Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

Act and Intent

Author(s): Annette C. Baier
Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 67, No. 19, Sixty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the
American Philosophical Association Eastern Division (Oct. 8, 1970), pp. 648-658
Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2024585
Accessed: 07/09/2009 15:42

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jphil.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal
of Philosophy.

http://www.jstor.org
648 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

ACT AND INTENT *

WT WITH an analysisas sustainedand ingenious as Chisholm's,

it is difficult to see the wood for the trees, and tempting
simply to stay inside the wood and explore its paths. But
to do this might be to miss seeing the controversial assumptions in-
volved, and arguing their merits. Chisholm draws attention to one
such assumption when he prefaces his analysis by informing us that
"I assume that the concept of action should be explicated by refer-
ence to the concept of intention, and not conversely." This assump-
tion puts his analysis in direct opposition to that of G. E. M. Ans-
combe, who writes, "If one simply attends to the fact that many
actions can be either intentional or unintentional, it can be quite
natural to think that events which are characterizable as intentional
or unintentional are a certain natural class, 'intentional' being an
extra property which the philosopher must try to describe." 1 Chis-
holm's analysis might be seen as an attempt to demonstrate that
such a description can be given, that if we add a special event, "in-
tending," to the natural class of events that consist in states of affairs
being brought about, and combine them judiciously, intentional
action is generated. To put the matter thus is to oversimply grossly,
and in what follows I shall draw attention to some of the details of
Chisholm's subtle and instructive analysis, with a view to testing
the soundness of this important basic assumption that intention is
not essentially derivative of action.
I. MEANS AND ENDS
The first point I want to make concerns Chisholm's definition of
purposive activity, of doing one thing to do another. The definition
stipulates that if I intend p in order that q, I must intend p and in-
tend that my doing of p shall bring it about that q, where the
"bringing about" is making a causal contribution. I intend to ex-
amine Chisholm's definition of purpose in order to test the ade-
quacy of his assumptions. Do I, therefore, intend that my examining
it shall causally contribute to my testing the assumptions? Causa-
tion does not seem to be what relates my examining to my testing,
unless 'cause' is being used in what is sometimes called the "old"
sense, to cover any sort of bringing about. Chisholm intends "cause"
to include "agent causation," but this extension of Humean causa-
tion links me with my examining, not my examining with my test-
* To be presented in APA symposium on the Structure of Intention, December

27, 1970, commenting on a paper of the same title by Roderick Chisholm,

this JOURNAL, this issue, pp. 633-647.
1 Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), ?47.
 ACT AND INTENT 649

ing. No causal chain runs from the examination to the test. What is
needed if my examination is to serve my purpose, is that it count
as a test, not that it cause a test. It is linked to the test by canons
of argument, not by causal laws. These canons, not any causal result
of my examination, are what decide whether my examination counts
as a test. Such causal results as my examination may have-your ir-
ritation or boredom, are irrelevant to its success as a test. In this
case, and in many others such as handing over money to pay my
debts, raising my hand to salute, arguing to prove something, what
we rely on to achieve our ends are not just causal laws but other
sorts of connection. My first criticism of Chisholm's analysis then is
this: that his definition of purpose does not cover any of those cases
where conventions, not causal laws, connect our means with our
ends. I link this shortcoming with the determination not to derive
intention from action, since the vital role of convention is much
more obvious in action than it is in separated-out intentions.
II. AIMING AND INTENDING
Next I want to suggest that, despite Chisholm's too narrowly causal
account of purpose, or having an end or goal, there is a sense in
which that concept plays too central a role in his analysis of inten-
tion. This is best shown by considering the difference in the range
of the things I can intend and the things I can take as a goal. I can-
not intend the sun to stop, nor can I intend to turn the moon
around to see its other face. Both of these, if I am ignorant or credu-
lous or confident enough, can figure among my goals, among the
things I am hoping and planning and working to bring off. The
proper objects of intending, unlike the proper objects of aiming
at, seem limited to my actions (not the sun's) and to things I can
do, though not necessarily to things I know I will succeed in doing
on this occasion. If I cannot play the harpsichord I cannot intend
to play it; at most I can intend to learn to play it. But, if I can play,
I can intend to play the Italian Concerto, even though, as it turns
out, I get stuck in the middle of the second movement, unable to
go on. A man's reach may exceed his grasp, but his intentions surely
must lie within it. I may have impossible or Utopian goals, but not
impossible or Utopian intentions.
I shall now look at Chisholm's primitive concept, and at some
of his definitions, in the endeavor to show that, as they stand, they
do not give or imply an adequate account of the proper objects of
intending, and to suggest that no such account could be given with-
out major modifications of the system. To put it another way, I do
not see how, in the terminology Chisholm has provided, we can ex-
650 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

