is no difference in how
the agent’s will is related to the assailant’s death in the two cases, or that, while
there is a difference in how the wills are related to those deaths, both actions are
intentional killings. If they adopt the second alternative, then that means there are
two types of intentional killing—type one and type two. But in that case it is not
clear why we should say that both types are intrinsically wrong—why not say that
only those intentional killings where the death is part of the proposal or plan of
action are intrinsically wrong—for only in those types of intentional (or “direct”)
killing is a person’s death a proximate goal of one’s action, a state of affairs one
has committed oneself to. If they adopt the first alternative, then it seems they are
denying a difference of which we are plainly aware.
Argument 3: Clearly, the same physical action may in different instances carry
out significantly morally different choices. For example, I might walk despite
knowing that my walking involves wearing down my already damaged knee,
but I could do exactly the same thing, physically, but with the intention to
harm my knee (I might want to sue my orthopedist, for example). Of course a
proponent of a broader view of intention might say that in both instances one is
walking, but as a means toward different ulterior ends—in one as a means toward
enjoying the scenery and in the other as a means toward injuring the knee, as a
means toward suing my orthopedist, and so on. This, however, raises other
difficulties, for the damage to the knee seems to occur as part of the physical act
of walking. So if this physical proximity is decisive, then the difference between
the two actions does not seem to lie only in different ulterior intentions; the
difference seems to be located in the proximate end of the action, the very first
end that gives meaning to question of what I am doing.

common idiom, side effects which are foreseen and accepted (and thus voluntarily caused), will on
the one hand be described as unintended and unintentional if the question is whether they were part
of the agent’s plan, but on the other hand be described as intentional or intentionally caused, if the
question is whether they were caused inadvertently or ‘accidentally’. Moral analysis, rightly em-
ployed, uses a more precise and stable conception of intention. This conception is tightly linked to
the moral significance of choice. To choose is essentially to adopt a plan or proposal which one has
devised and put to oneself in one’s practical reasoning.” Finnis, Intention and Identity, 142. Also,
speaking of the act of blowing up an airplane in flight in order to collect the cargo or hull insurance,
an act that also kills the pilot, Finnis notes that some want to say in such a case the killing is “obliquely
intended.” But he rightly rejects such language and explains: “What should be said? It is in no sense a
case of intending to kill, intention to kill, or intent to kill—and adding the qualifier ‘oblique’ is to no
effect, save in a jargon driven not by the insights reflected in common speech but by a theory which, as
an analysis of intention, has nothing to be said for it. One must immediately add, however, that by a
nuance of our language, it is a case in which the accused cannot be said to have killed unintention-
ally—for ‘unintentionally’ connotes accident or mistake or lack of foresight. It is thus a killing which
is both intentional and not intentional, for ‘intentional(ly)’ is equivocal between ‘intended’ and ‘not
unintentionally.’” Ibid., 184. In this paper I will avoid using the word “intentionally” in this last
manner; by “intentionally killed” or “intentionally harmed” for example I will mean intended to kill
or intended to harm.
13 This point is made by Christopher Tollefsen, “Is a Purely First Person Account of Action
Defensible?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (2006): 449.

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Or suppose that in the example of the soldier covering the grenade, the soldier
had been looking for an opportunity to end his life and saw this as a way of doing
so: again, the same physical action may carry out two significantly different
choices. And the difference seems to consist, not so much in ulterior intentions
but in the most proximate end or goal, which provides an answer to the question,
what are you doing? In such cases it seems that a clearer explanation of the
differences between moral choices carried out by identical types of behavior is
that what one chooses, what one intends, includes only the end sought (ulterior
intention) and what is proposed to be brought about to help realize or attain that
benefit (means), in other words, what the agent proposes to herself to achieve.
Thus, the physical immediacy of the bad effect to the good effect in the phys-
ical performance that carries out one’s choice does not entail that in choosing this
performance (adopting it by choice) one must intend the bad effect. One intends
the bad effect only if it is included in one’s plan or proposal of action, only if it is
viewed as desirable in itself or as needed in one’s plan to attain what is desirable in
itself.
In a recent exchange with John Finnis, Luke Gormally objected to this position
that, while not every type of physical immediacy of the bad effect to the good
means that intending one entails intending the other, certain types of immediacy
do entail that. He argued that such an entailment applies where: (a.) “doing X
would eo ipso be a case of doing Y, ie. it would be in the very nature or character of
a doing of X that it would be a doing of Y;”14 or (b.) the “circumstances make
bringing about the effect a contingently inseparable part of one’s chosen means
since it is inseparable from what one is aiming to do if one is to achieve one’s
end.”15
An example (drawn from Elizabeth Anscombe) of the former is that of trans-
fixing a man with an arrow. One cannot, says Gormally, intend only to transfix
the man but not to damage him, on the ground that it’s the transfixing and not
the damaging that realizes one’s end (for example, stopping his attack). For, he
argues, the act of transfixing him is eo ipso (by that very fact) damaging him.
Likewise, Gormally argues, in the craniotomy case (an obstetric case where a
baby’s head—at a time or place where Caesarean section is unavailable—is
crushed to facilitate his or her passage through the birth canal), the surgeon
cannot reasonably claim that he intends only the changing of the dimensions
of the baby’s head, and not the baby’s death. For to act as the surgeon has planned
to act is eo ipso to kill. The killing, he says, is “in the nature of the procedure,” it
“just is” a form of killing.16

