A Handbook of Ethical Theory

by George Stuart Fullerton

48. ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF INTENTION AND MOTIVE.—There has been much dispute among moralists as to the ethical significance of intention and motive. Bentham maintains that "from one and the same motive, and from every kind of motive, may proceed actions that are good, others that are bad, and others that are indifferent." He gives the following illustration: [Footnote: Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter x, Sec 3.]

"1. A boy, in order to divert himself, reads an inspiring book; the motive is accounted, perhaps, a good one; at any rate, not a bad one. 2. He sets his top a-spinning: the motive is deemed at any rate not a bad one. 3. He sets loose a mad ox among a crowd: his motive is now, perhaps, termed an abominable one. Yet in all three cases the motive may be the very same: it may be neither more nor less than curiosity."

In criticizing this citation I must point out that curiosity is not, properly speaking, an object of choice at all. I have used the word "object" to indicate what is chosen, not to indicate the psychic fact present at the time of the choice. And I have said that the motive is the vital part of the object.

Hence curiosity should not be called the motive. No man chooses curiosity as an object, either in the abstract or in the concrete. Curiosity is a fundamental impulse of human nature; we may elect to satisfy the impulse in any given instance; in other words, we may choose the appropriate object.

In the case of the boy letting loose the bull in the crowd, the object is to see what will happen under the given circumstances. This is what appeals to the boy. Something else might have appealed to him in performing the action. He might have had the deliberate wish to injure certain persons present against whom he harbored resentment. Or his sympathies might have been with the bull, which had been the victim of bad treatment, and to which he wished to grant its liberty. Were the crowd in question a band of ruffians intent upon lynching, he might have been moved by the desire to assist, in a somewhat irregular way, in the re-establishment of law and order. But even if his real object is only to see what will happen, there is no reason to put it on a par with the object in view when a boy spins a top. "To see what will happen" is the vaguest of phrases, and covers a multitude of disparate objects. He who does things to see what will happen has, at least, a very general knowledge of the kind of thing likely to happen, if a given experiment is made. A boy does not hold his finger in the candle-flame to see what will happen. He who does things to see what will happen, in really complete ignorance of what is likely to happen, may be set down as too much of a fool to be the subject of moral judgments.

It is obvious that an act may be done with many different objects in view—I mean real objects, motives. I give money to a beggar whose case is one to inspire pity. My motive, my "vital" object, may be to relieve the man. But it may equally well be to get rid of him, to gratify my self-feeling by becoming the dispenser of bounty, or to inspire admiration in the onlooker. The intention, as I have used the word above, is to relieve the beggar, with such consequences of the act as may be foreseen at the time. Within the limits of this intention, the motive may vary widely, and may, in a given instance, be either admirable or contemptible.

It may be claimed, in answer to this, that the real intention is, in every case, what I have called the motive; that, in the first case, it was to relieve suffering; in the second, to get rid of an annoyance; in the third to satisfy vanity; in the fourth, to be admired.

The word "intention," thus used, is equivalent to "motive." Popular usage gives some sanction to this confusion of the words. We say of a man who has done a questionable act: "His intentions were good," or, "His motives were good." Still, popular usage does not always regard the two expressions as equivalent. To revert to the case of the unhappy Flex. It does not seem inappropriate to say that the use of a man as a stepping- stone was a part of his master's intention. It does appear inappropriate to call it the motive or a part of the motive of the whole transaction.

Intention and motive are convenient words to designate the whole object chosen and the part of the object which accounts for the choice of the whole. That it is important to distinguish between the two is palpable.

The intention gives some indication of character. We know something about a man when we know what kinds of objects he will probably set before himself as aims. But we know more when we know why he chooses these objects rather than others; when we can analyze the complex and can discover just what elements in it attract him.