press such necessary truths as that I cannot intend what I cannot

do and that I cannot intend your actions, only my own. The second
may not appear obviously necessary, or, if necessary, different from
the first, but in what follows I shall try to make clear the sense in
which the second is a necessary truth, and different from the first
one.
Is there anything in Chisholm's analysis that restricts the objects
of intention? For him, the objects of intention are states of affairs,
and this is a very hospitable category, including everything ex-
pressible in a well-formed sentence or "that" clause. However, be-
tween the 'I intend' and the unrestricted state-of-affairs clause, e.g.,
'that he will mow the lawn', we must insert the connective 'to bring
it about that', so that unrestricted states of affairs are the objects,
not of intendings, but of intendings to bring it about that, or, alter-
natively, the objects of intendings are restricted to bringing it about
that -. What sort of a restriction is this? Will it make the re-
strictions I claim should be made? It cannot function to put a
stronger restriction on what we can intend than on what we take
as our goal, since, in Chisholm's scheme, the sort of thing I intend
is also the sort of thing I aim at. 'Bringing it about that' puts no
restriction on the objects of intending that is not also put on the
objects of aiming at. Thus, if I am right in claiming that I, a non-
player, can have it as a goal to play the harpsichord, but cannot yet
intend to play it, then either Chisholm has overrestricted the ob-
jects of aiming or underrestricted the objects of intending.
It will not do to say that this is a purely verbal quibble, that what
Chisholm is setting out to analyze are not what I call intentions,
but rather goals, and the relation of less to more ultimate goals. For,
apart from the possibility that one cannot analyze peculiarly hu-
man goals without analyzing intentions (in the strict sense), there
is evidence in Chisholm's paper that he is concerned with inten-
tions in the strict sense. This is clearest in his worry about the ap-
plication of the concept "consented to but not intended." The
things I consent to are said to be those things I knowingly bring
about by doing what I do intentionally. In theory it seemed that
there should be cases where I consent to, but do not intend, what I
bring about. But in fact, as Chisholm notes, we would be disin-
clined to allow the man who knowingly killed the King who stood
between his bullet and the stag he intended to shoot to disavow
the intention of killing the King. (I note, and it would be worth
exploring the fact, that we would be equally disinclined to allow
the use of the term 'side effects' here, although we do use it in cases
 ACT AND INTENT 65I

exactly parallel as far as causal chains go.) Surely if Chisholm, by

'intended to', had meant no more than 'had it as my goal', this
worry would not have arisen. We do not have the same qualms
about accepting the man's claim that killing the King was not the
object of his enterprise, was not his goal. We may have qualms
about his sanity, but we would not contradict his claim about his
objectives in the way we would contradict his claim about his in-
tentions. He does not have the same authority in saying what he in-
tended, as he has in saying what he aimed at. Killing the King
was neither the man's goal nor his subgoal, neither his means nor
his end, yet it was intended; it was, Chisholm wants to say, at least
part of his intention. Had he been using 'intention' in a technical
sense throughout the paper, it would be hard to understand the
worry he has at this point. So I think it fair to say that he is con-
fusing the objects of intending with goals, not simply defining them
as such.
III. PRELIMINARY STEPS
There is one place in Chisholm's analysis where it might appear
that a restriction has been placed on what we can intend, and that
is in his definition of what it is to have an intention without acting
on it. Paradoxically, the definition requires that to have an inten-
tion without acting on it, I must have already acted on it. I leave
aside the puzzle of how I could act on that intention for the first
time if I cannot have it until I have already acted on it, and consider
rather whether this definition serves to restrict the range of things
I can intend. Does it rule out my intending to turn the moon
around? Suppose I gaze at the moon, intent on the problem of how
to turn it. Does this constitute my having that intention? Here we
encounter the obscurity of Chisholm's primitive locution: that of
bringing about p in intending to bring about q. This primitive not
only introduces intending; it introduces a mysterious relation be-
tween what I bring about and what I intend to bring about. The
'in' which expresses this relation presumably means something
stronger than 'while', and Chisholm says that 'in intending' is
weaker than 'with the intention of', since it can be used where what
was in fact done was unintentional. Again, presumably it does not
mean 'as a causal resultant of', for if this were what it meant there
would have been no need for a compound primitive, since the causal
relation is independently expressible in Chisholm's system. I sus-
pect that if the mystery in this 'in' were unveiled, action-derivative
concepts would come to light; so there may be good reason for
Chisholm to keep it hidden inside his primitive. To confirm that
652 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