14 Luke Gormally, “Intention and Side Effects: John Finnis and Elizabeth Anscombe,” in Reason,
Morality, and Law: the Philosophy of John Finnis, ed. John Keown and Robert P. George, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 102.
15 Ibid., 103.
16 Ibid., 101. This claim was previously made by Elizabeth Anscombe in “Action, Intention, and
‘Double Effect,’” reprinted in, Human Life, Action and Ethics, Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. Mary
Geach and Luke Gormally (Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2005), 221-226. John Finnis
replied in detail to Anscombe’s article. For more on that reply see below note 18.

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A second way in which, according to Gormally, the immediacy of a bad effect

entails that it is intended, is in cases where the bad effect is a “contingently
inseparable part of one’s chosen means since it is inseparable from what one is
aiming to do.”17 Thus, if a potholer is stuck in the exit from a cave (an example
also discussed by Anscombe), and a rock could be moved that would both open
the exit (and thus save those within the cave) and at the same time crush the
potholer’s head, intentionally moving the rock would (Gormally claims) also be
intentional killing. Although moving the rock would not be eo ipso crushing the
head (it would not belong to the nature of the act), still, it would be a “contin-
gently inseparable part of his chosen means.”
However, Gormally’s analysis fails to show how in such cases the bad effect
becomes desirable. If a state of affairs A is in itself desirable, and state of affairs B
(though not desirable in itself ) would help bring about A, then B thereby becomes
desirable: my seeing (or believing) that some state of affairs is either good (worth-
while) in itself or instrumentally good is precisely what moves me to desire it, or
choose (efficaciously will) it. Thus, one can will to realize a state of affairs only if it
is believed to be good (worthwhile, desirable), either in itself or instrumentally.
But the physical connection of a distinct state of affairs C to B (the instrumentally
desirable state of affairs) does not suffice to make it desirable—does not give it
what it needs to move the will. Gormally argues that in some cases “doing X
would eo ipso be a doing of Y.” This of course is true in the physical order, but that
fails to show that intending to do X entails intending to do Y, as Finnis points out
in his reply to Gormally. Perhaps Gormally means that, in effect, doing X and
doing Y are not two states of affairs at all. This would be so if doing Y were just a
more abstract description of doing X, that is, where X and Y are conceptually
connected—for example, choosing to destroy an animal just is choosing to kill a
living being. But if doing X and doing Y are not thus conceptually connected,
then, just as one can conceive of one without conceiving of the other, so one can
will to realize, or to cause to be, one without willing to realize, or to cause to be,
the other.18

17 Ibid.
18 John Finnis also discussed this claim as it occurred in Anscombe, “Action, Intention, and ‘Double
Effect.’” Discussing this precise claim from Anscombe, Finnis writes: “‘But doing X just is doing Y!’
Some will be impatient with the distinction drawn by Aquinas. Some acts, they will say, just are
killing, whether done in self-defence or not; one who chooses to do such an act just is, willy-nilly,
intending to kill. Intentionally firing a shotgun at close range directly at robbers just is acting with
intent to kill them, even if done as the only way of stopping their violent assault. And this sort of claim
is made, or at least conceded, by many who otherwise acknowledge that one’s intention is defined by
one’s practical reason, in terms of the desirability characterization under which one wills the end and
the description under which one judges one’s chosen means appropriate to that end.” Finnis’s
detailed rebuttal continues for several pages after that: John Finnis, “Intention and Side Effects,”
in Intention and Identity, 189-193
Gormally’s more recent article claimed that Finnis had assumed that if my doing X could in some
other possible world, not be a case of doing Y, then I can intend to do X without intending to do Y. And
against this Gormally argued that we are constrained by what we can do in the actual world, not just
by what is conceivable. Thoughts of merely possible worlds in which entities have different consti-
tutions from what they have in the actual world have no proper role to play in practical reasoning.
Gormally, “Intention and Side Effects,” 101. In response, Finnis pointed out that his account does
not refer to alternate possibilities or merely conceivable possibilities as a criterion for distinguishing

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The strict intention position coheres well with the reason why a distinction
between intentional and non-intentional killing or harming is needed to begin
with. Actions are morally significant, are moral realities, insofar as they stem from
an act of will—“stem from” in a strong sense, since they are precisely the executing
of the choice of some proposal. An action is morally good only if it is in accord
with right reason, reason’s knowledge of what is and is not to be done and
pursued. The morally good act is one that flows from a will that is fully responsive
to reason’s judgments concerning what is genuinely fulfilling for oneself and other
persons. Hence the central moral standard is that the will (and the actions directed
by reason and will) should be positively responsive to—loving, respectful, open
to—every aspect of the flourishing of persons. So any choice that diminishes one’s
love or respect for any instance of an intrinsic good of a person by that very fact is
morally defective, a morally evil act—introducing into one’s will a privation of
love for the person(s) in whom that good is instantiated. Intending to damage an
instance of a basic human good necessarily and straightaway diminishes one’s love
and respect for that human good and so for some person or persons. By contrast,
accepting a bad side effect does not necessarily do so—though it could do so in
another way, for example, if it is unfair, or not in line with one’s special
responsibilities.
By intending to harm (that is, to destroy, damage, or impede an instance of a
basic human good) one treats an instance of a basic human good as at best entirely
dispensable, as if it were merely an instrumental good. Thus, intending to harm
an instance of a basic human good is incompatible with love of that good, and of
the person in whom that good might be realized, whereas choosing to do some-
thing that is not a harm but that causes harm to a basic good as a side effect, is not
of itself incompatible with a love of that good and of that person, as intrinsically
valuable.
Thus, a choice to walk in order to wear out my knee (for whatever ulterior
purpose) is not compatible with valuing my health as in itself good. Such a choice
would diminish my love of what is in truth an intrinsic aspect of my flourishing
and so would diminish my love of self and (and respect for my life and health as
gifts from God). On the other hand, a choice to walk as a way of exercising or
enjoying the beauty of the outdoors—although foreseeing that it will damage my
knee—could be compatible with continuing to value my health as good in itself.
So the distinction between intentionally harming and harming as a side effect is

what is and what is not needed to accomplish one’s purpose. Rather: “[A]ll those attempts of mine
emphasize that what counts in such analyses and descriptions is the actual practical reasoning of the
acting person about what he actually needs and wants in order to accomplish his actual purposes.”
Finnis, “Reflections and Responses,” in Keown and George, Reason, Morality, and Law, 482. In the
craniotomy case, for example, the fact that a surgeon would perform the same physical actions and
count his plan of action as successful if the baby did live and recover—even though one knows that in
these circumstances the baby will not live—is a sign—not a criterion—that the baby’s being killed is
not an end (and so not a means in relation to subsequent events desirable in themselves). Ibid., 482. I
would add that, consideration of contrary to fact conditionals—could X occur without Y?—also can
help one discern whether X and Y are distinct states of affairs rather than merely two considerations of
a single state of affairs, one more abstract or less determinate than the other. For more on the
importance of this consideration see below, pages corresponding to notes 33-35.

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important inasmuch as it marks out two different ways a harm can be related to
the will.
But this point seems to cohere more fully with the strict view of intention, not
the more physicalist positions. What one wills, what one commits oneself to
bringing about, is: (a.) what one takes to be a benefit, and (b.) what one proposes
to oneself to bring about in order to realize that benefit. One might view being
healthy as a benefit and then see taking a walk as a good insofar as it will realize
that benefit. Then, whatever one sees that one will bring about but is outside that
proposal, need not be intended—that will be the foreseen but unintended con-
sequences of one’s act. For example, if one foresees that one’s walking will involve
harming one’s knee, or even, say, harming the grass one walks on, then, since these
effects are not needed to bring about one’s end (the benefit one seeks), they are
not part of one’s proposal adopted by choice and are not intended.

III
Let us turn now to the objections to the strict intention view mentioned in section
I. One objection to the strict intention view was that it doesn’t sufficiently note
that we are bodily beings, and so our actions parallel our whole constitution: just
as we are body-soul composites so our actions are material and not just spiritual,
but the strict intention view identifies (so it is said) the human action solely with
the spiritual and interior intention. However, in the first place, rejecting
Cartesianism does not entail rejecting the idea that human beings do perform
spiritual actions, such as acts of intellect and will. One might hold that these are
acts done by the human person—who is both body and soul—but are done
without a bodily organ.19 The rejection of substance dualism (Cartesianism) re-
quires holding that all of the natural actions (as opposed to supernatural or graced
actions) of a human being involve bodily changes in many cases as components of
those actions, but perhaps in some cases as prerequisites of them. Aquinas, for
example, held that acts of the intellect and of the will are spiritual, and of course
he was no body-self dualist.20
The second problem with this objection is that proponents of the strict inten-
tion view need not, and generally have not, identified the whole moral act with an
interior act of will. While they usually distinguish the act of will from the physical
performance done to carry out that act of will, they hold that the human act as a
whole is in very many cases both bodily and voluntary (not in all cases—the acts of
the intellect and of the will are, I would argue, non-bodily—that is acts performed
without a bodily organ, though performed by the whole human being who is both
body and soul). And the bodily act has the moral quality it has precisely insofar as
it is the execution of a morally sound or immoral act of will. One can (and

19 Robert George and I defend such a position in Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and
Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 52-66; also see Peter Geach, “What Do We
Think With,” in God and the Soul (New York: Schocken, 1969), 3-41.
20 See for example, St. Thomas Summa Theologiae, I, q. 75, aa. 1 and 5.