suspicion would take too long. For my immediate purpose it is

enough to note that there seems no reason why we cannot say
that I gaze at the moon in intending to turn it around, so my
gazing will count as a preliminary step in turning it around, if
we suppose I am ignorant enough to think that my gazing may
make a causal contribution toward my goal. More knowledge might
destroy my confidence that my gazing was a preliminary step in
executing my "intention," and so disqualify the gazing as a prelim-
inary step. Chisholm's restriction, then, rules out as intentions those
things which I do not think I can begin doing, rather than those
things which are not in my power, and so does not rule out those
intentions I claim to be conceptually impossible. Where, on Chis-
holm's view, it seems that knowledge of difficulties is the only ob-
stacle to my having these bizarre intentions, the truth seems to me
that it is not my excess of knowledge but my lack of know-how that
prevents these being my intentions.
IV. BRINGING THINGS ABOUT
Thus far I have claimed that Chisholm's way of talking fails to
exclude as intentions those things which I cannot do and which
cannot be done. I now turn to the more difficult question of whether
Chisholm not merely has failed to give a sufficiently restrictive speci-
fication of the objects of intention, but has mischaracterized the
categorial type of such objects. Here it is instructive to return to
the problem of whether I can consent to something I do not intend.
It may have seemed that what I said before amounted to this: that
we can consent to things that were not our objective, but not to
things we didn't intend. Now I want to say that we can indeed
consent to things we don't intend, because we consent to things we
can't intend, namely, the doings of others. Indeed, I don't think I
can consent to what I do, though I may consent to our doing a
certain thing. The objects of my intending are my doings, but the
objects of my consenting, what I consent to, are states of affairs,
including your doings and our doings. This is very cryptic and
dogmatic, and once again it may seem as if I am unfairly demand-
ing that Chisholm's technical concepts conform to the vagaries of
ordinary use. The demand I intend to be making is rather that the
technical concepts allow us to make all the important distinctions,
and I think that Chisholm's locution 'bringing it about that' ob-
scures an important distinction, and allows him to put in one cate-
gory the things we do and the things we consent to, the goals we
have and what we do to reach them. I shall try to show what is lost
by using this locution, and why it is a loss.
 ACT AND INTENT 653