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should) view the relation between the interior act of will and the exterior act
carrying it out as analogous to form to matter.
Significantly, however, the form unifies and gives identity to the matter, and it is
that unity that distinguishes between what matter (what set of physical events) is
included in the moral act, and what is joined to it but not part of it. An analogous
relationship obtains in the biological order between chemical events, on the one
hand, and a biological action, on the other. In the biological act of digestion
numerous chemical changes occur, but they are all parts of the act of digestion as
unified by their being ordered to the end of nutrition. Chemical changes not
ordered in that way accompany but are not parts of the digestive act. Analogously,
a bodily act—such as moving one’s legs and torso—gets its unity from the human
intention of which it is an execution. The same bodily changes could constitute
different human actions, and so they include more or fewer physical effects,
insofar as they are the physical components of different human acts, or are unified
by different acts of will.
Sometimes the claim is made that if in one’s action one directly touches the
person harmed with one’s limb or an instrument such as a scalpel, then the harm
done must be intended. And so again the argument is that the strict intention
view is ignoring how physical facts constrain what one can intend. For example,
speaking of the direct/indirect distinction in the context of an ectopic pregnancy
in the fallopian tube, Edward Furton says that the removal of the malfunctioning
tube (salpingectomy), with the baby inside, is an indirect killing, whereas, this is
not the case if the baby herself is removed from the tube (salpingostomy): “Such is
not the case when surgical instruments come into direct contact with the body of
the unborn child. This is not an act directed at a pathological condition, such as
infected membranes.”21 And so he denies that this procedure could be an indirect
killing: “Instead, there is a direct assault on the body of an innocent.”22
Of course, it is true that the two cases are different in regard to physical direct-
ness. Also, it is true that in the second procedure the surgeon places the surgical
instrument directly on the baby’s body—unlike in the first one, where the surgeon
places the surgical instrument directly on the diseased Fallopian tube. But why
should that physical relation just by itself entail a difference in the nature of the
moral act? What is determinative might be—and some of the reasons for thinking
so I have explained earlier—how the bad effect is related to the will of the agent
instead of how the bad effect is physically related to that agent.
In a salpingostomy the surgeon does intend to do something to this particular
baby, to introduce a change into the body of this baby. But it does not follow that
the change that he or she intends to introduce is the baby’s being killed. The
change the surgeon intends to introduce could be the detachment and then re-
moval of the baby from the Fallopian tube, changes that are distinct from the
baby’s death. The baby’s death does not contribute to the surgeon’s end, the
alleviation of the mother’s condition: what improves her pathology is the detach-
ment and removal of the baby, not the baby’s death. And so unless the surgeon

21 Edward Furton, Ethics and Medics 39, 8 (August 2014), 2.

22 Ibid.

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desires the baby’s death for another reason, the baby’s death is not intended.
Because the baby’s death (or being killed) does not contribute to the surgeon’s
end, unless he pursues it for some other reason, such as hostility, that death has no
feature making it desirable, and so cannot be part of the surgeon’s plan of action
or proposal, even though the surgeon foresees that it will occur as part of the
behavior he or she performs.
A second objection to the strict intention view was that it provides no objective
standard for what does belong to the human act and so someone wishing to justify
his action could always choose to re-describe it so that the bad effect falls outside
the intention and the action is morally permissible.
However, this objection seems to presuppose that only a directly observable and
physical standard prior to intention can be objective. But that is precisely what is
in question.
The strict intention view does have a non-arbitrary standard for what belongs
to the human act: given the agent’s end, then her plan of action—what she
chooses—must include those states of affairs she understands to be needed to
attain that end. This cannot be changed by telling herself a convenient story about
what she is doing.23 So, for example, in the salpingostomy case the end is ob-
tained by way of the removal of the baby from the Fallopian tube: the baby’s
removal, not the baby’s death, is needed to attain their end in the plan of action,
and so the baby’s removal is intended, while the baby’s death is not intended.
If a couple’s end is avoiding the difficulties of another pregnancy, and the
physician is asked to perform a tubal ligation on the woman (cut or block her
fallopian tubes), then surgery attains the end only by preventing conception—the
prevention of conception is needed to attain the end in the agents’ plan of action.
So, provided the couple is aware of this point, whatever the couple may say, in
adopting that choice they choose the prevention of conception or infertility—
sterilization is the means chosen.
Someone might object that on this view one intends only to realize a universal,
but in many cases what we choose is an individual reality or state of affairs. And so
it might be argued that in the ectopic pregnancy case, for example, it is mere
abstractionism to think that one can intend only to remove the pre-viable baby: in
that situation removing the baby just is at the same time killing the baby. Or in
the craniotomy case—where the baby’s head is depressed in order to remove her
from a too-narrow birth canal—the surgeon crushes the baby’s skull in order to
remove her from the birth canal, but that act of crushing is identical with the
baby’s being killed. By contrast—the objection continues—when a surgeon re-
moves a gravid cancerous uterus (the uterus with the baby inside) from a woman
in order to save her life, he is not acting directly on the baby but on the mother.
It is true, of course, that we often intend to act precisely on a certain individual
(or certain individuals). There is a difference, for example, between intending that
someone or other learn from an article one posts on a website, and intending to

23 O’Brien and Koons concede this point but argue that the standard proposed by the strict inten-
tion view is “remarkably weak.” See O’Brien and Koons, 665. So they do not endorse this objection
as an additional difficulty for the strict intention position.

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talk to a particular person. Or I might first choose to illustrate the very idea of a
triangle by drawing a triangle—some triangle or other, any would do—but then,
having begun, I might then intend to finish drawing the particular triangle I had
partly drawn.24
It is true that in both the salpingostomy and the craniotomy cases the surgeon
intends to do something to a particular baby, not just to some baby or other. He
intends to introduce a change into this particular baby.25 But it does not follow
that the change he intends to introduce—in either of those cases—is the baby’s
being killed. In the first case he intends the removal of the baby. For it is the
baby’s removal, not her death, that corrects the pathology. In the second case he
intends the changing of the dimensions of this baby’s skull—as a means toward
removing the baby, as a means toward saving the mother’s life. In neither case
does the baby’s death contribute to the surgeon’s end. Provided the surgeon’s end
is only to save the mother, the baby’s death has no feature making it desirable, and
so is not part of the surgeon’s plan of action or proposal, even though the surgeon
foresees that it will occur as part of what the surgeon brings about.26

24 However, suppose the only writing instrument I have is a pen that writes green. Does it follow
that I intend to draw a green triangle—suppose a green triangle is an offensive symbol for some people
observing my artistry? It seems to me the answer is no. It seems to me that I could draw the triangle,
foresee that part of my drawing a triangle will be my drawing a green triangle, but accept that as a side
effect rather than it being part of what I directly intend.
25 Steven Jensen is correct on this point: “In our actions we seek to introduce some change into
some subject.” Steven Jensen, “Causal Constraints on Intention,” National Catholic Bioethics
Quarterly 14 (2014): 282.
26 As briefly noted above, obstetric craniotomy is the crushing of the baby’s skull in order to
facilitate the removal of the baby from the birth canal in a pregnancy where the baby’s head is
otherwise too large to travel through it. The development and refinement of Caesarian section in the
last century have made this procedure obsolete, at least in developed countries. Still, the ethical issue
involved is often discussed when the application of the principle of double effect is considered. The
baby’s skull is crushed or flattened in order to remove the baby from the birth canal, and save the
mother’s life, and the procedure is fatal to the baby. The question usually discussed is whether
craniotomy necessarily involves intentional killing. The argument in the text, I think, shows that it
need not. But it remains to ask whether it must be an intentional injuring or harming. Steven Jensen
seems to concede that in the craniotomy case the baby’s death need not be intended, but he argues
that the procedure is intrinsically immoral because the crushing of the baby’s skull is intended, and
this is identical with the baby’s being injured. (Jensen, “Causal Constraints on Intention,” 288-289).
This position is more plausible than the claim that in craniotomy the baby’s death must be intended,
but I think it also is mistaken.
While the flattening of the baby’s skull—crushing—does in fact harm the baby, this flattening is a
harm (or injury) only if that change in the shape persists. Some flattening of the baby’s head naturally
occurs in most deliveries, but almost always his or her head does not remain flattened. So the
flattening, and the remaining flattened, are distinguishable. And, as Christopher Tollefsen points
out, in some less critical cases the obstetrician uses forceps to flatten the baby’s head to facilitate the
baby’s passage through the birth canal. In some of those cases the change to the baby’s head turns out
to be permanent, that is, the baby’s head is disfigured. This disfigurement, however, need not be
intended. Moreover, it seems that this would be so even if the disfigurement occurred in every case
(Christopher Tollefsen, “Is a Purely First Person Account of Human Action Defensible?,” 450.)
These points indicate that the damage to the baby is the persistent change in the shape of his head.
That is so whether the lasting damage is disfigurement, mutilation (which includes damage to
function), or death. It seems that in each case the surgeon may intend the change in dimensions
(crushing or flattening) without intending disfigurement, mutilation, or death. Hence the change in
the shape of the baby’s head needed for passage through the birth canal seems to be a distinct state of
affairs from disfigurement, mutilation, or death; and it is the changing of the shape of the baby’s head