Chisholm's locution reduces my apparently varied action reper-

toire to a single item: the making of a causal contribution. Where
I had thought I knew how to do a lot of different things: to write,
to walk, to argue, to announce, as well as to write different things,
argue different points, and make various announcements, it seems
that there is only one thing I can do, and that is to contribute
causally to a variety of states of affairs. Is this merely a manner of
speaking? It is that, but manners of speaking are rarely merely
manners of speaking, and something is often lost or gained when
one switches manners. I think that the variety of states of affairs I
might be able to bring about, in Chisholm's world, is no substitute
for the variety of ways in which I can contribute in this world. To
see what is lost, consider my intention to speak sharply to the boy
who is stealing raspberries, as contrasted with my intention to get
myself to speak sharply to this boy, or to bring it about that I speak
sharply to him. Of the latter intention, but not the former, the
question "How?" in a certain sense applies. 'How' has many senses,
but whenever we announce an intention in a vague way, we must
be prepared to back it up with a more precise specification or a dem-
onstration of how we will do what we intend doing, if our hearers
are to be satisfied that we can do it, and so be satisfied that what we
have is an intention and not just an aspiration. (This limitation on
the vagueness allowable with respect to what we intend to do is
quite compatible with the often remarked ineliminable and char-
acteristic vagueness concerning what we want to achieve by doing
it.) Thus if I announce that I intend to get myself to speak to the
boy, the very phrase 'get myself to' signals the fact that more could
be said concerning how, concerning my method. Perhaps I will
take a pill, or let my thoughts dwell on the raspberries he is depriv-
ing me of. Answers given to the question "How?" or "What's your
method?" may themselves invite the same "how" question, but
eventually we shall reach a point where that question does not ap-
ply. If you ask me how I shall think of the raspberries, I can only
reply, "What do you mean? Don't you know how one thinks?" Here
we have moved from my way to do something to the way to do it,
and the "how" question correspondingly alters. There is no need
to ask me what my method for doing it is if "it" is a thing like walk-
ing or thinking, where something counts as the way to do it. Per-
sonal ways are needed only in the absence of impersonal ways. Of
course other senses of 'how' typically apply to my doing of these
"impersonal" things-I may have my own style of walking and of
thinking, where I am unlikely to have a style of getting myself to
654 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

talk firmly to small boys. Styles flourish where methods are unnec-
essary. What I want to suggest is that, unless a point is reached
where the "What's your method?" question ceases to come up, we
have no reason for believing there is intention, no indication that
the man knows a way of doing what he says he intends to do. If the
question can continue to come up, then it will remain a mystery
how the man will do what he says he will do. This mystery is
dispelled once he tells us his intentions in terms of activities we
understand, activities where we don't need to be told how he will
do them, because we know how they are done. These include skills
and arts that are mastered, where mastery consists not in getting
certain results, nor in getting them in an efficient way, but in do-
ing things in the right way. We can rarely spell out what is the right
way, but we can recognize what is the wrong way. I cannot tell you
what walking is. I know it is not just getting from one place to
another by using a particular leg movement, since if I use that
movement to activate a moving sidewalk, I am not walking. I know
that this and many other ways are the wrong way, and that is all
we need, to be able to speak of the right way. The requirements
that determine these rights and wrongs are like those laws which
Hart calls "enabling laws"; they need not restrict the possibilities,
but can enlarge them. If everything I do intentionally is done in
the last analysis in a sequence of moves each of which is thus "stan-
dardized," this does not mean that all my actions are stereotyped.
I may have an idiosyncratic style of doing these basic things, I may
build up novel techniques from them (we speak of a technique, but
of the art of -). I may even, if really creative, inaugurate a new
art.
Our language does not mark very clearly this distinction I have
been laboring: between the things I can intend to do somehow,
and the things I must intend to do as they are done; and this for
good reason, since the latter class is constantly changing, old mem-
bers being lost, new ones added. Where until recently we had to
(somehow) escape a spouse, now we can divorce (in the standard
way). Where once we could cast the evil eye, now we have lost that
art and must content ourselves with somehow causing evil. Our lan-
guage leaves it open, with most verbs reporting action or expressing
intention, whether the addition of 'somehow' makes sense or not,
whether the question "How?" in the sense outlined applies or does
not apply. But we do have a way of marking the fact that that
question must apply, where 'somehow' must make sense, and that
is by the locutions 'see to it that -' 'bring it about that -', and
 ACT AND INTENT 655