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The third and final objection requires a more extended treatment. As men-
tioned, Alexander Pruss and Steven Jensen have in certain types of acts according
to the strict intention view the sort of being acted on is outside the agent’s
intention and the yet the identity of the being acted on is essential to the kind
of act being done. Pruss argues this occurs with some types of killing, while Jensen
argues it occurs with some types of adultery and theft. Both Pruss and Jensen hold
that these cases raise difficulties for the strict intention view, though they disagree
about how to solve that difficulty.27
Pruss argues there are cases in which an agent chooses to kill a person as a
means toward a further end, but the fact that what the agent kills is a person is not
important for attaining his or her end.
Here is one of Pruss’s examples (exotic but not impossible):
An eccentric, literalistic but always truthful magnate tells Sam he will donate to famine
relief, saving hundreds of lives, if and only if Sam follow his directions to the iota. Sam
is to purchase a gun, sneak at night into a zoo owned by the magnate, and kill the first
mammal he sees. Unfortunately the first mammal Sam sees is the zookeeper, and he
shoots her. When Sam is charged with murder, he argues that he did not intend to kill
the human there, but only to kill the mammal.28
Pruss says Sam could be right, that Sam need not have intended the killing of a
human. He might have deliberated as follows: First he decides to kill the first
mammal he sees; next he sees a mammal in the distance and forms the intention
to kill that mammal. Finally, he notices that the mammal is a human. But (Pruss
says) the fact that the mammal is a human does not affect his will. So the prospect
of killing a mammal moves Sam’s will, but not the prospect of killing a human.
Still, the killing of the person does not seem to be a side effect; it seems to be a
doing of evil so that good may come, rather than a causing of a bad side effect
without a proportionate reason.29
Arguing in a similar way, Steven Jensen claims that the strict intention view
logically implies that many adulterers and thieves do not intend adultery or theft.
(Jensen’s own solution, however, is different from that of Pruss.) Usually—Jensen
that is needed to remove the baby and save the mother, not the baby’s disfigurement, mutilation, or
death.
It is worth noting also that this same point—the distinction between a particular type of change
(of shape, spatial relation, or separation) and the persistent form of that change (a persistent tearing or
a removal of a vital organ)—is relevant in many other instances. For example, the removal of a heart
(as in open-heart surgery) is distinct from the permanent removal of that heart, which is a dismem-
berment. And an incision (as in surgery, including those done for the sake of others, e.g., in organ-
donations) is distinct from permanent tear, which is a harm. And so in each case one can intend the
former (the removal of a vital organ or an incision) without intending the latter (the permanent
taking away of the vital organ or the permanent tear). The harm seems to be a distinct state of affairs
and thus an effect rather than part of the means itself.
27 And so Pruss offers a different interpretation of the universal prohibitions presupposed by (most
versions of ) the DDE. Pruss’s idea of the accomplishment of plans as being the criterion for defining
the kind of act to be evaluated—centering on success as a criterion—may not be as different from the
strict intention view as he thinks, but that is a question for another time.
28 Alexander Pruss, “The Accomplishment of Plans,” 52-53.
29 Pruss eventually says that not only must one never intend a basic harm, one must never choose to
do something in which a basic harm is essential to the successful accomplishment of one’s plan. By
this account, Pruss says, one can explain why Sam’s killing of the zookeeper is intrinsically wrong.

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argues—what the adulterer intends is to have sex with an attractive woman; her
being married to another is not essential to the motivation of his act. And so it
seems to follow on the strict intention view that the adulterer doesn’t choose to
have sex with a woman married to another. What he chooses, rather, is to have sex
with an attractive woman, and her being married to another is incidental to what
he chooses. Specifically: having sex with a woman married to another is not
included in the proposal he adopts by choice.30
Likewise for the thief: he chooses, for example, to take lasting possession of this
shiny new automobile. That it is owned by another does not figure in his mo-
tivation; it is not included in the proposal he adopts by choice. So, Jensen argues
that the strict intention view, if followed to its logical consequences, would end up
making the class of actions to which moral absolutes apply so small that the
question of moral absolutes becomes utterly negligible. Murderers, adulterers
and thieves seem to have a ready justification for their acts. Something must be
amiss.
First let us consider the cases of killing. I think Pruss is mistaken in his analysis
of the zookeeper case. I think in that scenario the death of a human is actually
intended. Sam is undertaking to bring about the death of a particular mammal, a
human one, as a means of achieving his project of killing the first mammal he
sees. Killing a human being—that one there—is in this case the effective means to
his not fully specified end (as is made even clearer if he has to check in his mind
that human beings do indeed count as mammals for the purposes of the offer).
We often intend to bring about a singular state of affairs rather than an indefinite
one—to speak to this person, say, rather than to whoever might read what one
publishes. And in that case it seems that one intends to bring about what is
essential to the change one aims to bring about in this individual. This is true
even though the feature making such a change beneficial to one may be a more
general, non-specific aspect of the change one needs to achieve one’s end.
This same point applies to another case discussed by Pruss. Suppose a ruthless
CEO orders her very efficient subordinate to do whatever it takes to gain the
contract.31 Suppose also the CEO has good evidence both that the subordinate
almost always succeeds, and that killing some of the competitor’s employees by
bombing his headquarters may be necessary to gain the contract.32 Pruss thinks
this also is a case where the death (or killing) is not intended in the strict sense
because the fact that the competitor might be killed as a result of the CEO’s
command is not a feature that motivates the CEO’s choice—it is not explana-
torily relevant to the explanation of his action (his uttering the command).
However, it seems to me, instead, that the CEO conditionally intends those
deaths. She intends that the killings take place if that is what it takes. Given that
the CEO knows that the killing may be needed to bring about the end she
intends, then in intending that her subordinate do whatever it takes she condi-
tionally intends that killing.
30 Jensen, “Causal Constraints on Intention,” 283-284.
31 Ibid., 54
32 I’m presuming that Pruss meant that killing—not just the headquarters’ bombing—might be
necessary for the end to be achieved.

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Such intentions are not conditional in the sense that there is a condition on
forming the intention (Smith will form intention Y if X occurs) but a condition
within what is intended, and so the harm is intended; one’s will is positively
oriented to the harm itself. Suppose a man meets a woman in a bar and invites
her to go to a hotel room and have sex with him: he intends: to have sex with her
if she says yes. He is committed to bringing about that state of affairs, even though
he knows that he may not succeed and even if he also knows that under some
circumstances he would change his mind and abandon his intention.33
Suppose a spaceship commander says to his subordinates: “I don’t want any-
thing left alive on that planet,” and knows there are various living things, perhaps
including humans, living on the planet. Has he chosen to kill humans? Someone
might say that the killing of humans is not essential to the commander’s end—the
description under which the killing would be done would be, “killing what is alive
there.” The fact that what is killed does (or might) include human beings (one
might argue) does not affect the commander’s will, and so the killing of humans is
outside his intention. However, given that the commander knows that there
might be humans on the planet, then what he intends includes: the killing of a
human if any are present (the condition is internal to his intention, not a con-
dition upon his forming or sustaining the intention).34 He conditionally intends
the killing of humans.35
To determine what is intended, the key question is: is this state of affairs—for
example, this human being’s death—required to bring about one’s end? If so,
then this state of affairs is intended. But the reason why this human being’s death
contributes to the end may not be directly tied to his being human. Someone
might choose to kill a person because he has been hired to do so. Then the feature
that makes that person’s death desirable is not that he is human but that he has a
price on his head. Or suppose Jim wants to kill Harry because Harry is consuming
oxygen in the closed room they share (they are trapped in a basement after an
earthquake). In that case, if Jim chooses to kill Harry as a means of conserving

33 See John Finnis, “Conditional and Preparatory Intentions,” in Intention and Identity, 220-234;
J.P.W. Cartwright, “Conditional Intention,” Philosophical Studies 60 (1990): 233-255.
34 This case would be similar to Pruss’s zookeeper’s case if we supposed that Sam makes a choice
upon first hearing of the offer and before going to the zoo, to enter the zoo and kill the first mammal
he sees, whatever that mammal happens to be. If he has made such a choice, but also realizes that the
first mammal he sees might turn out to be a human, but still intends to kill the first mammal he sees—
then he conditionally intends to kill a human. He intends: to kill a human if that’s what it takes. If it
does not occur to him (before going to the zoo) that the first mammal he sees might be a human, then
the proposal he first adopts seems to be this: to kill the first mammal he sees, in order to gain the
reward. But then, when he discovers that the first mammal he sees is a human, he then (in the
scenario where he does kill the zookeeper) adopts an additional proposal (nested in the larger, less
specified proposal already adopted), to kill this human being (the human zookeeper), as a means of
killing the first mammal he sees.
35 This situation is different from a case where someone foresees that a harm to another might occur
but is indifferent—unjustly—to that possibility. For example, if a rancher places traps to catch bears
even though he foresees they might be stepped on by human hunters, the rancher does not condi-
tionally intend to harm those hunters—though his indifference is surely gravely wrong. In the
rancher’s case the harm done to the human hunters is not conditionally necessary for the rancher’s
end, whereas in the spaceship commander’s case if there are humans on the planet the spaceship
commander refers to, then their deaths do contribute to, and are needed for, his end.

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 Distinguishing Between What is Intended and Foreseen Side Effects 19 of 21

oxygen he still intends Harry’s death—the death of a human being—as a means

toward his end. This is so even though the feature in Harry that makes killing him
desirable is not his humanity but his being a consumer of oxygen. An analogous
point is true of the zookeeper’s case. The feature that made this individual’s death
necessary for bringing about the agent’s end was not her being a human, but her
being a mammal. Still, this human being’s death was part of the proposal adopted
to realize the end the agent had in view.
Pruss argues that Sam (the killer) might first choose to kill a mammal, and then
discover that the mammal he seeks to kill is a human; then, says Pruss, the fact
that the killer’s will might be unaffected by this fact shows that he could choose to
kill the zookeeper without intending to kill a human. Pruss is right that this fact
does show that the victim’s being a human is of no interest to the killer, that is, does
not move his will. Still, he intends to kill this individual and he knows she is a
human. This human being’s death is not a distinct state affairs closely connected
to the state affairs that is needed to bring about his end; rather, this is the state of
affairs needed to achieve his end and so must be included in his proposal or plan
to attain his end.
If Sam chooses to kill a human individual, he chooses to deprive him or her of a
specific type of life—a life that is essentially human. It is true that a choice to kill a
human need not be a choice to destroy all of the non-essential characteristics
inhering in him, even though one foresees these also will be destroyed. For ex-
ample, if the person one chooses to kill has green eyes, then it does not seem that
this act will also include choosing to kill a green-eyed individual—that is, if the
killing of a green-eyed individual is not required to attain one’s end. In other
words, if one act-description (e.g., killing a human) is related to another (killing
this individual) only as the less determinate to the more determinate, then willing
the more determinate entails willing the less determinate. If one intends the
killing of an animal then one intends the killing of an organism. But an individual
is related to its specific and generic natures as more determinate to less determin-
ate. So if one intends to kill this individual and one knows this individual is of this
kind (say, a human) then one intends to kill a human. Being green-eyed, however,
is not related to the other features (descriptions) as the less determinate to the
more determinate.
So the objection regarding adultery involves a slightly different problem. If
Jones chooses to have sex with a woman who is married to another man, it may be
true that his choice does not include the woman’s being married to another, that
is, he need not intend that the woman he have sex with be married to another.
The object of his choice might be to have sex with this woman, and her being
married to another is an attribute of her that need not be included in what he
intends—as opposed to cases where the adultery itself is intended, as when a
spouse chooses to commit adultery out of revenge or because the adulterous
aspect of the sex somehow adds excitement. Steven Jensen thinks that this impli-
cation amounts to a denial that these choices are instances of adultery. “If
Tollefsen is correct [in holding that we intend only what is included in the pro-
posal adopted by choice] then few adulterers would commit adultery and few
thieves would steal. Most adulterers do not intend to have sexual intercourse with