the like. Chisholm has deprived himself of this marker, since, for
him, 'bringing it about that' is not something we do in especially
involved cases, calling for further elaboration, but something we
always do. Both 'I intend to speak to the boy' and 'I intend to see
to it that I speak to the boy' would seem to translate in Chisholm's
language as 'I intend to bring it about that I speak to the boy'; but
if this is so, then we lose the special implications of the second
intention-announcement, and so lose the contrast between the cases
where mystery remains about how the thing will be done and cases
where that mystery is dispelled. If I am right, if that is lost, we lose
the concept of intention, since we can no longer distinguish inten-
tional action from miracle.2 Chisholm's acknowledgment that his
definition of successful intentional action suffers from just this de-
fect, because it does not seem to have captured the requirement
of "competence" (644) confirms my suspicion that this vital distinc-
tion is lost in Chisholm's language. Chisholm's suggested way of
emending the definition of intentional action, by adding the re-
quirement that the agent have good reason to believe that he will
succeed in reaching his goal, will not do the trick, since we might
have good reason to believe in miracles, or luck, and this would not
be the same as confidence in our own skills.
V. VARIATIONS ON BRINGING THINGS ABOUT
It might be objected here that all I have shown is that Chisholm's
locution 'bring it about that -. .' cannot serve its ordinary purpose
when it is used, as he uses it, indiscriminately; but this is not to
show that nothing in his vocabulary can serve that purpose. Per-
haps it was wrong to translate both (A) 'I shall speak to the boy'
and (B) 'I shall somehow bring it about that I speak to the boy' by
the same Chisholm sentence 'I intend to bring it about that I speak
to the boy'. What other translations are available? The two inten-
tions in question are:
A1. I intend to speak.
B1. I intend to bring it about, or see to it, that I speak.
Perhaps they should be translated as:
A2. I intend to bring it about that I speak.
B2. I intend to bring it about that I bring it about that I speak.
2 It is therefore no accident that the doings of a being whose ways are not

our ways are described as 'bringing it to pass that . . .' and his intentions an-
nounced in the same mystery-preserving locution. (Of course, since omnipotence
destroys the distinction between intention and aspiration, our lack of compre-
hension of how such announced intentions will be implemented need not cause
us to doubt their reality.) Perhaps Chisholm's analysis applies better to divine
than to human intentions?
656 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

We now face the problem of whether the introduced 'bring it about

that' does or does not invite the question, "How?" There are three
possibilities: that it does, that it doesn't, that whether it does or not
depends on what follows. To explore the last possibility, we could
try saying that a double occurrence of 'bring it about that' signals
the fact that the "how" question does arise; a single occurrence
blocks it. But this would seem to conflict with what Chisholm has
said in an earlier paper 3: that if someone brings it about that p,
then he brings it about that he brings it about that p. For then the
"bringing about" of the antecedent would block a question raised
by the double "bringing about" of the consequent, which is absurd.
Let us try supposing that our question "How?" does arise, regard-
less of the number of occurrences of 'bring about that'. Then if the
form of the sentence is to reflect the difference between the orig-
inal A and B, we must add some marker of the difference. We could
try:
A3. I intend to bring it about that I speak, by speaking.
B3. I intend to bring it about that I speak.
Here we allow the question "How?" to be raised by the 'bring it
about that' but forestall it in A3 by answering it in advance, whereas
in B3 the question remains unanswered. Does this difference reflect
the difference between our original A1 and B1? No, it does not, be-
cause A3 now by its form indicates what A did not indicate by its
form, namely, an answer to the "how" question. Yet it is also true
that the answer it indicates is no real answer, since presumably we
must expand A3 into:
A3,. I intend to bring it about that I speak by bringing it about
that I speak.
and nothing in this answers the question, "But how will you bring
it about?"; so the "how" question, if allowed, seems here to be an-
swered in a way which raises the same question endlessly.
Are we then to conclude that our question "How?" is never in-
vited by the 'bring it about that' which must figure in all our in-
tentions? We might then mark the difference between A1 and B1 by:
A4. I intend to bring it about that I speak.
B4. I intend to bring it about that I speak by bringing it about
that -.
Here the difference between A1 and B1 is marked by the incomplete-
ness of B4. Now we have the position that, where B invited the
3 "The Logic of Intentional Action," read at the University of Western On-
tario conference on Action in 1968, publication forthcoming. The relevant claim
is made there in the axiom labeled A,.
 ACT AND INTENT 657
question "How?", B4 virtually demands the different question,
"What?" Furthermore, this alternative has awkward consequences
for the definition of purposive activity. If the question "How?", or
its analogue, arises only when we have a statement of intention of
the form of B4, and if that "how" question can be answered, as it
seems it can, by a statement of the form 'p in order that q', then it
would seem that what follows the 'in order that' should be an in-
complete statement of the form of B4. If saying that I shall do p
in order that q tells you how I shall do q and if the only things I
can tell you how I do are incomplete things like B4, then this essen-
tial incompleteness of the end or goal should be embodied in the
definition of purposive activity. The unwelcome consequence we
now have is that our goals are our necessarily incomplete intentions!
This outcome reinforces my earlier claim that goals and intentions
are confused in Chisholm's analysis. If we keep the definitions that
do justice to the structure of goals, we cannot do justice to inten-
tions, and if we try, as I have been trying here, to do justice to in-
tentions, we do violence to goals, and in either case we misrepresent
the relations between them.
VI. NEGATIVE INTENTIONS
Another way of seeing that the objects of intending have been mis-
located is by considering the ways in which negation can enter into
what we intend, and to consider the ways it could enter into Chis-
holm's locutions. If "bringing it about that" is something we can
intend, it must be something we can do, not just something that we
do; that is, we must be able both to do it and not to do it. We can-
not intend the things we cannot prevent, such as digesting or breath-
ing (though we can intend to take a digestive aid or to breathe
deeply). So if "bringing it about" is within our power, there should
be cases where we intend to bring it about that p and cases where
we intend not to bring it about that p. But what would these cases
be? If I intend not to warn the King, this presumably becomes, for
Chisholm, a case of intending to bring it about that I do not warn
the King,4 not a case of not bringing it about that I do warn him.
All the genuine negative intentions can be translated into Chis-
holm's language without negating the 'bring it about that' directly
following the 'I intend to'. This suggests that the real objects of
intention, the things that vary from intention to intention, are not
expressed in Chisholm's language by what follows 'I intend', but by
4 If this is a case of allowing him to go unwarned, then strictly it becomes, by
Chisholm's D.9, a case of intending to bring it about that I do not bring it about
that I warn him. But this does not alter my point that the first 'bring it about
that . . .' is never negated in Chisholm's language.
658 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