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 20 of 21 P. Lee

a woman insofar as she is another man’s wife; most thieves do not intend to steal
insofar as the object stolen belongs to someone else. These features or descriptions
do not provide the motivation behind the action. Typically, the adulterer wants to
commit adultery with this woman not because she is another man’s wife but
because she is beautiful or some similar reason, and the thief does not want to
take the object precisely insofar as it belongs to someone else but insofar as it is
valuable.”36
However, the thesis that for many adulterers the fact that the persons they are
having sex with are married to others is outside their intention, in no way implies
that such choices are not instances of adultery, nor that adultery is not a distinct
type of act with a distinct type of moral defect. Suppose that X who is unmarried
has sex with Y who is married but the fact that she is married to another, though
known to X, is a matter of complete indifference to him. Both X and Y are
intending non-marital sex (that is, in each the object of their choice is sexual
pleasure or illusory experience of marital union rather than expression or embodi-
ment of marriage): X’s choice is of non-marital sex because it is conceptually
impossible for him to have marital sex at this time; Y’s because it is conceptually
impossible for her now to have marital intercourse with someone she knows to be
not Mr Y. So both are choosing adultery in a broad sense (as of Matthew 5: 28).
And Y is choosing adultery in the strict sense, since if she chooses to have sex with
someone other than Mr Y she is conceptually-necessarily choosing adultery, a
violation of her marital bond. Y’s choice includes a turning away from or disrup-
tion of her exclusive communion with her spouse, though this disruption need
not be a means toward her end—intending an end is not the only way a kind of
act can be intrinsically immoral. Also, unless the sex act is rape, then X intends
that Y choose to have sex with him, and thus his choice includes consenting to her
infidelity. Thus, the will to commit adultery includes, in one way or another, a
willingness or acceptance of the disruption of marital communion, and so con-
stitutes a morally relevantly distinct kind of act.
Jensen’s objection regarding theft raises interesting considerations. His objec-
tion is that on the strict intention view it turns out that in some thefts the object’s
being owned by another is outside the thief’s intention, but what is outside the
agent’s intention cannot define the action, and so on the strict intention view
some acts that obviously are thefts can’t count as theft. But this argument is based
on a confusion. Ownership means (roughly) the right to use, control, and dispose
of an object. Theft is not merely the use of an object without the owner’s consent,
but an attempt to move an object’s status from being owned by someone else to
being owned by the thief (or at least acquiring the appearance and effects of
ownership). The modern English legal definition of theft includes as its key
element: “with intent to treat the thing as his own to dispose of.”37 So in most
thefts the object’s being owned by another is not simply accidental to what is
intended. For although the thief does not usually attempt to assume ownership of

36 Steven Jensen, “Causal Constraints on Intention,” 284

37 Richard Card, “Theft and Related Offenses,” in in Richard Card and Jill Molloy, Card, Cross and
Jones, Criminal Law, 22nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 434.

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 Distinguishing Between What is Intended and Foreseen Side Effects 21 of 21

the object precisely because it is initially owned by another, still, he usually must
take account of the fact of its being owned by another, since what he intends is
precisely to move that status (exclusive control) to himself. Thus, usually the fact
that the object desired is currently owned and controlled by another requires
stealth or force.
On the other hand, there are perhaps some thefts that consist in someone’s
consuming an object in utter disregard of its initially being owned by another—but
then such consumption would qualify as theft by this utter disregard or indiffer-
ence in relation to that ownership. Since the object’s initially being owned by
another enters the definition of theft—what the thief intends is to change that
ownership status to the extent that he can—it follows that that status is not merely
accidental to intention, even though it is not a factor in intention in the same way
that human life is in murder. Moreover, theft by definition involves injustice.38 So
theft is always wrong, not because it involves intending a first order evil such as
killing or damaging health, but because it involves a disregard for requirements
constitutive of good society, an insufficient caring for other persons, or letting
one’s disordered emotions of partiality, greed, etc., override one’s concern for the
well-being of other persons. The definition of theft involves complications, but
they are perfectly compatible with the position that one can intend to steal this car
(which happens to be red) but not intend to steal a red car, being indifferent or
unhappy about its being red.
I conclude that there are strong reasons in favor of the strict view of intention as
opposed to the broad view and that, while recent objections to it help to clarify
the understanding of human action, they do not cast doubt on that view.

38 Thus, if someone who is in extreme and urgent need takes and material goods from another’s
abundance, that is not a theft—the other’s right to those material goods has ceased in that emergency
situation. See St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 66, a. 7.

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