what follows 'I intend to bring it about that I -', since all of this
must precede any allowed variation in what is intended.
VII. AGENT AND OTHERS
Now it appears that not only is there a dummy activity, "bringing
it about that," but also a dummy agent, or rather agent-as-patient,
since the "I" who is intending always figures in his own intentions.
Is this objectionable, or is it a mark of that necessary truth men-
tioned earlier, that I can intend only my doings? To answer this,
even sketchily, we must look at the way the doings of others can
figure in our intentions. I can intend you to speak, but if I intend
to speak, this is not to intend me to speak. In our language, unlike
Chisholm's, the agent's special privilege is, not to insert himself into
all his intentions, but to leave himself out of the basic ones. He can
have intentions concerning himself, such as the intention to get
himself to speak, but these, like his intentions for other people,5
must be cashed in intentions to do something to get himself, or
them, to speak, and this last intention will necessarily omit ref-
erence to the agent. I think Chisholm's ever-present agent has over-
advertised. His constant presence obscures his special role more
than it draws attention to it and distracts us from the truth that in
the last analysis we drop out of our intentions, that they are simply
intentions to do.
Thus my main quarrel with Chisholm's analysis concerns its treat-
ment of the objects of intending. The analysis and the assumptions
it involves seems to me to conceal important points concerning what
we can do, and to fail to allow for some of the important things that
enable us to them.
ANNETTE C. BAIER
Carnegie Mellon University
5 We can now shed even more light on the already discussed case of "con-
senting." Chisholm's principle of the nondivisiveness of intention is introduced
with the example of the man who intended to visit Paris while De Gaulle was
there, but who did not therefore intend De Gaulle to be in Paris. That prin-
ciple is then applied to the case of the man who "consented" to the King's
death, a "side-effect" of his bagging his stag. Here, the principle blocks the
move from the compound 'he intended to kill both stag and King' to the simple
'he intended to kill the King'. Now we can see that, in the former example, the
unwanted implication can be blocked by a principle independent of and stronger
than the nondivisiveness principle, namely, the principle that I can intend only
those actions which I can initiate. We could call this the "principle of the de-
limited sovereignty of intention." Since the Paris visitor has no power or au-
thority over De Gaulle, he cannot intend his movements. But since, in the case
of the King-and-stag-killer, the agent did have the King's life in his hands, he
could intend his death and, I would say, did intend it. I therefore suggest that
the principle of nondivisiveness can be dispensed with, since we can get its
wanted implications without its drawbacks by the stronger different principle
of delimited sovereignty.